I remember pretty well the few times I’ve had to get around with a limp, even on crutches. Not long after Beth and I met I sprained my ankle pretty bad and had to get around the Notre Dame campus on crutches in the snow. Twenty years ago I broke my foot playing racquetball and had to limp around in stiff sandal while it healed. Then just about three years ago I tore a ligament in my foot, once again while playing racquetball. I clumped around in an orthopedic boot for a couple months and limped a bit for several more.
I’ve since given up racquetball and I still really have no conception of the pain and struggle of being permanently mobility impaired. Yet my tiny experiences of lameness tell me it would be a truly challenging way to live. That’s why there is an incredible note of hope at the beginning of the promise of Micah 4:6-13. The “lame” are the remnant whom God will assemble to restore Israel, to make them a “strong nation” again after the defeat and humiliation of the exile.
It’s a constant biblical theme. God starts where we do not expect, with people we would not expect to be at the center of His kingdom work. From that unexpected place of weakness and insignificance He builds a people who give Him true glory and praise. That’s what Mary the mother of Jesus sang while still carrying our Savior within her, understanding it to apply not just to her own lowly position, but to all God’s people.
There’s a fascinating connection of our text from Micah with this week’s lectionary assigned Gospel lesson from Mark 9:38-50. In verse 45 Jesus adds to admonition of the Sermon on the Mount to remove an offending eye or hand a command to cut off a foot that causes you to stumble, because “it is better to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell.”
It might be worth spending some thought on how you and I might want to become “lame” in order to receive the gift of life from Christ our Savior. What limitations or disabilities might it not be good to accept if they draw us away from sin and the road to hell, and closer to Jesus’ path of righteousness and life?
It seems like the passages have different messages. In Micah the people of God will experience weakness (lameness) but will soon have a heel of iron and a horn of rock and defeat enemies to gain victory.
In Mark the people of God are advised to lame themselves, if necessary, in order to avoid an ultimate future defeat.
Weakness temporary before victory, or weakness a possible necessity for victory, or most likely both.
Thanks for commenting, Craig. Yes, it’s not quite the same thing in both passages. I simply saw the kind of connection you make in the last part of your comment, that Christian faith accepts weakness and defeat as an integral part of our story. I’m taking a somewhat similar spin on this week’s text about Bethlehem being a small place from which the Messiah comes.
The passage from Micah reminds me of Psalm 118, especially verse 22: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone;”
Yes, that’s true, Jacob. Good connection.