2 Corinthians 12:9, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for [my] power is made perfect in weakness.’
The weakness that Paul speaks of here—weakness in which the anastasiform (resurrection-shaped) power of Christ is brought to completion—are the very same weaknesses that Christ bore in Himself on the cross (Is. 53:3-4). That is to say, they are the weaknesses that have already become the context for the working of the power (and wisdom) of God through Jesus’ bearing of them unto death and into resurrection (1 Cor.1:23-24). Therefore, our reliance upon the sustaining grace of God in Christ in the midst of our weaknesses such that those weaknesses should become the context for the perfection of God’s power in the world—that reliance is nothing other than a joining with Christ Himself in His reliance upon the Father as He hung upon the tree under the burden of those same weaknesses, transfiguring them to the perfection of God’s power through His cosmos-reconciling Passion.
Paul’s thorn had already become the context for the working of God’s power when Christ bore that same thorn in perfect faith and obedience upon the cross and so turned it to the working of God’s power—as is made clear in His resurrection. Paul’s reliance upon the grace of God in Christ during his own experience of this thorn, then, is not something other than Christ’s reliant bearing of that same thorn, but is a joining in that very moment of Christ’s bearing of it. The SINGLE suffering of Jesus Christ *is* the MYRIAD sufferings of His people.
In this way, Christ’s suffering is a trans-temporal and trans-spatial reality, encompassing the agonies of His people in every time and in every place within His One, Crucified and Risen Body of flesh—which is His Bride, His People, His Church.
The power of Christ is made perfect in the weakness of His people because the weakness of His people is the weakness that Christ has made His own upon the cross and turned to (or better, revealed as) power by His resurrection. We, in turn, ‘enter into’ or ‘activate,’ as it were, this reality as we rely upon the grace of God mediated to us in the midst of our weakness through our union to this same, anastasiform Christ.
