Feria V after Sexagesima: The Thorn That Perfects Strength
MASS Exsúrge, quare obdórmis
LESSON 2 Corinthians 11: 19-33; 12: 1-9
GOSPEL St Luke 8: 4-15
HOMILIST Mt Revd Jerome Lloyd OSJV
Holy Church places before us again the Epistle of the Apostle — the great catalogue of sufferings from the Second Letter to the Corinthians. And she does so deliberately. In these pre-Lenten days, she does not move us forward; she drives the lesson deeper.
St Paul does something extraordinary. He boasts.
But he boasts in chains.
He boasts in shipwreck.
He boasts in hunger, cold, betrayal, danger, sleeplessness, and anxiety for the churches.
This is not rhetoric. It is revelation.
The Apostle is compelled to defend his authority, yet he refuses to defend it in the manner of the world. He does not list achievements, conversions, or influence. He lists wounds. Why? Because apostolic authority is measured by conformity to the Cross.
Here the Church corrects a perennial temptation: the belief that spiritual authority rests on visible success. The Apostle overturns that entirely. His credentials are not triumph but endurance.
And then comes the centre of the passage — the “thorn in the flesh.”
Three times he beseeches the Lord that it might depart from him. Three times he is refused. Not ignored — refused.
And in that refusal comes the decisive word:
“My grace is sufficient for thee, for power is made perfect in infirmity.”
This is not consolation. It is a redefinition of strength.
The world equates strength with autonomy.
The Apostle reveals strength as dependence.
The world seeks removal of weakness.
God permits weakness to destroy pride.
The world flees humiliation.
God uses humiliation to anchor the soul in truth.
We must be honest: this doctrine is unwelcome to modern sensibilities. We prefer deliverance to endurance. We want grace to eliminate the struggle. Yet the Apostle shows that grace often sanctifies through the struggle rather than apart from it.
The thorn remains.
And because it remains, Paul learns not self-sufficiency, but Christ-sufficiency.
This is the discipline of Sexagesima. Before Lent imposes external penance, the Church teaches interior realism. Sanctity is not the absence of weakness; it is the transformation of weakness into reliance upon God.
Consider how countercultural this is.
Our age is obsessed with optimisation — physical, psychological, professional, even spiritual. Weakness is hidden, medicated, rebranded, or denied. Yet the Apostle stands before us and says: the place you most resent may be the place God most inhabits.
The anxiety you cannot silence.
The limitation you cannot overcome.
The humiliation you did not choose.
If borne in union with Christ, these become participation in apostolic fruitfulness.
This is not passivity. Paul does not love suffering for its own sake. He prays for relief. But when relief is denied, he accepts interpretation from God Himself: grace is sufficient.
That sufficiency is not theoretical. It is concrete, daily, often quiet. It does not dazzle; it sustains.
On this feria, the Church asks us not whether we admire St Paul’s endurance, but whether we will accept our own thorns as occasions of grace. Not romanticising them, not dramatizing them — but submitting them to Christ.
“When I am weak, then am I strong.”
That is not paradox for its own sake. It is the law of the Cross. And without that law, Lent becomes performance, and Christianity becomes self-improvement.
With it, weakness becomes the doorway through which divine power enters.
And that is the beginning of true fruit.
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