Antifragility and Theology of Failure
“When we have served our Lord in Gospel advancement, sweating, sacrificing, and suffering, with no apparent success; when we have been rejected, laughed at, or just ignored; we have a choice: we can enter the sacrament of holy failure or become bitter. ”
Jesus teaches how failure will come in two ways. He told his disciples they would fail him and abandon him, and he also told his disciples there will not always be apparent success in mnistry. If he is telling his apostles who walked with him, how much more could this teaching be true of us?
“Then he went about among the villages teaching; and he called the twelve and began to send them out, two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. And he ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money intheir betls, but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics. And he said to them, “Where you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place. If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake off the dust of the feet as a testimony against them.” Mark 6:6-13
Jesus affirms mission from a state of powerlessness, not from a victorious army, superpower, with no military force to back them up. His disciples would need help from the very people they were sent to share the Gospel with.
Jesus gives them a perspective on failure. When a disciple is rejected, Jesus is being rejected. He told them to respond with a kinesthetic response - a somatic response. They are to shake their robes and their feet, in effect to shake off the trauma and hurt of being rejected.
Jesus directed them to engage in holistic mission: proclaim, cast out, heal. But he didn’t send them out and tell them to stay safe.
When we deal with failure holistically, entering into Christ’s pain of rejection, we are becoming antifragile to success and failure!
Download a Bible Study on Theology of Failure Here (Coming April 2025)
Additional Verses:
Matthew 10:14
“If anyone will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet when you leave that house or town.”
Mark 6:11
“If any place will not receive you and they will not listen to you, when you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.”
Luke 9:5
“Wherever they do not receive you, when you leave that town, shake off the dust from your feet as a testimony against them.”
Luke 10:11-12
“Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet we wipe off against you.”
John 16:32
“Behold, the hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, each to his own home, and will leave me alone. Yet I am not alone, for the Father is with me.”
Acts 13:51
“But they shook off the dust from their feet against them and went to Iconium.”
Acts 18:6
“And when they opposed and reviled him, he shook out his garments and said to them, ‘Your blood be on your own heads! I am innocent. From now on I will go to the Gentiles.’”