The Triangle That Shouldn't Work

I have a thing for the Penrose triangle. It’s a little weird, if I’m being honest. A micro obsession of sorts. A thing in the back of mind all the time at any given moment.

If you don’t know what it is, look it up. I’ll wait. (Actually don’t, keep reading, I’ll explain it.) It’s a geometric figure; three beams connected at right angles forming a triangle that is structurally impossible. Each corner looks completely reasonable. Each connection looks sound. But the whole thing cannot exist in three dimensional space. It defies the rules it appears to be following. It looks solid and logical and inevitable right up until your brain catches up with your eyes and realizes that what you’re looking at cannot be real. And yet, here it is:

Penrose Triangle example.

I’ve written about Reutersvärd before. The Swedish artist who formalized the impossible figure in 1934 and spent his life creating things that shouldn’t work but do. His work has been sitting with me for years because it does something I can’t fully explain. It makes me more comfortable with paradox. It trains the eye to hold two contradictory realities simultaneously without flinching. It makes the impossible feel at home.

Which is probably why it made jiu jitsu make sense to me.

Jiu jitsu is one of the hardest things I have ever attempted to learn. And I say that as someone who has tried a lot of hard things. It is humbling in a way that is almost theological. You walk in thinking you understand how bodies work and within about four minutes someone half your size has folded you into a shape you didn’t know you could make and you are tapping the mat with a level of urgency that surprises you. Being a bigger guy folded up into a pretzel is a new form of humility.(Tapping is how you say please stop in jiu jitsu. You tap a lot when you’re learning. A lot. Sometimes just because you have no idea what you're doing.)

What makes it so disorienting at first is that nothing about it follows the intuitive logic of strength. Your instincts are wrong. Every time. You try to muscle out of a position and it gets worse. You try to overpower someone and they use your power against you. You try to be strong in the way you understand strength and you lose to someone who is being strong in a way you don’t yet understand. Because jiu jitsu strength is not about force. It is about form.

And the form is built almost entirely on triangles. The triangle choke. The guard position. The frame. The base. The angle of attack. The geometry of leverage. Everywhere you look in jiu jitsu the triangle is doing the structural work. It is the most stable geometric form in existence; three points, three connections, no weak side, no dominant angle. A triangle distributes force evenly. It doesn’t collapse under pressure the way a square does. It holds.

When I started understanding the triangles I started understanding the art. The impossibility of jiu jitsu. The way a smaller person can control a larger one, the way submission produces dominance, and the way going low creates leverage over someone standing high. It stopped being impossible and started being inevitable. Because once you see the form underneath the movement, the paradox resolves into something that makes complete sense. The Penrose triangle made jiu jitsu make sense.

And then both of them made something else make sense.

The Impossible Figure of the Gospel

I’ve said before that the gospel is an impossible object.

The first shall be last. The least shall be greatest. Lose your life to find it. Die to live. Give everything to gain everything. Strength made perfect in weakness. Power perfected through surrender.

Every corner of the gospel looks reasonable on its own. And the whole thing looks like it shouldn’t work. Like the Penrose triangle; structurally sound at every point of contact, globally impossible by every rule you thought you understood. Nevertheless, it exists.

Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1 that the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing. Not merely difficult or counterintuitive. Foolishness. The Greek is moria. That's where we get moron, if you were wondering. The gospel looks moronic to the person whose categories haven’t been recalibrated yet. The person whose instincts about strength and power and winning haven’t been broken and reformed by an encounter with the One who won by losing. Like jiu jitsu to a beginner, it looks wrong until you understand the form underneath it.

And the form underneath it is a triangle.

Not a Penrose triangle, though the impossibility resonates. The Trinity. Father, Son, and Spirit. Three persons, one God. Three points of an eternal relational geometry that distributes the weight of all creation without collapsing. The most stable form in existence, not geometric but personal. Not theoretical and abstract, but alive forever.

And at one point of that triangle, the form touches the ground.

The Son. The Word who became flesh. The second person of the Trinity who descended into the human condition and demonstrated what strength actually looks like when it is no longer operating by the instinctive logic of force.

He went low. He submitted. He let the weight come down on Him. He tapped (not out, but through) into death itself. And three days later the leverage reversed and death found out what happens when you try to hold someone who has infinite base and perfect form and knows exactly how the geometry works. The resurrection is the triangle choke applied to death. From underneath by someone who looked like He was losing right up until He wasn’t.

Strength in Form

Here’s what jiu jitsu has taught me about faith that nothing else quite has.

Your instincts will betray you. Every. Single. Time. The thing that feels like strength: the muscling, the forcing, the trying harder in the same direction that isn’t working...will exhaust you and produce nothing. The thing that feels like weakness: the stillness, the patience, the willingness to go to the ground and work from...is where the leverage actually lives. You don’t get strong in jiu jitsu and then learn the form. You learn the form and the form produces a kind of strength your instincts didn’t know existed.

Paul had an inside track on this. "When I am weak then I am strong." (2 Corinthians 12:10) That is not motivational poster theology. That is the report of someone who discovered (through a thorn in the flesh he begged God to remove three times, by the way) that the form of Christ’s strength is perfected in the places where human strength runs out.

The form is kenosis. Self-emptying. The willingness to go low. To submit to the process. To trust the geometry of grace even when every instinct says resist.

Jesus didn’t climb the ladder. He became the ladder. He didn’t accumulate power upward. He distributed it downward. He didn’t dominate through force. He leveraged through love. And the cross was the perfect execution of a form that human categories cannot fully process until after the resurrection reveals what was actually happening. Because it was impossible.

The Penrose triangle looks impossible until you understand the geometry.

Jiu jitsu looks impossible until you understand the form.

The gospel looks impossible until you understand the One who is the form.

Christ is the image of the invisible God. (Colossians 1:15) The exact imprint. The form of God made visible in human flesh. And the form He demonstrated was not what anyone expected. It was submission producing dominance. Weakness producing strength. Death producing life. The triangle resolving into something that holds when everything else collapses.

The Connector

I’m still learning jiu jitsu. I tap a lot. I get folded into shapes I didn’t know I could make by people who understand the form better than I do. And every time I think I’m getting somewhere I roll with someone who has been doing this longer and I discover a new category of humility I didn’t know was available to me.

Which is not entirely unlike sanctification. (Just saying.)

But here’s what keeps me on the mat, getting folded every week. The form is real. The geometry works and the triangle holds. And the more I trust the form (the more I stop muscling and start moving, stop forcing and start feeling, stop trying to win by instinct and start learning to win by submission to the structure) the more I understand what I’m actually doing.

Christ is the connector in all of this. Not because I am trying to make jiu jitsu spiritual or turn a Penrose triangle into a sermon illustration. But because the same instinct that makes the impossible figure beautiful and the same geometry that makes the gentle art work are both echoes of the same truth. And that truth is this: that the universe is built on a paradox that resolves in Christ.

Strength through surrender. Dominance through submission. Life through death. The impossible held together by a form that shouldn’t work and does. That cannot be explained from the outside but becomes inevitable from the inside.

God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. (1 Corinthians 1:27)

That’s the Penrose triangle. That’s the triangle choke from the bottom. That’s the cross that looked like defeat and turned out to be the hinge of history.

The form holds. It always has.

You just have to trust it long enough to stop trying to muscle out.