Our NT readings for a few Sundays are from the opening chapters of 1 Corinthians. At our last service, Helen introduced this important letter in which Paul writes to the Christians in the Greek city of Corinth about the heart of their faith, the death and resurrection of Jesus, only twenty years or so after these events had happened. He writes to them about living as a diverse but united community, the Body of Christ, filled with God's Holy Spirit; about their worship, what we today call Holy Communion or Eucharist; about various questions and challenges they face as Christians living in a world where many gods are worshipped and the name and the story of Jesus are just beginning to be known.
Today's reading is one of the most powerful passages Paul wrote about the cross: what the cross tells us about God and what it means for us. Paul admits frankly that the cross, the execution of Jesus, seems to suggest a foolish and weak God. How can God be represented in this world (as Paul believes) by a man who was rejected and died a terrible death? Paul grasps this point boldly and responds: Yes, the God of Jesus Christ may seem very foolish, but "God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom"; and yes, the God of Jesus Christ may look very weak indeed, "but God's weakness is stronger than human strength" (v. 25). Let's reflect on these puzzling sayings.
Paul begins by speaking about his experience of preaching. He describes the response of two very different kinds of people to his message about the cross of Jesus: first, Jews, his own people, the people of Israel; second, Greeks, who are Gentiles, not members of God's people Israel. Paul says that Jews and Greeks are looking for different things. Jews demand signs, but Greeks seek wisdom. They are impressed by very different things.
Jews demand signs: miracles, acts of power. That's natural enough because Jews believe in the God who brought Israel out of Egypt, destroying the Egyptian oppressors and liberating Moses and his people by leading them through the Red Sea. The God of Israel is known for wonderful deeds of power. So if a message about God is to convince the Jews, it must be about a God of obvious and dramatic power.
Greeks, on the other hand, seek wisdom. These Gentiles look to their great philosophers rather than to the Bible. They are attracted by impressive intellectual arguments, sophistication, wisdom. Greeks will only believe in a God of obvious wisdom.
Jews demand signs; Greeks seek wisdom. OK, so how do these two main categories of people respond to Paul's central message, the cross of Jesus? Not very positively. Paul writes that the message of Christ crucified is a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to the Gentile Greeks.
To Jews, Paul's message of the cross is a stumbling block, something awkward that you trip over. From the Greek word used here we get our word "scandal", something shocking, offensive, morally objectionable. To Paul's message that God has come in the person of Jesus, he often had this pushback from his fellow-Jews: What you are saying is unacceptable. What kind of God is represented by – let alone present in – a crucified criminal? Not our God – not the God of Israel.
And to the Greeks who heard Paul, the message of the cross sounded ridiculous, foolishness. This recalls the story in Acts (17:16-34) of Paul preaching in Athens, where his audience scoff at him as a "babbler". The cross does not impress sophisticated philosophers. Maybe they asked Paul what the very specific event of Jesus' death – such a violent, messy episode – could have to do with a God of eternal perfection, the unmoved mover of all things? Paul's claim that the cross reveals the wisdom of the Creator is laughable.
I wonder if we have encountered in other people – or even, if we are honest, in ourselves – reactions like these to our faith, and especially to the message of the cross? For myself, what comes to mind here is how Muslims often comment on the cross. For example, one distinguished Muslim writer explains that Islam rejects the belief that in Jesus Christ God became human, adding: "It would be too degrading for a transcendent God to become man, to eat, drink, be tortured by His own creatures and even be put to death." (M. Hamidullah, Introduction to Islam (International Islamic Federation of Student Organizations, 1970), p 57, paragraph 138) Muslims and Christians have several shared convictions. Both faiths proclaim a merciful, wise, and powerful Creator. Islam also accepts Jesus as a prophet of God. But most Muslims believe that Jesus did not die on the cross, and even if he did, they certainly do not see in the cross the revelation of God's saving love. Islam rejects the possibility that the glorious, transcendent, all-powerful, all-knowing God was present in Jesus crucified on the cross.
I've described the objections to the message of the cross of people of different outlooks, past and present, because it's important to recognize honestly, as Paul does here, that the cross does not make obvious sense in the assumptions, the patterns of thought of this world. The cross doesn't fit. The message of the cross didn't fit with Jewish expectations about God; it didn't fit with Greek ideas of ultimate truth; it doesn't fit with Islamic convictions about the wisdom and power of God.
But whatever the world might think – whatever we might think – nevertheless, is the cross, in all its foolishness and weakness, the place where God comes to us, saying: "This is who I am. I will be who I will be. Don't try to protect me from the logic of my love"? Rather than trying to make the cross fit into our lives, our natural ways of thinking – which it won't – are we willing to accept the cross of Christ as the place where God meets us, giving us a whole new start for our thinking and for our living?
But why in the world should we do that?
The only reason why we should accept the cross as the basis for how we think about God and the world, and ourselves and our lives is that God raised the crucified Jesus from the dead. Paul doesn't mention the resurrection of Jesus in today's passage, but the resurrection is absolutely his starting-point. It's only because the crucified and risen Jesus came to Paul on the road to Damascus that Paul began to look in a new way at the message about the cross, which till then he had rejected as offensive nonsense. It's only because of the resurrection that Paul comes to see the crucified Jesus as Messiah, Saviour and Son of God. The cross and the resurrection of Jesus totally belong together, and later in this same letter Paul will write his longest passage about the resurrection. Sometimes Paul will focus on the cross and sometimes on the resurrection, but here in chapter 1 he's focusing on the cross. Let me draw out a couple of concluding points from what he says here.
One takeaway from today's reading is that God is different from us. From centuries before Paul, we read in the Book of Isaiah (55:8) that God's thoughts are not our thoughts, and God's ways are not our ways. OK, we might say, we know God is different from us. But do we really know that? In reality, left to ourselves to think about God, we tend to follow the natural human instinct to create images of God as being like ourselves, but on a massively bigger scale. So to imagine the power of God we think of how power works among human beings, we magnify this as far as we can – and that is our powerful God. But that imaginary God isn't really different from us; that God is the same as us, only much bigger. This God is in fact an idol, an invention, or projection of ourselves. But the true God, the God we did not create but who created us, is truly different from us. And the power of the true God is different from power as we know and experience it.
Among human beings (vulnerable, fearful and greedy as we are) power is normally used to assert the interests of the self and of its immediate community, to build up the empire of the self and weaken or destroy its rivals. But God is different from us, thank God. God's self needs no protecting against rivals, so the power of God is not caught up in the anxious project of self-protection against enemies but rather flows into the generous project of self-giving for the sake of others. The power of God serves the love of God, because the ultimate truth about God is not "God is power" but "God is love". Yes, God is powerful, God is Almighty, but with God it's always the power of love, never the love of power. But that's not how we tend to think and live, so God struggles to open our eyes, to open our hearts, to this very different way of being and of acting. When the powerful love of God was most fully revealed in this world, in the cross of Jesus, nobody could recognize that power; when the wise love of God was revealed in the cross, nobody could recognize that wisdom. It was only in the light of the risen Jesus that people began to see what was happening on the cross, that in God's gloriously different way, God was acting here with power and wisdom, and above all in love, to draw us into his loving ways.
And that's the final takeaway: the God of the cross of Jesus is drawing us into his ways. In this passage Paul talks mainly about what God has done for us, not about our response. But he also points to what all this means for our lives. At the end he writes that God "is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption" (1:30). What God has done for us in the crucified and risen Jesus isn't just something 'out there', something that may or may not have happened 2000 years ago but which anyway has no impact on us today. Jesus is not just the revelation of God, the wisdom of God out there; we have been drawn by God into life in Christ Jesus and Jesus has become "our wisdom". Jesus is the embracing, enfolding reality holding our lives. Jesus is the directing, shaping wisdom working in us to make us gradually more like him, more like the God we worship, the God who shows us in the crucified Jesus that in the end it's all about the power of love, not the love of power. It's in this God, Paul says finally, that we are to "boast", to find our self-worth, our dignity, our value. Every Sunday, God invites us to come together to this table to remember that Jesus died and rose again for us; at this table we recognize the wisdom in God's foolishness and the power in God's weakness; and we are drawn more deeply into the foolishness and weakness of God.
David Marshall