Foolish Wisdom
I Corinthians 1: 17-31
February 19, 2023
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
First, let’s talk about the ancient city of Corinth. Corinth was on a narrow strip of land with sea on both sides. It was inland with two port cities as a first line of defense, one to the north and one to the east. By the first century, it was a commercial hub. Goods for sale arrived by ship and were carried across the Corinthian isthmus to be put on ships on the other side. Many of them made their way into Corinthian markets, and Corinth exported bronze and pottery and earthenware. It had first been a Greek city, but was largely destroyed in a war with the Romans in 146 BCE. Augustus Caesar rebuilt it as a Roman city about 80 years before Paul arrived. He repopulated the city with eager, upwardly- mobile persons who emigrated from other parts of the empire. By the time of Paul, Corinth was functioning as a regional capital, competing even with Athens. Corinth hosted the Isthmian games, every two years. It was an ambitious city full of ambitious people.
Paul planted a church in Corinth in about 50 AD. If the city had a certain reputation, so did the church. A letter written a full generation after Paul’s time notes that the Corinthian Christians continue to “engage in partisan strife.”[1] The term “Battling Baptists” had not yet been invented, but otherwise, it would have been apt.
One of the purposes of Paul’s letter is to urge reconciliation and promote unity among the various factions. Here at the beginning, he appeals to them to stand together because of their common understanding of the cross.
There are some church nerds among us – you know who you are. For you especially, I want to note that this Sunday is the last Sunday before Lent begins. It marks the end of the season after Epiphany. It is called Transfiguration Sunday. Being church nerds, you know that Epiphany means appearing or revealing. In this season, we celebrate the ways that God appears, the parts of God that are revealed in Jesus the Christ. For those who follow the lectionary, the season of Epiphany always begins with the story of the magi who follow the star to find an infant or a toddler Jesus and they worship him. For those who follow the lectionary, the season ends on this Sunday with the story of Jesus’ transfiguration. That’s the time that Jesus took three of his closest disciples up on a mountain with him and while they were there, Jesus started glowing, even his clothes became shiny white. Then the prophets Moses and Elijah appeared and Jesus was talking to them. That’s the arc of the season of Epiphany, from Jesus as a vulnerable baby born to humble peasant parents to Jesus as an adult who is so close to God that he shines while having ordinary conversation with Moses and Elijah who died hundreds of years earlier.
The story of the Transfiguration is important, but I am not convinced it is important enough to have its own day every year. This passage from the letter to the Corinthians reveals as much about God in Jesus as the Transfiguration does, to my way of thinking, but it doesn’t get the same air time in the lectionary. So, I invite you to let the image of Jesus shining on the mountaintop rest in the back of your brain for a minute as we focus on Paul’s words about the foolishness of the cross.
Paul is writing to the Christians in Corinth. They are as upwardly mobile and ambitious as the other citizens of their city. They want status and power.
Power played by the same rules then as now. You knew you had power if you were winning. You knew you were winning if you had the most toys or the largest bank account or the most friends in high places. You had power if there were people below you in the pecking order and if they were a little afraid of you.
Paul reminds them that the gospel’s power does not work like human competition. God’s strength is found in weakness, in vulnerability. Paul wants them to know where their true worth resides. He wants them to remember where their true power comes from: a mangled human body, suffering so unjustly, tortured to death, the incomprehensible love of Christ displayed on the cross.
This is deeply unsettling. It is scandalous to some, utter foolishness to others.
“This is not a message geared to win friends or influence people. The cross was a lousy marketing tool in the first-century and remains so in the twenty-first century.” [2]
The Corinthian Christians seem to be embarrassed, scandalized to be associated with the cross. They want to gloss over that part of the story, just leave it out. They want somehow to tap into the power of resurrection without understanding that you have to die to get there.
We may have a hard time getting why the cross is so offensive because crucifixion doesn’t happen in the same way any more. Crucifixion was capital punishment for disreputable individuals or groups like rebellious slaves or insurrectionists. It was a public death intended to degrade and humiliate and torture. It was a warning to anyone who dared to threaten the imperial social order that they might be next. It was distasteful to speak of in polite company. We know this, but it is hard for us to feel the emotional impact that they did.
A few years ago, a church in Florida put it into a statement that might help us see the cross with twenty-first century eyes. On the sign in front of their church was this sentence “We worship a man of color murdered by keepers of the law.”
That’s jarring, isn’t it?
“We worship a man of color murdered by keepers of the law.”
When you put it like that, in our context, it helps me see Jesus within a marginalized group, enduring public scrutiny for every thing he does from how he washes his hands to who he eats with to how he celebrates national holidays. It helps me see Jesus killed without justification by those in authority, mostly just because they could.
The church put that statement on their sign a couple of years ago. It was intended as a statement of faith in protest against police brutality directed at people of color. It was intended as a reminder that Jesus was not white. The “keepers of the law” that they intended to reference were the Romans, who valued Roman lives above others and thus exerted dominant power over non-Romans. The sign drew a lot of response, both supportive and critical. The critics pointed out that “keepers of the law” has historically been construed to mean the Jewish people. It has been used to foster hatred toward Jewish people by blaming them for Jesus’ death. The church leaders heard that and immediately took down the sign. They issued a public retraction and apology on social media. They said “We are horrified to think that our sign could in anyway be used to foster more death-dealing hatred toward those who are Jewish. We should have taken more care with our wording. We apologize whole-heartedly for any harm our message has caused.”[3]
It is very hard to talk about power without tripping up. It can be very hard to stand with the marginalized and not fall into the trap of using our power in ways that cause further damage.
This is the foolishness of the cross. That God, who is supremely powerful, surrenders everything– Jesus does not use force or clever rhetoric to escape. He doesn’t encourage his followers to mount an insurrection. He doesn’t even try to justify himself, to talk his way out of it. He just dies, an unspeakably awful death.
What power can this possibly have? And yet, in the foolish wisdom of God, it does. The message of the cross is that God thinks people and the creation are so good, so beautiful, so precious that our redemption is worth dying for.[4]
It reveals the paradox of God’s foolishness over human wisdom. “But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong;” Paul writes.
Jesus taught about this foolishness all the time – the reign of God he proclaimed was a place where the last were first, where leaders were servants, where neighbors and enemies were loved. But people didn’t really get it then and we still don’t really get it.
How many times in history have we witnessed the power of non-violence as a way to solve conflict? Ghandi in India, the civil rights movement in the United States, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Singing Revolution in Estonia. And yet, how often we jump to war? This week, it will have been one year since Russia invaded Ukraine. Whenever it ends, it will take decades to rebuild and some in both countries will never recover from the trauma. If there is a declared winner, their victory will be offset by the destruction it required.
How long will this nation continue to trust in the power of guns to keep us safe? I’ve lost track of the mass shooting events that occurred in just the last week. One was on Monday at Michigan State. Two students on that campus had survived other mass shootings. Did you know that? One lived through a high school shooting near Detroit just 14 months ago. The other, Jackie Matthews, survived Sandy Hook as a 6th-grader in 2012. "I am 21 years old and this is the second mass shooting that I have now lived through," she said.[5]
Our culture definitely doesn’t get it. We who are Christians struggle with it, but I want to encourage us to stay in the struggle.
If you still have that picture of Jesus on the mountaintop in your brain, take a look at it again. That story is foreshadows the rest of the story. We hear it just before Lent in anticipation of the journey to the cross. It suggests that what is coming – the suffering and death of Jesus may at first appear as an unthinkable, desecrating defeat, but it’s actually a step toward a dramatic, subversive victory. Jesus will go down from the mountaintop to venture into the shadows of death – precisely in order to overcome death forever. And when he does, we shall see that resurrection power shining like he shines on the mountain now.
What is revealed in the cross is that God is in Christ redeeming the world, reconciling the world to God’s own self. This is mystery, which we just begin to grasp. It happens through the paradoxical power of God and not human wisdom. What we can contribute, probably all we can contribute, is to resolve with Paul, to know Christ and him crucified, to keep ourselves receptive and responsive to the power of suffering, foolish love. May it be so for you and for me. Amen.
[1] J. Paul Sampley, New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume X, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002), p. 775.
[2] Richard Carlson https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/third-sunday-in-lent-2/commentary-on-1-corinthians-118-25-2
[3] https://www.facebook.com/goodsamaritanchurchpinellaspark/posts/we-worship-a-man-of-color-murdered-by-keepers-of-the-law/3065120376866849/
[4] Douglas John Hall, The Cross in Our Context: Jesus and the Suffering World, (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2003), p. 24.
[5] https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2023/02/14/michigan-state-univeristy-shooting-student-jackie-matthews-sandy-hook-newtown-tiktok/69902925007/