1 Corinthians 1:18-25 Lent 3

1 Corinthians 1:18-25

Christ the Power and Wisdom of God

18 For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. ¹⁹For it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’ ²⁰Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? ²¹For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. ²²For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, ²³but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, ²⁴but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. ²⁵For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

Both to the cultured Greek and to the pious Jew the Christian message seemed like pure folly. Paul knows this and expresses it clearly. The Gospel still – for many – just does not make any sense! Paul makes the point that all the wisdom in the world had never found God – and this too remains true even today.

Let’s look briefly at the essence of the Christian message:

1. God has come to the earth and taken on the form of a human;

2. The ordinary carpenter from a remote and insignificant settlement – was indeed this God incarnate;

3. Jesus rose from the dead;

4. Jesus of Nazareth is the fulfillment of the majestic Messianic prophecies of the Old Testament;

5. Jesus will come again to judge the world – the living and the dead;

6. There is an urgent need for people to repent and receive the promised gift of the Holy Spirit.

For Jews, being hanged in any form was a sign that one was accursed of God (Deut 21.23) so the crucifixion of Jesus was ultimate proof for them that Jesus was not the Messiah. Even though Isaiah 53 speaks of a suffering servant, the Jews never dreamt of a Messiah that would suffer. Jews also looked for signs – startling things. Jesus had performed many miracles and wonders and signs, but he was still too humble and meek and avoided the spectacular and ended up on a cross. Barclay concludes: “… it seemed to them an impossible picture of the Chosen one of God.”

In Britain particularly, Jesus has not been taken seriously by an increasing majority, especially since the 1960s because it just does not seem to make sense. Even senior clergy have taken pains to ‘prove’ that the Bible is unreliable, a mere fallible and very imperfect document that has in fact been discredited.

But what of the experience of credible and intelligent people? Some of the greatest British minds have been those of profound faith in this same Jesus of Nazareth who they have found, intimately and personally, to be who he claimed to be, not because this is a rational thing, but something much more sophisticated – faith – what Kierkegaard claimed was the essence of what it means to be human.

Rowan Williams, Alistair McGrath, John Polkinghorne, Keith Ward, John Macquarrie, Richard Swinburne – all acknowledged as some of the greatest intellects of our time – and all men of the deepest and profound belief in the Christian message summarized above.

It is time that we stop worshipping at the shrine of reason and the limits of the human intellect, because that is to flatten and narrow human existence (to use an expression of one of the greatest philosophers of our time – Charles Taylor – and a lay Roman Catholic Canadian – not the African dictator!). Even when we have understood everything that it is possible for a human to understand – there is more – much, much more. It is available to all, not just to the great intellects, because it is God’s gift to humanity in and through the anointing of God’s Spirit Himself poured out into the hearts and minds of all who would receive it. It is called faith and it makes all who receive it wiser than human wisdom, stronger than human strength.

The Greeks sought wisdom. The Greek word for wisdom is ‘sophist’ and means ‘a wise man’ in the good sense. But in time, it came to mean ‘… a man with a clever mind and cunning tongue, a mental acrobat …’ sadly, Greek Philosophy degenerated into endless hours discussing ‘… hair-splitting trifles …’ They also ceased to try to find solutions but simply enjoyed the argument.

There is something to be said for this because, as a philosophy teacher, I think it is healthy to question everything. But there must be some point, or else we fall into the trap of losing focus and becoming like the medievalists who argued about the number of angels that could fit on the head of a pin! Charles Taylor makes the point that what really matters to us can easily go to an extreme: like individualism becoming a self-centred and becoming a form of selfish atomism; efficiency and reliability can become a worship of technology and e.g. nursing becomes a technological enterprise where nurses are technicians instead of people caring for vulnerable and sensitive human beings. He does not advocate either the position of a supporter or a detractor or even take a middle road position. He advocates doing a work of retrieval – re-discovering what is good about what has become warped.

I think we need to do a work of retrieval of the importance of Biblical study and reflection and redeem the Bible as God’s inspired word from the extremes of fundamentalism at the one end and complete dismantling on the other. I think we need to do a work of retrieval of the centrality of subjectivism and the importance of religious experience as a valid and crucial way of knowing God from the insistence on empirical proofs that simply do not exist and that (to use Taylor’s expression again) narrows and flattens our lives.

God is completely ‘other’ and we cannot know him simply through reason. But this does not mean that we throw reason away. We use reason and faith. Becoming subjective is also something that needs retrieval. It is not something that is unreliable because it is personal and not objective; it is at the core of what it means to be human. As Kierkegaard put it: becoming subjective is above reason and a central part of what makes us human. Where would we be without love, hope, joy … all subjective, all vital and all of infinitesimal value?

This is part of the wisdom of God – that we ‘know’ God both by our minds and by faith. Once more it is a matter of both / and rather than either / or.

The power of God (verse 24) is available to believers through the preached word. O’Conner suggests that this proclaimed word ‘... is confirmed by the existential witness of the personality of the preacher.’ But as verse 24 makes clear, not all who hear the proclaimed word hear ‘a call’ which enables them to respond. It only makes an impact on those who have accepted Christ. All are offered God’s grace, and those who receive it and accept it, preaching becomes a call. O’ Conner continues: “... on those who refuse this grace preaching makes no impression, whatever the qualities of the preacher.”

Here we have Paul, once more, speaking about the divine initiative and human freedom. People are on the way to salvation because they have accepted the freely offered gift; others are on the way to destruction because they reject what is offered to them.

Paul reminds the Corinthians of the make-up of their community. In human terms people assume that it is the wise, the rich and powerful, and the wealthy who effect the greatest changes in a community and so one would expect God to work through them; but in order to reveal His power, God does the opposite and chooses the foolish, weak, low and despised to achieve his purposes. The Corinthians were not the dregs of society; some were well-educated, and others had all the privileges of power and noble birth, but this was not true for the majority. Yet their world was transformed by all of them working together by the grace of God.

As always; God does extraordinary things with the ordinary ...