Fooling with Wisdom
As the season of Lent progresses, we draw ever closer to cross. The stories of the betrayal and arrest of Jesus are coming. It becomes increasingly more difficult to watch, and we are tempted to simply jump over it all and head straight for Easter morning. Admittedly, I have been trying to draw the joy, the good news, out of the stories that we have heard over the past few weeks instead of focusing upon the doom and gloom that seems so prevalent in the season. Yes, the temptation is there to simply skip ahead to Easter, but we can’t… there is this cross that lies in the way… and at some point we need to take a closer look at it. After all, we cannot have Easter without the Cross.
Maybe to shed a bit more light on it, this week I’m shifting away from Mark’s storytelling, turning to Paul’s letter writing. This, admittedly, may or may not be helpful… Paul’s writing style is the bane of most language arts teachers that I know. Part of it gets lost in translation to be sure, and part of it comes from early copies of the text not actually having readable punctuation! As such, it appears that Paul rambles on and on and on and on at length about some theological point, and by the time he gets to the end of it we’re not quite sure where he started, or quite what the point was. Unlike a good, entertaining story, Paul can take quite a bit of energy to read.
Part of that has to do with the fact we’re reading somebody else’s mail. We often don’t realize it, but the epistles of Paul are a collection of letters that were directed at specific churches with specific problems at specific times. Over time, transcribed copies of these letters began to circulate around the early church. Given that Paul was considered to be a great teacher and leader, especially with the church in Greece and Asia Minor, they were collected into one place, and eventually found their place as part of what we now call the New Testament. Yet at their core, they are somebody else’s mail, which often address situations that we can now only make a guess at.
This morning’s reading comes in the middle of Paul’s thought process:
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. For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the iscerning I will thwart.”
Where 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? For 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. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
I’ll be honest, Paul’s reasoning is a bit hard to follow… in part because it gets lost in translation, but we also have long since forgotten what all the fuss was about.
Paul’s letters were a means of addressing concerns in early congregations when he himself could not be present to talk to the people directly. We tend to set these early churches up on a pedestal, as they were the good old days, and we regard them as being somehow so much better than our church communities today. A careful read through any of Paul’s letters will shatter any of that. These congregations that Paul himself helped found were made up of human beings, just like us… There were conflicts, struggles, and even some downright petty disagreements that threatened their future. When issues arose, Paul’s preferred method was to pay a visit to the congregation in person, but when he couldn’t, he would write a letter.
It should be interesting to note that the congregations that did not have problems we have no idea who they were, because Paul never needed to write a letter to them.
By contrast, Paul easily spilled the most amount of ink to this church in the Greek city of Corinth. In the two letters that we have in the New Testament, there are some twenty-nine chapters… making up nearly half of all that we have from Paul’s hand. Trust me… This is not a good thing. The church in Corinth was rife with conflict, and we honestly do not know if this fledgling church even managed to survive its infancy. It got so bad at one point that Paul had threatened to cut off any and all relationship with this congregation.
By any standard, Corinth was a challenging place to found a congregation… but not in the way that we might think. Instead of being hostile to new religious movements and ideas, the culture in Corinth had flung those doors wide open. They welcomed nearly everything into their midst. Being both a major seaport and a critical land-transportation route in Greece, everything went through this city. You’ve heard the saying that all roads lead to Rome… but one could also say that you had to go through Corinth to get there.
As such, Corinth was not only a bustling centre in the first-century economy, but it was also a marketplace of new ideas, new philosophies, and new religion. In no other city in the Roman Empire was there as diverse a range. There were a lot of ideas, and at the time, a lot of new religious movements. Christianity was simply one of dozens… there was plenty of “competition” in the spiritual market. The downside saw the formation of an implicit “standard” in the city’s culture by which these new religions were to be judged. It mattered as to who their leaders were, what signs and wonders they could perform, what pearls of wisdom they could share, and in the end, how big a show a given community could put on in worship –regardless of which faith it was. These “Corinthian standards” began to creep into the early Christian community. As they were trying to attract and build their own membership base, the way they could sell it was in how they would measure up to the city’s standards. Worse yet, they began to apply these standards to each other, and began to bicker as to who should really be in charge.
In this first letter that Paul writes to the Corinthian church, he takes a moment to remind them that God has entirely different standards. Faith in Christ when judged by these Corinthian standards didn’t make sense, but for Paul that was entirely okay. He saw how these influences were beginning to undermine the basic message, and if left unchecked the Corinthian church was in serious danger of becoming a carbon-copy of all the other new mystery religions in the city, with no real message of its own.
Paul’s defiant words, “we proclaim Christ crucified...” was a deliberate shot at all of this. By the Corinthian standards, they would be suspicious of a religion founded around a poor carpenter executed in the most dishonourable and humiliating way possible. By conventional wisdom, Jesus had no social status, and nothing of worth to offer… foolishness, they would think.
But that was exactly Paul’s point: God has different standards. Paul draws from a passage from Isaiah, reminding the Corinthians that even the wisest of human standards does not measure up to God’s most frivolous moment. God’s greatest strength is shown forth through the weakest of human frailty. This is the story of the cross as we get closer to Easter. Everything is turned upside down, and God confounds our conventional wisdom, showing us that there is truly something more, something beyond the standards that we create for ourselves and others. Maybe we can learn something from this… maybe we can learn to let go of our own standards and try to see things the way God sees them…
Amen.
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