Comparison Loses Its Grip: The Triumph Of Weakness

The cross wins.

That sentence is easy to say. It’s familiar. It sounds settled. But if we pause long enough to let it register, we begin to feel how strange it really is. Because nothing about the cross looks like winning. Nothing about it fits our instincts about power, success, or effectiveness. The cross does not look like victory; it looks like collapse. It looks like weakness exposed, control lost, and strength humiliated in public.

Paul begins this passage by insisting that the cross is not merely related to God’s power. He says it is the power of God.

That claim alone forces a question on us before we go any further:

What do we mean when we talk about power?

Most of us carry an unexamined definition. Power is the ability to act, to influence outcomes, to protect what matters, to stay upright when pressure comes. Power is competence. Stability. Self-possession. And when we speak about faith, we often assume that following God should make us more secure, more capable, more internally consistent. We expect faith to strengthen the self.

Paul does not share that assumption.

The Corinthians believed the gospel. They affirmed Christ. They gathered as a church. And yet Paul saw something forming among them that alarmed him. They were dividing. Comparing. Ranking leaders. Aligning themselves with personalities and styles. Measuring spiritual life by eloquence, intellect, and perceived strength.

What they were doing looks familiar because it is familiar. It is what happens whenever the church quietly absorbs the values of its surrounding culture. The Corinthians lived in a world that prized rhetoric, philosophy, public honor, and visible success. And without realizing it, they began to carry those measurements into the church.

So Paul does not start by scolding behavior. He does not begin with church politics or conflict resolution. He goes straight to the cross.

Because the issue is not disagreement.

The issue is what is shaping them.

This is important: Paul is not writing to people who reject the cross. He is writing to people who confess it—but are being formed by something else. They believe the gospel, but their instincts still orbit around the self. Around competence. Around recognition. Around strength as the world defines it.

That’s why this passage is not primarily explanatory. It is formational. Paul is not just telling them what the cross means; he is showing them what the cross does when it is allowed to sit at the center of a community.

“The message of the cross,” Paul says, “is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

Notice the present tense. No one is standing still. Humanity is always moving in a direction—either perishing or being saved. And the cross stands in the middle of that movement, exposing what kind of power we trust.

The cross does not flatter human wisdom. It contradicts it. It does not confirm our strength; it unmasks it. And that is why it feels foolish to some and life-giving to others. The difference is not intelligence. The difference is where the self is centered.

This passage is not asking whether we admire the cross. It is asking whether the cross has been allowed to re-center us.

Because the self always needs a center. It always needs something to lean on, something to boast in, something that feels solid enough to carry the weight of identity and hope. And if Christ does not occupy that place, something else will—usually something that looks like strength, competence, or wisdom.

Paul is going to argue that the cross overturns all of that—not by shaming us for being weak, but by showing us that what we thought was strength was never strong enough to begin with.

And here is where the passage becomes deeply personal. Most of us do not think of ourselves as boastful people. We are not loud. We are not arrogant. But Paul is not talking about loud boasting. He is talking about functional boasting—where the heart naturally goes for reassurance.

What do you trust when you are tired?

What do you reach for when you feel exposed?

What steadies you when things begin to wobble?

Those answers tell us where the self is centered.

The cross does not destroy the self. It relocates it. It takes the self out of the center and places Christ there instead. And once that relocation happens, something surprising occurs: boasting does not disappear. It simply changes direction. Boasting in the Lord becomes natural, not forced—because the self is no longer carrying what it was never meant to carry.

That is the work Paul is doing in this passage. He is not attacking weakness. He is exposing false strength. And he is inviting the church into a different kind of formation—one where power looks like dependence, wisdom looks like trust, and victory looks like a cross.