WELCOME & INTRODUCTION
- We are beginning a new series on the Cross of Christ this morning.
FOOLISH CROOKS
Donald Murray’s fifteen minutes of fame began December 2019 when he showed up on an episode of the TV show Live PD. As cops pulled him over for driving without headlights, he crashed into a tree and escaped on foot. The fugitive evaded capture until the following February, when he led police on a high-speed chase that ended with charges including “felony resisting, reckless driving, possession of methamphetamine, maintaining a common nuisance, and auto theft.” Aiding in Murray’s capture…and the reason his Live PD appearance went viral…was the large tattoo on his forehead that reads “Crime Pays.”
What a foolish message and a foolish criminal.
In this series we will be exploring aspects of what the Cross of Christ means for us. Both the blessings and the socially awkward curses today.
Over the course of the next 8 weeks, we will talk about how the cross gives us endurance to continue running this life race. The cross comes with blessings but the cross still has enemies. We will spend a Sunday talking about the cross that we take up today. We will also talk about the power of the cross of Christ. The cross also comes with a curse as I’ve mentioned. Then we will lead into the sign of the cross—and I don’t mean the hand movement some people do. Of course, we will end with the truth that the cross leads to salvation.
Today, leading in with Mr. Murray’s foolish criminal fame, we are going to explore the idea that the cross is a foolish message. Stick with me.
Let’s turn to 1 Corinthians 1:17-31 (7 Slides):
17 For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. 18 For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” 20 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? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. 22 For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, 24 but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. 26 For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. 27 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; 28 God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, 29 so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. 30 And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, 31 so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”
Crucifixion is a method of capital punishment in which the victim is tied or nailed to a large wooden cross, beam, or stake and left to hang until eventual death from exhaustion or asphyxiation. It was used as a punishment by the Romans among others. Crucifixion has been used in parts of the world as recently as the 20th century.
Being crucified in the first century was most certainly considered to be a sign of evil deeds either of yourself or someone in your family. People took crime seriously and would mete out punishment in this cruel way. Jesus took on this punishment so we would not have to.
Today, we see crosses everywhere. We wear them as necklaces, earrings, or tattoos; we use them to decorate our houses; and most churches usually place a cross front and center. Some people make the sign of the cross to show their faith outwardly. In fiction, Vampires are repelled by the mere sight of one. At the center of Christian faith, the cross has become woven into our cultural fabric, becoming a symbol for who it is we follow. The abundance of crosses expresses and enables an indifferent familiarity with Jesus’ own crucifixion that was entirely foreign to the first Christians.
Crosses were everywhere during the time of Jesus, but for entirely different reasons. This tool of capital punishment was fairly routine for the Romans, employed to humiliate the deceased. Nobles might be sent into exile, some were honorably beheaded, but the many slaves and other detestable criminals of the empire were crucified. Jesus’ shameful death by crucifixion would have been a tough sell to aristocrats and laborers alike. As told in Martin Hengel’s classic book, Crucifixion,
This radical kenosis of God was the revolutionary new element in the preaching of the gospel. It caused offence, but in this very offence it revealed itself as the center of the gospel. [… T]o assert that God himself accepted death in the form of a crucified Jewish manual worker from Galilee in order to break the power of death and bring salvation to all people could only seem folly and madness to those of ancient times. Even now, any genuine theology will have to be measured against the test of this scandal.
Hengel’s book focuses exclusively on how the Romans viewed crucifixion, but the same scandal of the cross can be said for Jewish thought at the time. While the Jewish literature often saw martyrdom as noble, the idea of a suffering, crucified Messiah was largely inconceivable — even to Jesus’ own disciples. The cross was a scandal to Jews and utter foolishness to the Romans.
It should be a shock to us that the means of Jesus’ death was universally disdained by those who first witnessed the event. Likewise, the identification that this crucified Jesus was God himself was pure nonsense to literally everyone.
Surely someone who was crucified deserved it. Not always. As I said, this was a cruel punishment and sometimes people would be condemned to crucifixion for minor betrayals of the Roman government. Look at the actual texts we have about Jesus’ crucifixion:
Matthew 27:22-23
22 Pilate said to them, “Then what shall I do with Jesus who is called Christ?” They all said, “Let him be crucified!” 23 And he said, “Why? What evil has he done?” But they shouted all the more, “Let him be crucified!”
Pilate didn’t think crucifixion was warranted here.
Luke 23:39-41
39 One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!” 40 But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? 41 And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.”
The criminal on the cross next to Jesus knew that Jesus had done nothing to deserve this.
The people of this day knew that what was happening was wrong. But no one would stop it.
There was no path that could be taken, no narrative to tell, no philosophy that could have reasoned its way to arrive at the belief that God had died while hanging naked on a tree. There was simply no precedent to comprehend (let alone stake your life upon) the idea of a crucified God.
The cross of God marked a rupture of existing beliefs. It enabled a fundamentally new discourse about God, ethics, and history itself. It spurred ingenious reflection on the part of early Christians to make sense of this event. The scriptures they had read their entire lives now bore new, unforeseen meanings in the shadow of the cross. Its themes of kingship, atonement, promise, and law were shattered and reinterpreted in light of the cross of Jesus. The temple was not the place to atone for sin, but an analogy for Christ’s death. What was promised to Abraham was none other than Jesus. The Davidic Messiah would conquer the world not through force, but through suffering.
The novel identification of God in the weakness and infamy of Jesus’ crucifixion requires the re-configuring of all values and worldviews. He elusively transcends our expectations and refuses to be co-opted by our political, economic, or social ideologies. The crucified God refuses to be pressed into service for anything besides his self-determined plan of redemption.
In our text this morning, both the passage in 1 Corinthians I have already read and the Scripture reading this morning, we hear that this word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing. Why is the word of the cross folly/foolish?
I have 3 reasons why people who are perishing would see this message as foolish.
PEOPLE WHO ARE PERISHING
1. Think this is too easy.
You just ask for forgiveness and Jesus comes into your life? You have someone dunk you under the water in baptism and you’re saved? Nothing else? Aren’t you required to pray a certain number of times a day? Shouldn’t you be required to do a particular number of good deeds as penance? Won’t you go to hell if you don’t go to church? It seems foolish.
In response, we need to be clear about the message of the gospel as shown in the cross of Christ: what needs to be done for us to be saved has already been done. That message may seem too easy, but that’s grace—being given something we don’t deserve.
Many people are not willing to admit that there is something wrong with them. And those people who do know and see that something is wrong—they quite often are dominated by guilt and cannot accept that it’s simple to find forgiveness from God. We need to remind people that God loves them enough to take their place and pay the price for their forgiveness.
John 3:16
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
Romans 5:8
“…but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Romans 8:38-39
38 For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
God doesn’t wait for us to be good enough before he wants to be our friend and Savior. He takes us as we are. He transforms us.
2. It seems too hard.
Many people see the message of the cross as losing control of their lives. They think it is all about what they won’t be able to do anymore. They look at the Christian life and think, “I won’t be able to get drunk with my friends anymore. I’ll have to go to church on Sunday instead of watching football. I have to watch my language. Fun would be over. Why would I do that?” Truth be told, people who are perishing are not happy with their inner lives, but still it seems foolish to give up the things they see as fun.
We need to help these people see that with every choice there is something gained and something lost. What will they be losing if they choose Christ? And what will they be gaining? How does this compare to what they will gain and lose if they reject Christ?
In the words of the famous missionary to Ecuador Jim Elliot who was martyred for wanting to share the Gospel with the Auca people—they were known pejoratively as the “savages.” Jim said this: “He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep, to gain that which he can never lose.”
So much is lost in this life when a person rejects Jesus, but the ultimate cost is eternal. In Matthew 13:41-43 Jesus says,
41 The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all law-breakers, 42 and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. 43 Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear.
At the end of our time here on earth, every person will find themselves in one of two destinations: heaven or hell. If giving up control of your life seems too hard, think about the consequences of not choosing Jesus.
3. Don’t Believe In God
Sadly there are people who just don’t believe. If someone doesn’t believe in God, then, of course, the gospel sounds foolish.
Almost everyone who puts their faith in Christ does so because of a significant relationship with a real Christian. If a person in your life doesn’t believe in God, part of your evangelism is to spend time with them. Try to go past surface conversations and keep dropping in comments about what God means to you or how he has answered your prayers or how something in the Bible has spoken right into your situation. Trust God to reveal himself to that person through you and others. Only God can do that.
1 Corinthians 2:14
The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.
In the end, only the Spirit of God can help a person see past the ‘foolishness’ of the gospel to the simple, powerful, life-changing truth of what God has done for us. This is why prayer is such a central part of evangelism.
So, while the message of the cross may seem to be foolish to those that don’t believe, it really is that simple. For those of us who may be tempted to add something to that message to make it seem more ‘reasonable’—if we change it, it is no longer the gospel.
CONCLUSION
We live in a world consumed by competing ideologies. Whether we like it or not, everything we do reflects our values and beliefs. The kind of clothes we wear is a statement. The kind of cars we drive, where we shop for groceries, the teams we support for college football or Major League Baseball. We can’t even buy a can of beans without it becoming a political statement. For everything under the sun there is either blessedness or damnation, according to the terms set by whoever holds power.
To be sure, Jesus is routinely enlisted in our many culture wars, as we attempt to speak on God’s behalf about what he wants us to do. This ideological God is robbed of the freedom of his self-disclosure and made to conform to our expectations of what we think a good God would do. The old term for this rhetorical move is blasphemy—ironically, the very charge leveled against Jesus and the early Christians.
The crucified God found no home among the ideologies of his day; they could neither comprehend nor accept such a person. He was neither a Roman nor a Pharisee, a Stoic nor a Sadducee, an Epicurean nor a Zealot. The kingdom he proclaimed was not of this world. He refused to pick one side and was therefore attacked and insulted from all directions.
Jesus’ vision of the world pleased no one, while inviting everyone. At the cross, God identified himself with the entirety of human wretchedness, the curse of death and god-forsakenness that afflicts people of all cultures and ideologies. He is the crucified Lord, and it is solely by his ideology of mercy that we are judged.
This message would seem foolish. But as Paul so eloquently writes,
“God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God…”
If our wisdom was the defining factor, we would not have chosen what God has chosen. And if our wisdom was the defining factor, we would stand and boast: “See God? See how great I have done? I am following all your commands. I am doing everything you’ve told me to do. I am not like those who are perishing.”
Sounds a lot like the Pharisee praying in Luke 18:9-13:
9 He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and looked down on everyone else: 10 “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.
11 The Pharisee was standing and praying like this about himself: ‘God, I thank you that I’m not like other people—greedy, unrighteous, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of everything I get.’
13 “But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even raise his eyes to heaven but kept striking his chest and saying, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner!’
The message of the cross is too easy and that seems foolish. Jesus said,
Matthew 11:28-30
28 “Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take up my yoke and learn from me, because I am lowly and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
INVITATION
Do you need this rest? Let me invite you to come forward. We are going to sing a song of invitation. I can pray with you and we can begin asking God for His rest. Come with me and hear this foolish message. Let’s stand and sing.
