“The Foolishness of the Cross”
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
There is a story about a wealthy early colonial man who asked the rector of the church if it was possible to find salvation outside of the Church of England.
The rector wrestled with how to answer the question because he knew it was within the realm of possibility, but he didn’t want his socially elite parishioner to be hanging out with Christian riffraff.
So, after thinking about it deeply, the rector replied, “Sir, the possibility about which you inquire exists. But no gentleman would avail himself of it.”
The reality in this story isn’t unique.
Yes, even Christians can be status conscious.
And this seems to be one of the many problems at the Church of Corinth that Paul was writing to for our Scripture passage for this morning.
The city of Corinth was filled with “upwardly mobile” folk.
There wasn’t much “old money,” but the town was filled with people who were trying to make it big--fighting to climb the ladder.
And this was reflected in the divisions and hostilities in the church, where members would follow one leader or another according to social status and how it might make them look.
And I’d imagine many of us can think of examples of this type of thing today, not only in churches but especially in the world.
The world tends to divide up into cliques.
And these cliques are often based on status.
We are all familiar with the often recited “Who’s sitting at the cool kid’s table in the lunch room?” routine.
And this kind of thing takes place not only in high school and middle school cafeterias, but also in colleges and workplaces as people jockey for positions and leave others behind in their effort to move on up.
We are all susceptible to this.
It’s the way of the world.
It just naturally happens.
You could say it’s sort of like humankind trying to save itself by its own wisdom and scheming.
But it’s hurtful to those left behind.
It’s mean and rough.
It lacks love for God and neighbor.
And it is foolishness to God even if it seems wise in the eyes of the world.
Before our passage for this morning, Paul references the church's social divisions.
Beginning in Chapter 1 verse 12 Paul writes: “One of you says, ‘I follow Paul’, another, ‘I follow Apollos’; another, ‘I follow Cephas’; and still another, ‘I follow Christ.’
Is Christ divided?
Was Paul crucified for you?”
And then he goes on, “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”
Foolishness indeed!
Paul is saying that the foolishness of the Gospel is a crucified Christ.
Crucifixion was more than a state-sponsored execution: it was meant to demean and shame the person being crucified.
It was the most shame-filled thing the Romans could come up with.
Think of what Jesus Christ did for you and me.
Matthew tells us that soldiers stripped Him naked, and then they decided to hold a mock coronation: and they brought Him a robe, probably one of the soldier’s robes.
Then, they decided that their freshly robed king needed a crown, and they twisted a branch from a thorn tree into a rough circle in parody of the royal laurel wreath.
Then they pressed it down onto His head so that the thorns dug into His flesh.
Then they put a stick in his hand to mimic a royal scepter.
“Hail, King of the Jews!” they shouted as they laughed and saluted.
I know it is not pleasant in the least, but it is essential for us to have this picture in our mind, this shamefully cruel and inhumane sport at the expense of Jesus.
We need to get a clear and tragic glimpse of what humanity did when God took on flesh and walked among us.
Jesus could have destroyed them all with a word.
Instead, He took the shame and humiliation.
And instead of throwing all the blame on the religious leaders and Romans of Jesus’ day, let’s—you and I—take a moment to see ourselves in this situation and see ourselves in the Roman soldiers.
This can help remind us that human beings throughout history have been capable of terrible inhumanity toward one another.
It’s easy for us to say, “I would never do that. I would never have been one of the Roman soldiers who took delight in mocking, lashing, and terrorizing Jesus.”
But we need to be careful about such claims.
In 1971, Phillip Zimbardo, a psychologist at Stanford University, did a study for the United States Navy regarding the behavior of people in prisons.
He and his colleagues transformed the basement of the psychology building at Stanford into a prison and hired twenty-four middle-class Stanford students, randomly assigning twelve of them to be guards and the other twelve to be prisoners.
The guards would be observed for fourteen days.
But the experiment had to be called off after the sixth day because the college students chosen to be guards took their roles so enthusiastically that they started to hurt and oppress their student prisoners.
They had lost sight of the fact that it was an experiment.
Zimbardo spent the next thirty years analyzing the results and studying what they might mean in other areas.
He found that all of us—every one of us—can be transformed from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde.
There are many historical parallels as well.
For instance, have you ever wondered what was so different about the Germans of the 1930s and 1940s?
Were they so unlike present-day Americans such as you and me?
Why were so many ordinary people willing to kill their Jewish neighbors under certain circumstances?
Could it be that given the right combination of ideology, authority, and gradual desensitization, all of us can become monsters?
It’s a reality we all must face and guard against, looking instead to God and trying to understand who God has called us to be.
(pause)
The suffering and death of Jesus Christ are meant to affect us deeply.
Jesus’ suffering and death are to be a mirror held up to our souls, a reminder of the jealousy, pettiness, self-centeredness, spiritual blindness, and darkness that lurk in all our souls.
We are meant to read the Gospel accounts of the torture, humiliation, and crucifixion of Christ and say, “Never again!” or “God save us from ourselves. Lord have mercy on us.”
The accounts are meant to move us to repentance.
The brokenness of humankind is not the only thing here, though.
We are also meant to see the love of the One Who suffers for us and His determination to save us from our sin.
Jesus’ suffering and death weren’t accidental.
He chose the path that He knew would end in His crucifixion.
He faced the most humiliating and painful thing possible.
He stood naked as if to say, “Do you see the extent of the Father’s love yet?”
Paul writes in Romans, “God proves his love toward us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us,” and John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
As I said, crucifixion was more than a state-sponsored execution: it was meant to demean and shame the victim.
And it was most likely very embarrassing to the early Christians that their Lord had been crucified.
But, by enduring such a shameful death, Jesus Christ overcomes our shame by letting us experience the boundless love of God.
Jesus takes the ultimate weight of shame to take away our heaviest and most secret burden, the feeling that no one loves us, no one respects us, we are not good enough.
In other words, when we face the so-called foolishness of the gospel of the Crucified Christ, Jesus removes the burden of our shameful feelings about ourselves, enabling us to see the foolishness of our inclinations to shame and compete with others.
But more than anything, it shows us the depth of the love of God!
Who would have ever guessed that a crucified God would be the salvation of the world for all who believe?
“For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”
It is so powerful—the most powerful force in the world.
It’s so powerful that it changes people.
It can soften the hardest of hearts.
It can turn violent people into gentle, beautiful, loving people.
It can motivate people to reach out to others with food, money, clothing—you name it.
It can so change us, that we can move from stepping all over one another in an effort to try and climb to the top, that we instead, humble ourselves and serve the so-called least of these.
It can create new people.
I remember leading a Bible study when I was much younger and when my conversion experience was much closer at hand.
And I was reading out loud from this very passage we are looking at this morning.
And as I read: “Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called.”
I began to tear up…to get choked up…and I was struggling through the words…
“Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth.
But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.
God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.
It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God, that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption.
Therefore, as it is written: ‘Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.’”
I barely finished, tears running down my face, and a Bible study group wondering what in the world was wrong with me.
But it was so real.
I could so relate.
I was so thankful and amazed.
And you know, I still am.
Have you experienced the power of the cross of Jesus Christ?
Has it humbled you?
Has it brought you to repentance?
Has it saved you?
Has it transformed your life forever?
It can.
It will, if you allow it to.
Let us pray:
Almighty God,
We don’t understand it.
It is more than we can fathom.
But we believe it.
You came into this world as one of us, to save sinners, of which we all are.
You died in humiliation in order to take away the humiliation of our sins.
And you live forever more, so that through faith in You, we may be transformed and live into eternal life.
We thank you.
We accept your gift of salvation.
Create us into new creatures in Jesus Christ.
Amen.
