“The Foolishness of the Cross”
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
There is a story about a wealthy early colonial settler 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 even thought this is an extremely unchristian way to be.
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, popularity 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.
We often make crosses look pretty, we have gold ones and stained glass ones.
But REAL CROSSES are grotesque.
They are ugly.
They are disgusting.
A Cross was the most shame-filled thing the Romans could come up with.
And towns were littered with them.
Criminals, flies buzzing and birds pecking were left on crosses as deterrents to commit crimes or step out of line.
Think of what Jesus Christ did for you and me.
Let’s try to take it in.
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 we must 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 the Roman soldiers.
This can help remind us that human beings have been capable of terrible inhumanity toward one another throughout history.
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 to back this up.
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?
Some of us might be getting a taste of how this works first hand as we watch—in dismay some of the unprecedented things that are being done in our country right now.
Illegal immigrants are being demonized and used as scapegoats.
People who identify as transgender…only about 1% of our population…are being accused of sexual assaults in women’s restrooms—without any evidence of this really happening.
DEI Programs are being shut down as well as former President Johnson’s executive order which required the government to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color or national origin.”
White Christian Nationalism is running rampant and currently the United States is on genocide watch.
A red flag alert was sent out by the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention after Elon Musk gave two Nazi salutes following his speech at Trump’s inauguration.
These are things we all must guard against and speak out against as we look instead to God and try to understand who God has called us to be…
…peacemakers…
…welcoming to strangers and immigrants…
…lovers of God and ALL People.
(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 of us.
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 demonstrates God’s own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us,” and John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world that God gave God’s 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 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 on Himself to take away our heaviest and most secret burden, the shame of our sin.
This shows us the depth of the love of God for all of humankind—you and me and our brothers and sisters from all other countries and nationalities.
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, to humbling ourselves and serving the so-called least of these.
It can make us new people.
Have you experienced the power of the cross of Jesus Christ?
Has it humbled you?
Has it helped you see how much God loves you?
Has it brought you to repentance?
Has it changed you?
Has it transformed your life forever?
It can.
It will, if you allow it to.
Will you pray with me?
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 for how much You love us.
We accept Your love and Your gift of salvation.
Create us into new creatures in Jesus Christ.
Amen.
