Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.
Paradoxical Proclamation
Scriptures: 1 Corinthians 1:18-25
Despite the fact that the Apostle Paul lived 2000 years ago, his world should look pretty familiar once we get past the unfamiliar language.
Paul was a Jew who lived in a thoroughly Greek culture and so his observations are made as someone who was at the same time an insider and an outsider to both cultures, something that any immigrant family to Canada could understand after a couple of decades.
Paul said that the Jews asked for signs, which is something we see in the gospels when people demanded miracles from Jesus, especially healings. We should recognize a modern equivalent: a demand for evidence like the inhabitants of Missouri – the “show me” state and home of Mark Twain. People there pride themselves on being hard to bamboozle. “Show me” is supposed to demonstrate that they are open to change if you can prove what you are saying.
Paul said that the Greeks desired wisdom and we should recognize this in our society’s quest for academic rigour and logical consistency: Does what you are saying make sense? Does your theology hang together well? Are you contradicting yourself?
What Paul says in our lesson today challenges both approaches and this has become a point of contention within the Christian church because some branches of the church use this passage to insist that in order to have faith we must defy both evidence and logic to believe in a seven-day creation, in specific prophesies of the end of the world and the miraculous ability to move mountains,
Paul is not calling for us to be gullible. He is not demanding that we believe six impossible things before breakfast like the White Queen in Alice through the Looking Glass. Paul is actually being quite sophisticated. Instead of creating a conflict between faith and reason, he is inviting us to embrace a paradox: to accept that in the crucifixion and resurrection there is something going on that doesn’t fit our usual ways of understanding. God’s foolishness is greater than our wisdom. God’s weakness is greater than our strength.
This fits with Paul’s own experience: he is clear that he met the risen Jesus in a vision on the road to Damascus; Paul understood all of this in spiritual terms. An empty tomb isn’t evidence and he couldn’t bring Jesus out to his listeners to demonstrate the nail holes in his hands like Doubting Thomas demanded.
And the wisdom, the logic of the day, with the might of Rome at the core of the world simply laughed at the thought of an utterly vulnerable man with no weapons, no soldiers, naked, dying on the cross being able to overcome the power of an empire through weakness. That was unthinkable for most people and certainly for powerful people.
We still have trouble with it: Jesus’ teachings keep pointing to that same vision of God and the Beatitudes are a wonderful summary of that central paradox of our faith; but we have a hard time believing that this approach of love and vulnerability will work because hostility seems to win so often, especially in ways that grab the headlines.
Paul’s words here are intended to be reassuring. I’m sure he was aware of the push-back his friends were getting: Christians had not yet been expelled from Synagogues, so the traditional Jewish scholars would have argued with these upstart followers of Jesus. The Greek philosophers in Corinth who loved public debates in the marketplace and who were trained debaters were likely making the Christians feel very foolish, maybe even humiliated before their neighbours
So Paul is calling his friends to consider that they are being informed by a higher standard: that if this business about Jesus was foolish and weak, then we should remember that it’s God’s foolishness and God’s weakness; that God sets a higher, better standard than these “experts” have grasped.
Paul isn’t calling for some kind of blind faith that questions nothing. He is calling for something sophisticated and actually rather difficult: the acceptance of principles that will not make obvious sense and that will require us to seek a deep truth; a truth that demands that we look past the obvious, to see what happens under the surface.
Some of this we actually know. Do you win people over by invading their land, sending drones and bombs and tanks to demolish their buildings and destroy their morale? Of course not; but that’s how empires and tyrants think. The most they can achieve is stolen land, dead civilians and generations of hatred as people call either for justice or vengeance.
What Jesus achieved by dying on the cross was to demonstrate how weakness and love can overcome even powerful empires, outlasting them by centuries.
Jesus talked about the last being first, about the visibility of one tiny light in the darkness, about loving others, even enemies. Jesus talked about the meek inheriting the earth and the subtle ways that God’s kingdom infiltrates people’s lives.
He talked about all of this and then he went on to prove it by dying on the cross.
If you take the evidence at face value, he was a victim of the greatest power on earth but in reality he was fully committed to demonstrating the truth of his teachings, even at the cost of a painful and humiliating death.
He gave us another paradox: living out faith by dying. Paul isn’t calling for us to die for our faith; early Christians made that foolish assumption and we were mass-producing martyrs for years.
No, we should be taking what Paul says and using this paradox of faith to examine how we approach the challenges of life.
Do we go for the obvious answers? Do we go for quick fixes or easy solutions? Do we demand signs or traditional wisdom?
Or do we dig deep and let the paradoxical teachings of Jesus guide us and shape our priorities?
I hope we can manage to follow Jesus’ teachings however paradoxical they may be. We are called to go forward in weakness, not afraid to be vulnerable or to look foolish. It’s the example Jesus set for us.
Amen.
Knox United Church Nepean 