If, as you and I think about this world in which we live, we are looking for a definition of love, then we should look not in a dictionary but at Calvary, at the cross of Jesus Christ. The emblem that Christians chose to be the universal emblem that spoke most comprehensively and most profoundly of him (from amongst many possibilities that spoke of particular aspects of his life and ministry) was the cross. The cross it was where Christians saw that the love and the justice of God, those two essential characteristics of God’s holiness - his perfect integrity, if you like, meet together in one place and demonstrate for us, in a most personal way, the wisdom of God in his dealings with us his creatures.
The repeated promises in the Qur’an of the forgiveness of a compassionate and merciful Allah are all made to the meritorious; that is, to those whose merits have been weighed in Allah’s scales. The ‘gospel’ of Jesus on the other hand is the ‘good news’ of mercy to the undeserving. The symbol of that mercy to the undeserving, the symbol of the religion of Jesus, is not a set of scales but the cross.
So we Christians need to be able to understand and to be able to explain to others the meaning of the cross and the wisdom of God that is demonstrated there. There is of course about the cross much that angers people. Those who do not understand this wisdom of God, can elicit from some people some pretty strong reactions when its meaning and significance, its wisdom, are presented to them. People don’t like it; they don’t like to talk about it; they don’t like to discover what it says about them. They resent, often bitterly, the humiliation of seeing themselves as God sees them and as they really are. And because their pride is so wounded by what they see and learn there, they are then unable to see and to learn of God’s incredible love for them. This is the great sadness of their self-imposed spiritual blindness. They prefer their comfortable illusions about themselves. Some even try to construct a Christianity without the cross, a Christianity that is more palatable, that relies on their own goodness or good works or their religious observance – anything, anything at all that will allow them to retain something of their pride.
But it is only when a person sees and understands that it is their pride that was the cause of the cross, that he or she may begin to understand the wisdom of God and why Jesus had to die on the cross for the sins of the whole world. Also, whenever you or I or anyone turns away from Jesus – through our denial of him, whether publicly or privately – we in effect crucify him all over again. Why? Well, because these are sins – our self-righteousness and our denials. And therefore we have his blood on our hands just as did Pilate and Herod and the Gentiles and the Jews. We have to understand this; that before you and I can see the cross as something done for us (something that ought to lead us to faith and to worship), we have to see it as something done by us (something that ought to lead us to repentance.)
Let’s see what St. Paul has to say about this deep divine wisdom in the cross of Christ, as he contrasts it here in our Epistle reading this morning to the Christians at Corinth, with the wisdom of the world.
Paul begins in V18 by clearly stating that the wisdom and the foolishness of God are seen in ‘the word of the cross’, that is, in the preaching or the proclamation of the cross of Christ. What the cross means is on the one hand God’s ‘wisdom’ but, on the other hand, it is perceived by those who do not want to understand and accept such wisdom, as God’s ‘foolishness’. He then in v 19, quotes from Isaiah’s warning to the Israelites not to put their trust in man-made solutions to their problems but, rather, in God’s solutions. He says how God will show how human wisdom and cleverness in such matters are useless; and indeed God in his wisdom has shown how foolish is the wisdom of the world. And by that of course he means that human wisdom which does not take account of what God has said about how the world is and about how we can solve our deepest problems.
V20 has Paul mocking the local exponents of human wisdom; and in v21 he explains to us that God in his wisdom chose for it not to be possible for human beings to know him through their own efforts but only through his revelation of himself to mankind, and also, in particular, in the way that he, God, had chosen to reconcile a sinful world to himself.
In vs 22 & 23 Paul tells us what the major barriers are for the Jews and the Greeks of his day. The Jews, he says, wanted God to meet all their criteria by providing irrefutable and tangible proof on which they could base their convictions. The problem for them was that a crucified Messiah was a contradiction in terms. ‘This is not what we expected; this is not what we need; this is not what we want.’ / As for the Greeks, well, they preferred to speculate their way towards God through reasoning and argument. Having used their intellect to create a God in their own image, they found it impossible to conceive of a God in personal terms. A God who suffers was therefore for them also a contradiction in terms. But the Jews and the Greeks of Paul’s day were only as guilty as are the people of today who decide for themselves beforehand – that is, before they listen to Jesus and the message of the cross – what kind of a God they want, what kind of a God they prefer, or are comfortable with – intellectually, politically, or, as is so often the case today, emotionally.
So, v23, this ‘Christ crucified’ was a ‘stumbling block’ to the Jews and ‘folly’ to the ‘Greeks’: whereas, says Paul, v24 & 25, for those who are ‘called’, and by that he means ‘those who have seen and responded to God’s wisdom, and seen the place of Jesus and him crucified as that wisdom and very ‘power of God’,’ he is neither a stumbling block nor folly: in fact this apparent ‘foolishness’ on God’s part, they have realised is wiser than anything human wisdom could ever construct. Well of course it is; it the Creator’s wisdom.
And still it is the case today: while people insist on or even allow their preconceptions and prejudices, either about themselves or about God and about the way he acts, to constrain how they conceive him, they will end up disappointed. /The place to unload our pride and prejudices and preconceptions is at the foot of the cross, the place at which you and I can begin to discover both the truth about ourselves and the truth about God’s wonderful love for us as shown in his graciousness, in his giving of himself, to take away the sins that separate us from him. Those sins he takes away by laying them upon Jesus, who willingly accepts them out of love for us, knowing that God’s justice will therefore be perfectly satisfied. The crucified God hangs on the cross for you and for me. The question for you and for me is how will we respond to such love? God has made himself unknown to and unknowable by human wisdom but he has made himself known in this crucified Messiah. It is up to each one of us to choose. As St. John puts it in his gospel, we choose him by opening the door of our lives to him and asking him in. Or, to put the response in the picture language of Jesus’ story of the ‘Lost Sheep’, repentance starts the moment we allow the Good Shepherd to find us. While we are still hiding from him or running away, it is difficult to be found! It is our pride that keeps us hidden and our sins that make us flee.
I just want to say a few words about verses 26 – 31 because they tell us very clearly why God in his wisdom chose to solve our fundamental problem – our alienation from God - in the way he did. We’ve already noted that God himself provides everything from start to finish for what is needed for our reconciliation with him; we can offer nothing except our acceptance of his love. And I trust too that you realise that Jesus’ sacrifice was necessary because sin and selfishness can have no place in the kingdom of a holy, that is a just and perfect, God. They must be dealt with and that he did, the only one who could.
But do you see here in these next few verses just how much Paul makes of the problem, the obstacle, of human pride and power? God, says St. Paul – and he is simply echoing and fleshing out the teaching of Jesus – had to do something that could break, not by force but by love, the consuming power of human pride. And that is why God chose v 26, 27, 28 the very opposite - in order to shame the pride of the self-styled wise and the rich and the powerful. How? Well, by working powerfully in and through the lives of the humble and the poor and the weak. It is indeed in such as those – the humble, the poor, and the weak who love God - that the realities of the Kingdom of God are most evident. There is only one person in whom we should boast, and that is Jesus, who is any wisdom, righteousness, sanctification (Jesus-likeness) and redemption worth having.
Anything else we have without him is just, well, ‘folly’. Indeed that verse 30 may also be translated ‘wisdom equals righteousness, sanctification, and redemption.’ And those things can only be found in Jesus.
God is so intent upon breaking down all human pride that he deliberately acts in such a way as to reveal its emptiness. Christianity spread most rapidly amongst the lower classes: in class-conscious Greek and Roman society this was also partly the cause of its being so offensive. The lower classes weren’t as sophisticated and concerned about keeping up worldly standards and appearances. They had so much less to lose, so few props to their pride, that the message of the cross was ‘good news’ indeed. That last verse 31 is actually a quotation from the prophet Jeremiah(9: 23-24) Let me conclude by reading it to you.
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