O Foolish Cross

1 Corinthians 1:18-25; Exodus 20:1-17; John 2:13-22

Dictionary.com provides the following definition for the world “foolish”:
Adjective:
1. resulting from or showing a lack of sense; ill-considered; unwise: a foolish action, a foolish speech.
2. lacking forethought or caution.
3. trifling, insignificant, or paltry.
Our British friends would add several additional definitions: “silly; resulting from folly or stupidity; ridiculous or absurd; not worthy of consideration; weak-minded; simple.”

Was Paul foolish to use the word “foolish” in the same sentence as the word “cross”? Not in the least. It was no slip of the tongue. He used it five times:

• “Foolishness to those who are being destroyed,”
• “God made the wisdom of the world foolish,” 
• “the foolishness of preaching,”
• “foolishness to Gentiles”, and 
• “the foolishness of God.”

There can be no doubt whatsoever that Paul used the word on purpose. If we run those back through with the various words used in the definition of “foolish,” that is quite a litany.

The church in Corinth was divided by factions and partisanship. In addition to this, the city of Corinth was a sophisticated, cosmopolitan city of its day. These factors worked together to make ministry in the Corinthian church quite challenging.

Even though the scene is different, the diversity of today’s community population makes for a very similar kind of challenge. Those of you born in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940's grew up with an understanding of the world that is very different from those of us born in the 1950s and 1960s, the so-called Baby Boomers. And if those two sets of views are divergent, the views of the next generation, the “Gen-Xers,” born in the 1970s and 1980s, differ even more sharply. Curiously enough, as the years wind on, the thoughts of the “Millennials,” born in the 1990s and 2000s, while based a still different view of the world, may not be so different from the folk sixty or more years their elders. Because there are now five different generations involved in today’s civic community as well as the church, ministry is truly challenging.

Paul realized that the major truth of the gospel, the major theme of the redemptive story, must not get lost in all the social and cultural clutter of Corinth. So he determined to preach Christ and to preach Christ crucified. This was a message that scandalized the Jews and seemed improbable to the Greeks; but it was in fact the Christian message, and Paul would not water it down, avoid it, or depart from it.

Many people today want to find a way to eliminate the need for a “crucified Christ.” Yet, if we face reality, we must understand that we will never fully appreciate the truth of the gospel until we appreciate the reality of sin. That’s why this passage is so appropriate during Lent. We need a long view of what the Christ event is all about. Too often we slice and dice the Gospel into manageable and innocuous segments and form them to fit our own biases about God. It is important for us to step back and take in the whole breadth of the passion narratives on Palm/Passion Sunday and Good Friday.

But even the complete passion story may not be enough. How often we are consumed by the details of the state-sanctioned execution or by the inevitable question of why jubilant “Hosannas” of Sunday turn into jeering judgment on Friday. There wasn’t a sudden turn around in the space of five days. The “foolishness of the cross” didn’t happen overnight. It at least started when Jesus rose out of the water of John’s baptism, and if truth be told, it probably started long before the holy messenger Gabriel showed up in Mary’s garden.

In the gospel reading, John 2:13-22, we are confronted with the anger of Jesus. Again, the picture of Jesus doing something other than being nice and placid ruins the image of Jesus we have worked so hard to cultivate in our thinking and in the thinking of the church. We don’t get angry, we turn the other cheek, we roll up into balls and play dead like opossums. What angered Jesus was that the Pharisees he encountered thought they could turn God's anger aside simply by adhering to their rituals and paying their sacrifices.

When the temple cleansing is paired with the Exodus passage citing the Ten Commandments, we can’t help but note the way in which those ten almighty, all-worshiped statements have been developed into a complex set of rules by which one might win salvation, whereas Jesus simplified them into the law of love: “Love God – love neighbor.”

John is perhaps very prescient in placing the temple cleansing at the beginning of the accounts of Jesus’ ministry, for it was not the last straw that caused Jesus’ execution, but the first. His whole ministry was repugnant to those who clung to power within the religious and cultural system. And to anyone with the slightest sense larger socio-political trends, what Jesus was about was silly, foolish, nonsensical, ridiculous, weak-minded, absurd, simple, not worthy of consideration. Sure he touched the lives of a number of people in very precious ways – returning life, healing long-term physical maladies, restoring psychological and spiritual wholeness. But for the average person, Jesus was a spectacle, a ludicrous mockery of the status quo, a nut-case just waiting to be cracked.

Human beings get so wrapped up in the ideas they take as their own, that they somehow get inoculated against anything outside of themselves. We are quick to label as fools anyone who thinks differently from us and to label as foolish any ideas that don’t agree with our own ideas. We can get all haughty and say that we would never have called for Jesus’ crucifixion. And maybe we wouldn’t have. But then again, we might have just kept our mouths closed and not said anything against those who were bound and determined to do away with Jesus.

Perhaps we don’t know what to think. Perhaps we can’t believe that an actual crucifixion was necessary to pay the price for our sin. We say, “After all, I’m not that bad. Sure, I make a few mistakes, but nothing calling for a death sentence, for me or for Jesus. There are those who I have my suspicions, I bet they are guilty.”

That’s like trying to be our own spiritual optometrist. We can’t see our way out of a fully glassed-in room. The gospel, that foolish preaching, tells us that we need to come to the point where we view our sin in the same way that the Holy God views it. We are powerless to do the right thing; but God intervened and sent his Son into the world to be crucified and on our account to suffer the pain of separation from God for a time. This is the message of the cross. It may not make any sense to us. It is the foolishness of God; but truly, it is the only thing that does make any sense.

The Good News of Jesus Christ still sounds foolish to many and offensive to others. It is foolishness to any who have chosen another way to face their unavoidable appointment with death and what comes after. It is offensive to those who attempt to maintain a facade of self-righteousness or self-confidence in the face of life’s persistent questions. Those who cannot consider their own sinfulness will find that the gospel offers a solution they insist they do not need.

Our society worships power, influence, and wealth. Jesus came as a humble, poor servant, and he offers his kingdom to those who have faith, not to those who work hard or improve themselves. This may look ridiculous to the world, but Christ is our power, the only way we can be saved. When we know Christ personally, then we’ll have the greatest wisdom anyone could desire.

God does not seek out the people whom the world admires; instead, God reveals the divine to humble and searching hearts, regardless of their worldly position. God can use us no matter what our position or status. To the worldly wise, it would have made more sense for God to call the leaders and the influencers. But God does what seems foolish to the world—God calls those who do not have those characteristics and achievements. The 19th century English preacher Charles H. Spurgeon famously wrote, “I expect to be amazed by three things when I first arrive in heaven. I will be delighted by those I find are actually there. I will be shocked to note who isn’t there whom I assumed I would see. And then I will be speechless with wonder as I realize that by God’s grace I am there!”

O foolish cross! Thanks be to God for it.

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com. 
Copyright 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.

Blinded by Preconceptions

Mark 8:31-38

John Newton, once a captain of a British slave ship, after his conversion went on to become an evangelical Anglican clergyman. He wrote several hymns, the best known of which begins:

“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,
that saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
was blind, but now I see.”

When a sinner is convicted by the Holy Spirit, the eyes of that person’s spirit are opened. It is as if flakes fall away from his eyes, as when Ananias prayed over the blinded Saul following his Christ-vision on the Damascus road (Acts 9:18). The man born blind, whom Jesus healed with mud and sent to wash in the Pool of Siloam, told the religious authorities, “I don’t know whether he’s a sinner. Here’s what I do know: I was blind and now I see” (John 9:25).

Physical blindness may be a detached retina, macular degeneration, severe cataracts, or some other disease of the eye. Spiritual blindness may not limit physical eyesight, but it can be an even worse malady. Spiritual blindness is often entwined with a severe case of preconceived notions. These preconceptions make it very difficult to experience the life-changing power of the grace of Christ. In Jesus’ day all the religious authorities had preconceptions about God, about religious reality, about life and death, about the messiah, and they could not see beyond those preconceptions to the truth embodied in Jesus. Even the friendly Pharisee Nicodemus was locked into a set of preconceived ideas and had trouble grasping the import of the “born anew” imagery which Jesus used in trying to explain eternal life to him.

The disciples also were prisoners of the preconceptions of their culture about the Messiah. Jesus explained the program to the disciples, “The Human One must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and the legal experts, and be killed, and then, after three days, rise from the dead.” Mark adds, “He said this plainly.” Peter grabbed Jesus by the shoulders and shook him strongly. “No!” he shouted as he set about to correct Jesus. Preconceived ideas have that strong a hold on people. Just moments before Peter had proclaimed with astounding insight that Jesus was “the Christ.” How quickly he lapsed into his old thinking: the Messiah doesn’t die.

Even Jesus had to deal with preconceptions. Frederick Buechner suggests that after his baptism, Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness asking himself the question of what it meant to be Jesus. In the season of Lent, we who call ourselves followers of Christ, are invited, even compelled to ask, “What does it mean to be a faithful follower of Christ? What does it mean to be a Christian?”(1) We are called annually to examine ourselves to the very core of our faith and root out the preconceptions which will invoke Jesus’ stern correction, “Get behind me, Satan. You are not thinking God’s thoughts but human thoughts.”

We all have preconceptions. Certain things are supposed to be a certain way and don’t anyone try to change our minds. Not even Christ. Except changing our minds about life in general and especially life as a creation of God in relation to other creatures of God is what Jesus is about.

We all have preconceptions about Jesus. Even most of us who have had it taught to us from when we were very small, have trouble with the idea of a Messiah who dies. Untimely, unnecessary death is such a waste. To die is to lose. We use that imagery for teams when are doing well and then all of a sudden fade away into a loss, either in a single game or through the last month of the season. Or we use that imagery in individual competition on the tennis court, the golf course, the ski slope, the gymnastics venue. To die is to lose. To lose is to have no value.

Everything in life is competition. Even retirement. We compete to have the best possible retirement and then we compete to do everything we can possibly do during whatever time is allotted to us. People even compete to lose. A popular television program has been “The Biggest Loser.” Yesterday’s paper had a report about two high school coaches who were suspended because they were competing to lose a game in order to get a better seeding in the tournament.

We have a preconception that with Christ everything is going to be all right, that nothing will go against us. We forget about all the psalms in which the psalmist prays to God about the lousy rotten deal he is getting either at no fault of his own or because he clings faithfully to his belief in God.

Believing in Christ is not a talisman to ward off the evil of the world. Too many times in the two millennia since Christ, belief in our Lord has actually been a lightning rod for drawing persecution and evil towards us rather than deflecting it.

Peter was blinded by his own preconceptions. His cherished convictions about what the Messiah’s agenda should be would not allow him to see what the Messiah’s agenda must be. How often are we guilty of this very same malady? We arrogantly assume that we know what must be done, so much so that a word from Jesus himself would not dissuade us.

Of course, we are better than Peter. We would never rebuke Jesus. Our rebuking would be kinder, gentler. We would respond with benign neglect and insipid indifference. We will never touch a hair of his. We will merely let him die. George Studdert Kennedy was an Anglican priest who served with distinction as a military chaplain in World War I. He wrote the following lines about indifference:

When Jesus came to Golgotha they hanged Him on a tree,
They drave great nails through hands and feet, and made a Calvary;
They crowned Him with a crown of thorns, red were His wounds and deep,
For those were crude and cruel days, and human flesh was cheap.
When Jesus came to Birmingham they simply passed Him by,
They never hurt a hair of Him, they only let Him die;
For men had grown more tender, and they would not give Him pain,
They only just passed down the street, and left Him in the rain.
Still Jesus cried, "Forgive them, for they know not what they do,"
And still it rained the wintry rain that drenched Him through and through;
The crowds went home and left the streets without a soul to see,
And Jesus crouched against a wall and cried for Calvary.(2)

Do our preconceptions prevent us from hearing Jesus’ words to us today? Do our misconceptions about Christ lead us to neglectful and indifferent behaviors when it comes to following our Lord?

We live in a violent world. Violence isn’t just military. It comes in all kinds of guises: physical, mental, psychological, economic, educational, oratorical, discriminatory, and in indifferent, neglectful, and well-meaning dependence-creating relationships.

Peter’s rebuke of Jesus reflects the way we humans think. That’s what Jesus says. The world says the way to victory is the way of power an might. The world says that violence is to be met by greater violence, in a never-ending escalation of force and strategy. If that is allowed to continue unabated, everything will be destroyed and everyone put to death.

Jesus offers another way. Jesus breaks down the preconceptions. He allows violence to have its way. But he responds with life, not death. He responds with resurrection, not oblivion. He responds with heaven, not hell.

As long as our selves reign in our lives, we will be forever seeking shortcuts to the kingdom, we will try to substitute some easier way for the way of the cross. As we look to the remainder of Lent, as we look to our collective ministry as a portion of the body of Christ in Waverly, as we wrestle with our preconceived ideas of believer, of disciple, of church, of Christ, may the blindness of our preconceptions be healed and may we help Jesus to carry the cross of life into the world we inhabit, laying down our lives, probably not literally but certainly figuratively, for the people we encounter.

May it be so. Amen.

(1) Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark: An ABC Theologized (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988), 74
(2) Geoffrey A. Studdert Kennedy. Online text copyright © 2003, Ian Lancashire for the Department of English, University of Toronto.

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com. 
Copyright 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.