Day 17, Fri., Mar. 2: 1 Corinthians 1.18-25

In my first placement as a minister in Glen Innes, northern New South Wales, I made friends with my Anglican colleague, an ex-policeman named Grant. Grant and I were both competitive, left-handed sports lovers, with a shared a love for the Gospel. So it’s perhaps not surprising that two of my favourite memories from those days 30 years ago have to do with a game of cricket in which little Cameron Memorial Uniting defeated Holy Trinity Anglican, and a devotional which Grant presented at one ministers’ association meeting, and at which he spoke on this passage from the beginning of Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth.

Perhaps it’s because we stand at the end of a 2,000 year old tradition that has accepted the Jesus story as “gospel”, but very rarely in any church of any tradition I’ve been in have I got any sense of how ludicrous, offensive, scandalous - pick your choice of words used by new atheists about the Christian faith in general - the Gospel is. Both to the surrounding pagan society, and to the “second temple” Judaism from which it sprang. The closest we get these days, perhaps, is at Good Friday services, but we pass quickly on to the celebrations and the chocolate of Easter Sunday.

In this passage, however, Paul leaves us in no doubt as to that score. In describing this brilliant piece of writing commentator Tom Wright first points to how a similar rhetorical tactic is used to great effect in another great piece of literature, Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar. Caesar has just been assassinated by a group of plotters, who therefore have the upper hand in the game of power they are engaged in. Marcus Brutus, the leading conspirator, explains to the anxious crowd why it was necessary, for the good of the state, that Caesar should die. He speaks well enough, in simple, straightforward prose. But his sentences plod, without life, energy or passion. Then Marcus Antony, Caesar’s friend, steps forward. In danger himself now, Antony claims, famously, to have come to bury Caesar, not to praise him, and to do the decent thing by his friend, not to argue against Brutus and his  colleagues. But, says Wright, Antony’s speech has already begun to move, to cast a spell on his listeners. Well aware of the effect he is having upon the crowd Shakespeare’s Antony claimed, in wonderful iambic pentameter, “I am no orator, as Brutus is.” But, in a turning point in Rome’s history, he wins over the crowd.

Paul writes rather than orates, but he employs the same brilliant inverted rhetoric twice in his letters to those oh so sophisticated Corinthians. One is in 2 Corinthians, where he constructs an upside-down list of his achievements which mentions only his failures. In a culture which elevated success perhaps as much as the American one does in our time this device would have been a devastating, or perhaps just a puzzling critique, for as the Corinthian Christians would have known, Paul suffered enormously for the sake of the Gospel!

The other similar passage is this one, from the beginning of first Corinthians. Paul’s basic claim is that the message about the Messiah and his cross carries a power and a wisdom quite different from the human rhetoric the Corinthians placed so much store in.

“But”, Wright continues, “in making this point [Paul] writes a paragraph of such wonderfully flowing and balanced rhetoric that one can only assume he was deliberately teasing them, perhaps hoping to make, by humour and irony, the deadly point underneath. I cannot do better than to invite you to read this passage through for yourself, slowly and a number of times:

“18 For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written,

‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,

    and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’

20 Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. 22 For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, 23 but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”

Ironically, Paul has used a piece of brilliant writing to stake the claim that ultimately brilliant writing is helpless either to promote or to destroy the Gospel. This was and is the craziest message anybody could imagine, given to some of the most sophisticated, worldly wise people then on the planet. As Wright writes:

“This wasn’t a smart new philosophy; it was madness. It wasn’t an appeal to high culture. It was news of an executed criminal from a despised race.” 

And for that race, the Jews, the gospel was a scandal. The Messiah was meant to be a winner who drove off the hated Romans, not a loser who died in agony, crucified by them.

Sometimes I think that Glen Innes’ little Uniting Church did our Anglican brethren a service by beating them at cricket on that day long ago. Being big and powerful brings with it its own trials and temptations. Then I think, “That probably shows that God still has some calibrating to do on you, David.” It’s not about human power or wisdom. It’s not about winners or losers. It’s all about Jesus and the Gospel!