Out of the Ditch!

It had been a lovely evening, officiating at a wedding. The beautiful venue was out in the country, far south of Houston—a large house on several acres of land. The parking was a large field of grass. We were parked on a well-groomed pasture. I had to be fresh for the next day at church, so I left the reception early. The homemade signs were in place to guide me down the center lane, not the lanes to the right or left because the turf was soft from the rains. I read the sign only after I was stuck in the mud to the left. I tried this and that—in my suit and shined shoes now caked with mud, but to no avail. In the end, it was the nice venue operator’s spouse, with a tractor and long-chain, that pulled me free to head home. I was a little later than usual polishing up my sermon notes. I had to clean and re-polish my shoes first.

It was too bad I did not steer that middle course, but I didn’t. The course St. Paul steered with his message of the cross was very carefully followed. He was trying to spread the word about God’s saving love in a world that has a complicated mix of religious and philosophical elements. The Roman empire had become vast, with roads putting together people with diverse backgrounds. The mystery cults and devotion to the traditional Greco-Roman pantheon was a crazy quilt of a backdrop. In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian believers, he shows his very careful steering between the esoteric, Greek philosophical tradition and his Jewish tradition with its rigidity concerning the law of Moses and the image of Messiah as insuperable warrior/savior.

The wisdom tradition of the Greeks was one in which the transcendence of the divine would never stoop to actually mix with and essentially join the mortal realm. In doing so, a god would cease to be divine. The dualism of most Greek philosophical structures would hold that gods of pure spirit cannot be material, they cannot join humanity. If they were to interface at all with the human round as one finds in mythology they would only be appearing in human form, not becoming human. Most important of all. A god would never suffer at the hands of men. They are beyond feeling; suffering cannot touch them.

Hebrew thought evolved to develop an expectation of the one anointed of God, who would appear in power. This anointed figure, both royal and priestly, called “Messiah” in Hebrew and “Christ” in Greek would come on the scene to vanquish the enemies of Israel, and usher in a realm of peace.

Paul was not preaching dualism: teaching anything of a god keeping himself transcendently protected from the material order. He was not preaching of a god who wired around suffering at the hands of Romans. Neither was Paul preaching that righteousness comes only from perfect adherence to the law, nor that the messiah would be untouchable to human authority structures. He stayed off those roads in his proclamation because he was preaching of a paradoxical mystery: that the power of God to save would make its way into the world through the enigmatic rabbi, the Son of God who would sacrifice his own life—going to the cross out of love. Paul claimed this very act itself saves us; sacrifice for love of us heals us all.

To the Greeks, such a story, of a crucified Divine Savior. was scandalous, but to Paul, sublime. So it was that Paul preached a paradox, this special episode of weakness, contained the greatest power conceivable. He knew the Greeks thought it ludicrous foolishness, and the Jews, an unthinkable barrier to the true way. Look at our Sunday Epistle lesson:

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. For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”...? 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. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. — 1 Corinthians 1:18-25

Paul does not get stuck in the mud of Greek categories of thought, nor the mud of his traditions, methods for righteousness, and messianic expectation. He travels on the solid, high road with the signpost, “Jesus is Lord.”Paul did not know how it is the cross is the saving power of God, but he knew that it is. He had been ushered into transforming life in Christ, and all his trust was there. You and I will not ever comprehend how the helplessness of Jesus on the cross brings about our healing. We will never be able to explain it. That does not stop its saving effect for us. Let’s move ahead: we are out the ditch, and on our way.