THE SCANDAL OF THE CROSS
March 11, 2012
I Corinthians 1:18-25
Michael L. Lindvall, The Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York
Theme: The cross, sign of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, is a way to
know God deeper than even human reason or outward proof.
Almighty God, by the hammer of your word to us in Scripture break open our stony
hearts. By your great love, warm our souls when they’ve grown cold. By your
extravagant grace, teach our tight-pursed lips to sing, even in the face of the cross.
And now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be
acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Amen.
When we restored the sanctuary of Brick Church eight years ago, there was only
one piece of it that needed no repainting, no fresh gilt, nary a coat of varnish. Most
every square inch was painstakingly repainted; the pews were stripped and
refinished, and a limping old organ was replaced with the mighty Cassavant. But
the restorers told us that the panel high above the communion table at the front of
the sanctuary didn’t need a thing. That panel centers on the cross, of course. It’s a
gorgeous piece of work – lovely, delicate, beautiful. Lovely, delicate, beautiful –
exactly the things that the original cross, barbaric Roman implement of
excruciating torture and slow death, was not.
If you could time-travel an actual Roman from the days before Christianity to now
and tour him around our world, a lot of things would surely astound him, but
nothing more than the buildings you might show him called “churches,” buildings
decorated with various versions of what he would call “the crux,” the Roman cross.
Our putative Roman would be flabbergasted to see people wearing crosses around
their necks. It would be rather like you or me time-traveling two thousand years
into the future to see people wearing little electric chairs around their necks. My
point is that our Christian eyes have grown so accustomed to the cross that we are
inured to the stark and jolting reality it represents. Lovely churches like ours have
lovely crosses, and lovely people wear crosses around their lovely necks.
-1* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
When Paul wrote the words we just heard sometime in the middle of First Century,
the cross was still in use as a means of execution. Crosses were not yet decorating
churches and necks. The cross still struck horror into hearts. It struck horror into
every heart except Christian hearts. For Christians, the cross had come to mean
something new – something that was, ironically, “lovely, delicate, and beautiful.”
In the passage Charlie just read, Paul recognizes this oddity. He says that for those
who are not Christians (he calls them “those who are perishing”), the cross was
“foolishness,” whereas for those who believe, “it is the power of God.” Paul sees
the irony in this, the irony that an implement of imperial Roman power and
shameful death would become a sign of life, a symbol of the love and power of
God.
It’s important to understand that for Paul the cross did not simply stand for Jesus’
death. And Jesus’ death is not all that it means for us today. The cross also stands
for the whole way Christ lived. It stands for the way he lives again in Easter. The
cross in front of you or the one around your neck stands not so much for a death as
it signifies the whole Christian way of being. The cross is the radically abbreviated
symbol of Jesus Christ’s way: his teaching, the way he related to others, his
compassion, his love, and – yes – his self-giving death, and – most emphatically –
the cross also stands for his triumph over death. The cross is the sign for the whole
story of Jesus Christ.
This, incidentally, is why most Protestants prefer an empty cross – one without a
body – to the crucifix that some other Christian traditions prefer. A crucifix with a
body is obviously mostly about the death of Jesus, important of course, but not the
whole story. An empty cross is about the whole sweep of Jesus’ story.
An empty cross is about Jesus’ self-giving way of life.
An empty cross is about his self-giving death,
And the empty cross is finally and most importantly about Jesus’ victory
over death.
-2* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
So when you see or wear an empty cross, think not only on his death for your sake,
but think on the compassion, the love, and the truth that flowed from his earthly
life, and think also about his victory over death at Easter.
Paul freely admits that a lot of people just don’t get this cross business. A lot of
people didn’t get it back then; a lot of people don’t get it now. Paul offers two
examples. First, he says the cross is a “stumbling block to Jews”, who, quote,
“demand signs.” That is to say, some people want outward miracles to prove God.
Remember that Paul is himself a Jew, so he should know what he’s talking about.
Woody Allen once said much the same thing when he quipped that he would
believe if only God would offer him a sign, like making a large deposit in his name
in a Swiss bank account.
It seems God does not want to impose faith on us by dramatic outward signs. If
God did that, our faith, instead of being an intimate condition of trust and
dependence upon God, instead of being an internal and personal relationship with
God, would become an intellectual position you were coerced into holding. God
would fall into the same category as gravity and a round earth. God would be
pulled into our temporal system of things: a demonstrable, tamed, necessary, and
impersonal fact.
In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel-within-a-novel called “The Grand Inquisitor,”
Christ has returned to earth in the midst of the Spanish Inquisition. Christ himself
is actually arrested by the Grand Inquisitor. The Grand Inquisitor knows who he is
and wants to be rid of him. In one telling passage, the Grand Inquisitor accuses
Christ of not giving people the kind of outward proof they want. He shouts at
Christ: “You did not come down from the cross when they shouted to you, mocking
and reviling you, ‘Come down and we will believe...’ You did not come down,
because again you would not enslave man by a miracle, you craved faith given
freely, not based on miracle.” Like Dostoyevsky, the Apostle Paul is also saying
that faith in God based on outward signs would not really be faith at all.
After observing that some of his fellow Jews seem to want signs in order to
believe, Paul then notes that Greeks want to find God with what he calls
“wisdom.” By “wisdom,” Paul does not mean “good” wisdom. He means the
-3* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
endless armchair philosophical speculation that was part of the current intellectual
scene. And by “Greeks,” he doesn’t mean just ethnic Greeks; he means the whole
pagan Greco-Roman world of which Corinth was a major capital.
William Barclay, the great Scottish Bible commentator, describes the GrecoRoman intellectual scene that prevailed in Corinth, the scene Paul is critiquing, like
this: “You might hear… sophists, shouting and abusing each other…, and many
writers of books reading their stupid compositions, and many poets singing their
poems, and many jugglers exhibiting their marvels, and many soothsayers giving
the meaning of prodigies, and 10,000 rhetoricians twisting lawsuits. The Greeks
were intoxicated with words.”
Our intellectual world may not be quite the sideshow that was ancient Corinth. In
fact today, the opposite seems to be true. Our modern academic and intellectual
worlds have often simply ruled discussion of God out of bounds. This reality was
explored in a best-selling collection of essays published a few years ago entitled
Finding God at Harvard. Each of the contributors was either a Harvard alum or
faculty member. The universal theme of the essays was that at Harvard – like any
modern secular university – questions about God were not on the list of questions
that were appropriate to ask. God is just not in the curriculum.
One of the essay writers, a Ph.D. student named Rebecca Baer Porteous, put it
eloquently: “What does it really mean to be a human being? This question had
been excluded (from the university) a priori, dismissed as non-empirical and
relative, unworthy of academic consideration because the answers were ultimately
seen to be purely subjective and emotive.” She goes on to say, “It was enough to
describe the world empirically, suggest how it works and what tinkering with it . . .
might do, but it was wrong to ask what made a truly good life . . . ” She concludes,
“Over time I became deeply disturbed by many of my classes.” Porteous described
“A mental world… no longer is open enough to ask whether or not there is a God.
A few years after graduating,” she finally says, “I returned to Harvard as a
summer school proctor and was struck by the spiritual confusion and hunger I
encountered among students.”
-4* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
So… if God is not going to pressure us to belief with whiz-bang wonders, and if
God cannot be found by the cleverness of Corinth, and if Harvard’s not even
looking, how then can we know God?
Paul’s answer is that we know God by actually living the way of Christ, in his
shorthand, by living the way of the cross. He writes, “We proclaim Christ
crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles, but to
those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the
wisdom of God.”
The point is that believing in God is another kind of knowing. It’s a way of
knowing that honors the mind. It’s reasonable, yet this way of knowing goes
deeper than an outward proof or merest empiricism. In this way of knowing, we
actually live into faith. We take on the risk of believing even when everything may
be far from clear. We make the leap of faith. Then, in living out the faith (even if
we have our doubts), we come to see in an interior and personal way that my life is
profoundly illumined by the faith we have risked. In the living of it, we find that
life is given meaning, defined, shaped and strengthened by the faith we have dared
to try on.
I like to call “the logic of congruence.” In living the cross-shaped faith you
discover this congruence between life and faith. It all fits together. The story of a
God whose love was so deep as to create and save this strange world, the words
Christ spoke, this story of his cross and resurrection, it fills the empty place in me
as though it were custom-created to fit that empty place. Faith makes sense of life.
Faith empowers life. Faith fills life with meaning. It is congruent. But… you
come to know this only when you take the risk of trying the cross-shaped faith on
for yourself.
I have to quote the great Albert Schweitzer on this yet again. His words fit so well:
Schweitzer wrote: “He (Jesus) comes to us as One unknown.... He speaks to us the
same word, ‘Follow me,’... and to those who obey, He will reveal Himself in the
toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship,
and as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience, who he is.”
“…They shall learn in their experience, who he is.”
-5* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
This is to know God in a way deeper than any outward sign.
This is to know God in way that is higher than any mortal wisdom.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
-6* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.