Scripture Reference: 1 Corinthians 1:18-31

Some of the alternative understandings of what the cross is about are quite right in their place; others are more questionable. Yet none of them is appropriate if understood as a replacement, rather than a reinforcement, of the call to share with Jesus the path of incarnate love, God in mankind (incarnation) meeting mankind against God (rebellion) at God’s expense (atonement).

The alternative vision of the entire matter which for Paul is fundamental is not merely to see that sometimes suffering love is powerful enough to effect social change. (Some of our neighbors are more ready to recognize this fact after the work of Gandhi and King.) Rather, in Christ’s seeming failure and His death we can confess and attest that God was moving omnipotently to reverse the stream of history which had been under the sign of hostility since Cain.

If the cross is wisdom, we can learn to read history differently. We can read ethics differently. We can see that the measure of the true reasonableness of a deed is not whether everyone agrees or whether if enough others did it, we would win. Rather, the measure is whether that deed (or the quality of will and purpose it displays) is congruent with the divine character manifested in the cross, and also everywhere else in healthy life: in patient mothering, in painful truth-telling, in honest brokering, and in mutually respectful problem-solving.

If the cross is power we can learn to participate in history differently, in hope. Sometimes, like the early Christians, or like the Jews in Babylon to whom Jeremiah wrote, or like the Anabaptist heroes of the sixteenth century in the Martyrs Mirror, we shall need simply to “take it on faith” that our weakness fits into the Lamb’s victory. But such faith will not be a grim or resentful perseverance. It will be service in hope, marked by the trust in God’s already certain triumph that marks the hymns of the fifth chapter of Revelation. The cross has always been the power of hope.

The shape of the challenge is misunderstood whenever Christians believe (as many have) that they are called by the law of love to leave the field to the adversary, and to grant that human wisdom and power may continue autonomous in their own realms, since God’s wisdom and power are something else. That is not what the text says. It says that human understandings of power fail to recognize the real power of God in and for real historical experience, in and through the cross. People are proven wrong who believe that by escalating their capacity to destroy those one has ceased to dialogue with as fellow humans they will in fact make the course of events come out the way they want it to in their own territory on their own terms. All one has to do is ask where the kings and empires of old are now? The simple answer, they came and went!

Only in recent decades have social scientists begun to inventory the ways in which a “soft answer turns away wrath” (Proverbs 15:1), but it has always been true. It is only in our epoch of nationwide media and movements that charismatic leaders like Gandhi and King can develop a technology of nonviolent social struggle. But it was true before their time that the way to make peace is not to make war.

To Be Continued

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®, ESV © 2016 by Crossway Bibles.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.