FOR THE LOVE OF GOD

Scripture Reference: 1 Corinthians 1:18-31

When it comes down to it, the cross was, after all, not an event outside the realm of politics. The largest, best-organized, and relatively most just empire in world history was executing a nonviolent Teacher on the grounds that He represented a threat of national liberation. We would not be reading the story today if it had not turned out that:

Though the cause of evil prosper,
yet tis truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold
and upon the throne be Wrong,
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
and, behind the dim unknown,
standeth God within the shadow,
keeping watch above his own.

Adapted for use as a hymn by the American poet, editor, and diplomat, James Russell Lowell

Martin Luther King Jr., often quoted this when feeling overwhelmed by the power of evil that seemed to be persistent in the world we live.

The cross is what makes sense of life, even if to our neighbors, and to our doubting selves at times, it looks crazy. The cross is what makes history move forward toward God’s final plans, even if we’ve been told the opposite in our national mythology, according to which world leadership is measured in destructive megatonnage, and in our media morality dramas, where every plot problem is resolved by a gun, and in our local economic dramas, where every employment problem is resolved by a federal weapons contract.

The cross of Christ has stood the test of time in its purpose, in its symbology, in its strength, and in its ability to give hope where there is hopelessness.

“But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord’ ” (1 Corinthians 1:27-31).

The cross will always be the wisdom and power of God through Christ Jesus. It will always be the believer’s beacon for hope!

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

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.

Scripture Reference: 1 Corinthians 1:18-31

The gospel of Christ is not obscure and deceitful. It does not ask for blind faith, faith without a reason, but it does ask for confession. It does not spare us the decision to recognize Christ as Lord. That decision is not made for us by the facts of the case, or by our parents, or by some irresistible logical proof. We sometimes try to avoid the risk of faith for our children by telling them that there is no other choice, that faith is unavoidable. That used to be convincing in a society dominated by the churches. However, that doesn’t bode well for an individual’s right to choose, no matter their choice.

As an example, Jesus was very forthright when He warned His listeners that they should not follow Him unless they were ready to suffer, as He was going to suffer.

The disciples of Jesus however, are a minority, not because particular doctrines that they hold on the grounds of particular revelatory experiences are not convincing to others. “The Greeks” could have respected that kind of special information. The disciples of Jesus are an unpopular minority because they love their enemies as Jesus did, and because their commitment to this path does not depend on its prior acceptability to others. It is not that they choose to be foolish but that they are committed to another standard of wisdom.

Sometime in August of 1525, in the midst of a frustrating debate about infant baptism in the office of the German Protestant reformer Oecolampadius, one of the Anabaptist participants said:

“What is needed is divine wisdom in order to see honor in the cross and life in death; we must deny ourselves and become fools.”

He was quoting our text, repeating a well-worn argument, familiar in the medieval pursuit of a mystical insight and in the Protestant argument against the then, scholastic church. What he was calling for, and what Paul is calling for, is not some sort of mysticism as being over or against reason, nor blind faith as being over or even against scholarship. What they called for is the understanding that the cross of Christ is in fact a new definition of truth, both as power and as wisdom.

One way all of us, both “Jews and Greeks,” seek to avoid this call is to redefine “following Jesus” so that it focuses on some point other than the cross. Like the famous Pastor Henry Maxwell in the best-selling Christian novel In His Steps, we transform “doing what Jesus would do” into doing with integrity and courage whatever we actually think is right in a particular situation. Yet the early Christians did not make Jesus an example in His celibacy, or in His not having a gainful occupation or a domicile—only in His cross; of which we also are to carry our own on a daily basis. In the Christian light, it is not foolish or weak, but rather showing our strength in following Jesus!

The other way of escape is to give great importance to the cross, but to give it some other meaning. In Christian pastoral care we speak of a person having a cross to bear and mean by that some conflict in interpersonal relations, or some intractable sickness or handicap. An accident or an illness may be called a “cross.”

In yet another school of pastoral care the cross symbolizes the experience of death to self: the discipline which in mystical or devotional exercises one can undergo as a part of becoming a Jesuit or a Quaker or a Wesleyan.

Or it is possible to move the cross from the realm of pastoral care to that of theology. In the realm of sin and grace it refers to the miracle of atonement. In the realm of history one can puzzle over the historical details of the Gospel accounts.

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.

Scripture Reference: 1 Corinthians 1:18-31

The cross of Christ later comes to have other meanings as well as the ones we covered in the previous part. It may be spoken about as penalty, as sacrifice, or as victory. But all such additional depths of meaning derive from and are dependent upon the social and historical one: a righteous Man was put to death because of the way He refused to let stand the unrighteousness of the powers in control of the people He came to liberate. It is also the way He calls all of His followers to take. That is what causes us to stumble; not that the cross is weak but that it asks too much strength from us.

Then, when Paul states that “Greeks seek wisdom,” again he is describing not a race or a nationality but a mental culture. By Greek he does not mean someone like Zorba. Nor does he mean all his readers in Corinth, the Greek city. He means to identify a mode of moral reasoning. Greek was the language of culture and of philosophy, even in Rome and in Egypt.

When he says “Greeks seek wisdom,” he is putting his finger on a way of reasoning with which we in most Western cultures have all learned.

All of our culture since then is indebted to the fathers of Greek philosophy, for the ability to ask regularly and rigorously, “But is that always true? Is it true for everyone?” We have learned to ask that truth be validated by its being general and not just particular, by its being true for everyone, not dependent upon perspective or bias. The philosopher Kant told us to ask of a moral statement whether it could be true for everyone. Democracy teaches us to consider as right what most people will vote for. Scholarship teaches us to respect the consensus of authorities. Truth is suspect if it cannot be commended to everyone.

When we apply that perspective to the Christian’s obligation to love the enemy, questions follow: “Can you ask that of everyone? Can you convince people that it will work? Does it not strike people as counter to common sense? Is it not most credible if you agree to label it as a rare peculiarity of a minority denomination, not to be asked or expected of others? Is it not irrelevant as guidance for the whole society?”

Paul does not agree with the “Greeks” that the word of the cross is foolish, but he understands how they might see it that way. He points out further that such wisdom does not in general facilitate people’s becoming believers:

“For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth” (1 Corinthians 1:26).

God’s message runs across the grain of our sense-making reflexes because those reflexes are tilted in our favor. What we call “reasonable” is against sacrifice and for self-preservation, against trusting and for demanding explanations, against risk, against the outsider and the enemy.

The human spirit is a sense-making organ, and that certainly is a good thing. We learn to test thoughts for their consistency. But, unfortunately, that skill can run away with us if we try in the same manner to handle situations that are different. Or we can assume that something must be false, since we don’t know everything about the situation.

For instance, we don’t need to concede that a peace commitment is irrelevant, or illogical. It is, in fact, possible to argue for love of neighbor on the grounds of the general wisdom of an ancient philosophical consensus, and the lessons of the history of the race, and what will make sense to most rational beings thinking carefully. But at the outset we cannot and should not attempt to validate the “love of enemy” by such criteria, as if our using such arguments were to be taken as granting that they have the final authority.

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.