Christ
the Power and Wisdom of God
Texts: Exodus 20.1-17; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 1.18-25; John
2.13-22
When Paul writes his first letter to the Corinthians, he writes to a
church that has begun to abandon the Christian way of life introduced
by Paul and slide back into the pre-Christian paganism from which it
came. That paganism was all-pervasive in Corinth. Of all
the Hellenistic cities of the first century, Corinth was the most
cosmopolitan. It’s citizens and traders came from every part of
the ancient world, and so did its religion. The city possessed
temples and sacred shrines by the bucket-load, most of them devoted to
the so-called ‘mystery’ religions of the ancient world, which taught
that one could (and should) escape the limitations of this earthly life
through the accumulation of a secret ‘knowledge’ or ‘wisdom’. The
mystery cults took a very dim view of ordinary life, the life
associated with the body, daily toil and ethical responsibility towards
other people. All these things were regarded as a prison in which
the human spirit has somehow become trapped. Our destiny, the
mysteries taught, is otherwise. Each of us possesses, deep inside
us, a spark of light from the divine being who created the
universe. Through the accumulation of secret knowledge (gnosis in Greek), one could escape
that prison and ascend to the world of pure spirit, where the shackles
of flesh and toil would no longer be of any consequence. In that
world of pure spirit, the initiated could expect to be re-united with
the divinity from which they had become separated by their ‘fall’ into
material existence.
Most of the Corinthian Christians had been converted in precisely this
religious environment. They took to the new faith with great
enthusiasm at first. But after Paul left them to continue his
missionary journey through Asia Minor, many of the converts began to
exhibit signs that their conversion had been only skin-deep.
Instead of reinterpreting the meaning of their world and lives through
the story of Christ, and especially of his crucifixion and
resurrection, the Corinthians started to do the opposite: to
reinterpret the new religious data of Christianity according to the gnostic way of thinking they had
grown up with as pagans. As this gnostification process
continued apace, the Corinthians came to some very alien conclusions
about Christ and his ways. Christ, they said, had not become a
human being and had not died on a cross. Christ had only appeared to die, for he was really
a demiurge, a lesser deity who had come from the world of spirit to
impart a secret knowledge about how to escape the burdens of suffering
and death. As a being of pure spirit, he could not have taken on
real human flesh, and therefore he could not have really suffered or
died. To think otherwise, they said, was nothing but foolishness.
This fundamental distortion of Paul’s teaching also had its ethical
consequences in the Corinthian community. The body no longer
mattered, and neither did the bodies of other people. All that
mattered was the accumulation of secret knowledge (gnosis again) of 'spiritual'
things. Thus, in the end, one could do anything one wanted to
with one’s own body of those of others: you could unite your body to a
prostitute or sleep with your own mother; you could eat and drink as
much as you liked, even if others went hungry; you could ignore the
needs of the weak and vulnerable. Since it was only the spirit
that mattered, you could do anything you like. For the gnostics,
the ethical inheritance of Judaism, those norms that governed what one
could legitimately do, or not do, in one’s bodily life, was to be
regarded as part of the problem, part of the prison which kept us from
being reabsorbed into the divine life.
Perhaps that little bit of social and religious background will help
you see why Paul writes as he does. The wisdom of the cross of
Jesus, he says, is nothing like this secret ‘wisdom’ being taught by
the gnostic sects. It is not a wisdom that separates the body and
the spirit, seeing the former as false and the latter as true.
Neither is the wisdom of the cross a wisdom that exults elite societies
and specialist knowledge at the expense of the real, fleshly, needs of
the weak and vulnerable. On the contrary, the revolutionary
message of the cross is one that seeks to transform and convert all
that Greek religion and philosophy would see as wise, and all that
Jewish religion would see as powerful and worthy of praise. To
Greek religion, that denigrates the body and exults the mind or spirit,
God has spoken a an embodied word,
said Paul: the Son of God becomes a human being, and suffers, and
dies, in order to show how much God loves the weak and the most
vulnerable, in order to save all who the world counts as nothing.
Furthermore, said Paul, to that form of Jewish religion that looks for
signs of naked power, for a messianism that would establish the rule of
God through the smashing of God’s enemies, God has spoken a word of covenantal submission: that
the power of God achieves its purposes through the humility and
condescension of vulnerability and weakness. That the ignominy of
God on a cross is,
paradoxically, the mode by which the ‘nothings’ of the world find
themselves risen with Christ in glory. Thus, as Paul would have
it, the wisdom of God is not
the same as Greek wisdom, and the power of God is not the same as the most
dominant Jewish notions of power. In the word of the cross a new
kind of wisdom and power is revealed, a wisdom that counts love as more
important the knowledge, and a power that counts patient compassion as
more important than getting one’s own way.
Of course, the ‘secret knowledge’ approach of the gnostics is not dead
in the world. The advent of Christianity did not destroy
it. The Corinthian controversy continued well into the fifth
century of the Christian era. Most of the early creeds, and the
New Testament canon itself, were formulated in order to protect and
distinguish the Christian confession of faith in the crucified God over
against the gospel of pure spirit and mind preached by the gnostic
sects. And it didn’t end there. The gnostic instinct is as
alive today, in our own time, as it ever was. It is with us in
that theology that seeks, continually, to absorb the singularity of the
Christian faith into a form that is commensurate with the philosophy or
science of late modernity. It is with us in that Christianity
which exalts the idea that we can have a ‘personal’ relationship with
Jesus that bypasses the teaching and tradition of the church or a
scholarly appreciation of Scripture. It is with us in the
syncretism of new age religion or secret brotherhoods, which seek to
absorb the particularity of Christian language and history into a vague
pot pouri of universal ‘faith’
or religion. It is with us in the longing for a return to the
time when the church could exercise its power through the instruments
of state, for that time when ideology became more important than basic
care and compassion for other human beings.
Whatever our gnostic tendencies, and we all have them, we cannot claim
to be genuine followers of Christ unless we are willing to accept that
the power and wisdom of God are revealed in the literally pathetic figure of Christ
crucified. Unless we are willing to redefine our notions of both
power and wisdom according to that history and parable, then I worry
for our future, whether ‘political’ and ‘spiritual’. For the
power of God to save and liberate has nothing to do with hunting down
terrorists and beating up our enemies; and the wisdom of God has
nothing to do with the accumulation of esoteric theories or personal
religious experiences. Power and wisdom are defined, for
Christians, by nothing other than the strange and paradoxical figure of
a Jewish man nailed to a Roman torture stake, truly a stumbling block
for the ‘powerful’ and foolishness to all who consider themselves
‘wise’.
In this Lenten season, I would therefore encourage us all to throw
caution to the wind and become the kind of ‘fools’ who can change the
world as Christ did, not by power or wisdom (as they are conventionally
understood), but by patience, kindness, condescension and humble
service; and by the fearless proclamation of a kingdom where 'fools'
can become saints and 'nothings' the children of God.
Glory be to God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—as in the beginning, so now
and for ever, world without end. Amen.
Garry
J. Deverell
3rd Sunday of Lent 2006
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