Third Sunday in Lent, 2024. Year B.
Readings: 1 Corinthians 1:18-25 & John 2:13-22.
“For 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”, says Paul to the Corinthians. It is “A stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles”.
The passage we have just read follows from his opening appeal to them to heal their divisions, and stop the factional infighting that he has heard is plaguing their church.
Corinth in Roman times was a wealthy and outgoing trading city, but unlike some of its neighbouring Greek cities, not one with the confidence of antiquity in its culture, because the ancient Greek city was completely depopulated and destroyed by the Romans in 146 BC, and the city we know of from Paul’s letters was only refounded by Julius Caesar in 44 BC, so maybe only 90 or 100 years before Paul was writing his letters.
So the Corinth he is writing to is a young, brash city still trying to assert its identity amongst its older, more established neighbours, with a population drawn from many different cultures.
And it’s important to remind ourselves that Paul’s letters are pastoral letters – he is always writing in response to a specific situation in a specific place at a specific time.
The advice he gives is rooted in scripture and his theological thinking, and deeply inspired by the Holy Spirit, but we can’t just take it wholesale and apply it verbatim to another situation.
In the same way that Paul sifts through the Jewish scriptures that were written for other people at other times in other contexts and creatively reinterprets them in the light of the Cross, so we too have to do the same with his writings, in the light of our context, with our knowledge of the scriptures, and listening to what the Holy Spirit is saying to us.
And to do this in a way that is inspired, that is filled with the Holy Spirit and is true to the whole message of the Gospel from incarnation to crucifixion to resurrection is not simple or easy.
Anyone who says that understanding and interpreting the Bible is easy is either a saint, or hasn’t been reading their Bible with enough attention.
The Bible is a complex body of writing, appearing at times to be contradictory, often saying things we don’t want to hear. It is written in many voices, each reflecting their own understanding of God. It is hard to understand.
God isn’t trying to make things hard for us, he sent his only Son to die for us after all, but the proper working of his creation as he intended it is too vast and complex for us to easily understand.
It is his unending love for us that is what leads him to the progressive revelation that we can see at work in the Bible, showing us what we can understand, and then as we grow in the Spirit, revealing the next step of the Gospel message.
God doesn’t call us to him, He comes to us and walks with us as we progress towards him, however slowly.
The Corinthians come over as brash and cocky in their attitude to life. A real bunch of know-it-alls. It feels at times like they have the outward confidence or even arrogance of those who deep down are very insecure about themselves and their place in the world.
The Greeks and Romans amongst them probably included many who had had a good education by the standards of the time in rhetoric, grammar and logic. The Jews probably included many who had completed much study of the Jewish scriptures.
Paul comes amongst them to preach the Gospel, and he admits elsewhere he is not handsome or prepossessing, he doesn’t speak like a great orator or debate with the eloquence of a leading advocate.
And he says many of them form a low opinion about him and his message because of this. They think they are more learned and intelligent than him, and they listen to other Christian missionaries who are more to their liking – smoother, more glib, maybe giving a simpler message.
But Paul’s message to them in this passage is that all their learning is of no use to them when it comes to understanding the Gospel message. Indeed, he tells them, it is actively hampering them from understanding it and becoming one with Christ.
Rather than being rich in learning and wisdom, they are impoverished spiritually. And they don’t even realise it as they indulge in their petty squabbles.
Because the Gospel proclamation, the message of the Cross, is not something that can be accessed through knowledge or philosophy.
Those amongst them who were students of Greek philosophy might have listened to accounts of Jesus’ teaching and nodded approvingly at some of his parables.
There a whole strand of literature today still that tries to recast Jesus as some sort of wandering Jewish stoic philosopher, whose simple message was wrapped in a load of religious mumbo-jumbo after his death by his followers to build a sort of religious Ponzi scheme.
But to do this means we have to ignore a lot of what Jesus said and did because it doesn’t fit into this conceptualization.
And it becomes hard to explain why the Romans would crucify a wandering philosopher, and requires a complete denial of the resurrection entirely.
And it reduces Jesus to just another man, whose words we can pick and chose, take or ignore.
It falls into the trap of all humanism, that there is no baseline truth against which everything else can be measured. Everything, every experience and every truth just becomes relative.
Maybe this is why Paul so rarely refers to Jesus’ teachings and parables, because he is working so much amongst Gentile populations who too easily seize upon the philosophical teaching, and Paul wants to bring them to a more spiritual understanding.
For the learned Jews amongst the audience expecting the Davidic Messiah of Daniel or Ezekiel or Enoch – the Son of Man coming to God on a cloud of glory, having brought all the world under his rule, then Jesus’ death on the cross is even more of a stumbling block. The Messiah, taken by Gentiles, broken and tortured, and then hung on a tree, the curse of God in the Mosaic law. Such a man could never be the Messiah, surely.
But Paul is saying to them that they have things back to front. They cannot come to Christ through their traditional knowledge and learning, through the categories that they have always thought in.
The cross has changed everything, he says. All their previous knowledge and understanding needs to re-evaluated and placed into that context.
They must come through faith, and then, in the light of that faith, they can re-use their knowledge and reason to truly understand the message of the cross.
The message is not written on the outside of the curtain, but rather on the inside, and we must pass through that curtain so that we can see it from within, and only then will we be able to start reading the true message.
As he says, the message about the cross is the power of God to us who are being saved.
The disciples in John’s story bear witness to this. They hear Jesus’ words – “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up”, but it is only after he has been raised from the dead, in the light of that re-understood faith, that they remember that he said this and they believed the scripture and the word he had spoken.
Time and again in the Gospels, we see that despite their faith, their understanding is lacking. And at times, we also see that despite their knowledge of Jesus, their faith can be lacking.
But, God has come and met them where they are, and walking alongside them in the poverty of their understanding and faith, he helps them and guides them, so that their knowledge increases their faith, and their growing faith informs their knowledge, so that that increased knowledge can in turn move them forward on that journey of faith.
It is not a single revelation, but a continuing cycle of growing and understanding and believing. A cycle that all of us, as disciples of Christ, should be in, and continue to be in throughout our lives, hopefully always humble in the poverty of our human faith and understanding.
Let us pray.
God of understanding and wisdom. We come before you conscious of our own limitations of wisdom and faith. Walk with us this Lententide as we seek to follow you more fully in the humility of our faithful witness.
Amen