Foolishness and Faithfulness

Micah 6:1-8

6 “With what shall I come before the Lord

    and bow myself before God on high?

Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,

    with calves a year old?

7 Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil?

Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,

    the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”

8 He has told you, O mortal, what is good,

    and what does the Lord require of you

but to do justice and to love kindness

    and to walk humbly with your God?

1 Corinthians 1:18-31

18 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. 19 For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

      20 Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scholar? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of the proclamation, to save those who believe. 22 For Jews ask for signs and Greeks desire wisdom, 23 but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles, 24 but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

    26 Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. 27 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; 28 God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to abolish things that are, 29 so that no one might boast in the presence of God. 30 In contrast, God is why you are in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, 31 in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

Matthew 5:1-12

1 When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. 2 And he began to speak and taught them, saying:

3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

4 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

5 “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

6 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

7 “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

8 “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

9 “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

10 “Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

     11 “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. 12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

I’m typically quite stoic about what’s going on in the world, but this week I’ve been unusually troubled.  I almost make a point of avoiding viral news videos, but I did watch the shooting of Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis.  It’s entirely possible to have good faith arguments about immigration and its enforcement, or about distinctions between lawful protest and unlawful obstruction.  But I think it’s difficult to argue in good faith that shooting Pretti as he was pinned to the ground was justified, and there definitely was no justification for then shooting him several more times as he lay there motionless.  I have sympathy for contrary opinions (too high, some might say) - I try to see things from the perspective of others - but what I absolutely no tolerance for is lying.  What really angers me is that the most egregious lying liars are often the same people who make a show of wearing a cross.  

“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.”  So said Paul in his typical way which draws a sharp contract between Christian and non-Christian.  Even then, but certainly now, his words were more prescriptive of how it should be than descriptive of how things really are.   It’s always inevitable that Christians, imperfect people we are, fail to live up to their ideals, fall short of the very standards they claim for themselves.  But in this moment many Christians themselves seem convinced that the message about the cross is foolishness.

Paul wrote that,  “We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles.”  A crucified Christ was scandalizing to the Jews because they could not see the cross as anything but a curse, not a blessing, a judgment rendered against, not in favor.  For the Gentiles, not dissimilarly, the whole idea that God would choose weakness and humiliation over power and glory seemed unthinkable.  It’s hard enough to believe that God took on flesh, that God became incarnate in human form, but even if you believe that then you wold it expect it to follow that this God-man would triumph over the powers of this world rather than being subject to them.  

In Paul’s day, the wisdom of the world would tell you that power is its own justification.  Those who have power have it because they’re supposed to have it, and they can wield it however they want.  Might makes right.  As Jesus stands on trial Pilate says to him, “Do you not know that I have the power to crucify you?”  This brute fact, much more than considerations of what is true and good, is all that matters.  And, of course, we seem to be back in more or less the same situation (if indeed we ever left) where the where the ability to lie and call it the truth is a demonstration of power, where the assertion of truth has supposedly been revealed as a power game in disguise.  That Christ ends up on a cross proves either that he wasn’t who he said he was or, if even he was, that it doesn’t even really matter because the empire could still execute him.  

The Gospel Paul preached - which, it must be said, is often not the same Gospel that Christians preach - is that the cross exposes the powers of this world as charlatans, confounding the wisdom of this world and locating true power in the apparent “foolishness” of Christ. The cross inverts what we take to be the natural order of things.  Power is made perfect in weakness.  Triumph comes through humility.  The omnipotent God comes to us in the form of servant, a slave, serves us, suffers for us, and thus saves us, and in this the truth about all things is revealed.  

Paul is telling us that the world we thought we were living in is not the world as it actually is, what we thought was wisdom is actually foolishness, what we thought was foolishness is the very wisdom of God.  Power and truth are very much aligned and are both to be found in Christ Jesus.   

The Matthew passage we commonly call “the Beattitudes,” a collection of if-then statements about the surprising people who are blessed.  Surprising because it sure often seems to our eyes that these people are not, in fact, blessed.  It’s easy to treat these statements sort of like they are a new version of the Ten Commandments, to convert them into instructions.  Of course, it would be a great thing for us to try to be merciful, to be peacemakers, to strive to hunger and thirst for righteousness.  But these statements are not so much prescriptive as they are descriptive of the kingdom of God - a kingdom which is coming and now is.  Jesus is telling us that, while we may be accustomed to thinking that it is the rich, the aggressive, the ruthless, who receive the blessings life has to offer, the reality is quite the opposite.  The wisdom of the world is foolishness, and God’s “foolishness” is true wisdom.  Those who mourn, those who are meek, those who show mercy - those we assume end up on the bottom in life, God will and does lift up.  

One obvious challenge for Christians is that the world as Jesus and Paul describe it is not necessarily the world as we experience it, so the very wisdom God calls foolishness can still seem pretty compelling to us, and the cross can seem like just a nice idea, but not a strategy for effective living.   And if you’ve fixed your heart on certain desires, meekness and humility begin to look counterproductive - they look like… weakness - and not only can’t they be embraced, but the only way to get what you want is to look the opposite direction.  

If I’m trying to be charitable toward the conspicuous cross wearers in the current American administration, I would say that maybe they really do think that they’re doing God’s work, that it’s their responsibility to make a “Christian society”.  One problem with this is that, once you start thinking this way then you inevitably start arguing that the ends justify the means, that certain compromises are inescapable, a little cruelty is necessary here and there.  The other problem is that God never asked us to pursue these goals.  There’s nothing in the NT to suggest that Christians would ever possess worldly power, and certainly no instructions about what to do if you had it.  

The desire to use political power to remake the world as you imagine God wants it to be unavoidably means trading the wisdom of the cross for the foolishness of the world, and worse, it likely means you invoke God’s name to bless your own unholy desires.  There seem to be a lot of people who claim to fight for God despite the fact that God never asked them to fight.  

I assume none of us will be holding the levers of political power anytime soon, but we all face the same kind of temptation on a smaller-scale.  For any person, the driving questions are, “What do I want?” and “How do I get it?”  We fix our hearts on all kinds of things, and we employ all kinds of devices to attain our desires.  

(It’s not not inherently wrong to want a promotion, for instance, but pursuing this goal - playing the game as we assume it must be played - usually finds us relying on one kind of wisdom rather than another.  

The message of the cross is that faithfulness always bears fruit, that Jesus didn’t need to call down legions of angels, he didn’t need to overthrow the empire, he just needed to do the Father’s will - and though he died, he was lifted up, and through his faithfulness the powers of sin and death were overcome.  The message of the cross is not that the ends justify the means, but that the ends are the means, that faithfulness is itself the goal.  Or to put it another way, if a goal cannot be attained by following the wisdom of the cross, then it probably isn’t a worthy goal.

Among other things, the wisdom of the cross frees us from the burden of figuring out to make things turn out the way we think they should.  All we need to do is be faithful, which is more than enough.  

what does the Lord require of you

but to do justice and to love kindness

    and to walk humbly with your God?