The Cross is Moronic-1 Cor 1:17-25

There can be no unity (1 Cor 1:10) without continuous ongoing thanksgiving (1 Cor 1:4).

How is your approach to life shaped by the cross of Christ? Does the cross change the way you look at the world and her problems?

The cross is the key to reality yet it makes no sense at all. Jesus loved everyone (Jn 3:16). He genuinely embraced everyone and canceled no one. Yet everyone he loved either abandoned him or contributed to his execution (Jn 1:10-11). Everyone without exception was disappointed by him: his disciples, the masses, the religious hierarchy and the ruling authorities. The ONLY person he pleased was his Father (Jn 8:29). When Jesus died, he died alone (Ps 22:1; Mt 27:46; Mk 15:34)–like many who die from Covid-19. A confounding fact is that a perfectly innocent good man was killed because of unfulfilled expectations (Mt 27:42) and the ego and politics of the times (Jn 11:50).

God‘s way of salvation appears really foolish. So we–the world–crucified Jesus because his crucifixion looks like it wouldn‘t do anything to solve any problem! To those who think they can fix or improve the world purely by their efforts or wisdom, Christ crucified and the way of the cross looks useless and pathetic–like a defeat and a cop out.

• God’s folly–a crucified Messiah (1:17-25).
• God’s folly–the Corinthian believers (1:26-31).
• God’s folly–Paul’s preaching (2:1-5).

1:18-25 is crucial to the entire letter; it is one of the truly great moments of Paul. For he argues, with OT support, that what God had always intended and had foretold in the prophets, he has now accomplished through the crucifixion. God brings an end to human self-sufficiency through human wisdom and power. Paul argues that the gospel is not some new sophia (wisdom, or philosophy), not even a new divine sophia. But the gospel stands as the divine antithesis to such judgments.

The meaning of the cross is what Paul reflects on–after appealing for unity in the church (1 Cor 1:10)–to show that prideful confidence in human wisdom is antithetical to the deepest logic of the gospel. The fundamental theme is the opposition between human wisdom (sophia) and the “word of the cross” (1 Cor 1:18). The cross is interpreted here as an apocalyptic event–God’s shocking intervention to save and transform the world.

The cross defies human expectations. Paul links it to Israel’s Scripture, on 2 OT quotations in 1 Cor 1:19, 1:31, that depict God as one who acts to judge and save his people in ways that defy human expectation. Here Paul makes no explicit reference to church divisions, which doesn’t reappear until 3:1–4. But he lays the theological groundwork for his critique of the Corinthians’ divisiveness. Paul’s diagnosis the root causes of the Corinthian conflict. They are caught up in rivalries because they glory in the superficially impressive human wisdom of this age. They are boasting in their own wisdom and rhetorical eloquence. They are infatuated with leaders who have these skills. But God reveals in Christ another kind of wisdom that radically subverts the wisdom of this world: God saves the world through the cross, through the shameful and powerless death of the crucified Messiah. If that shocking event is the revelation of the deepest truth about the character of God, then our whole way of seeing the world is turned upside down. Everything has to be reevaluated in light of the cross.

Our familiarity with “the cross” may obscure the astonishing imaginative power of this passage. Paul takes the central event at the heart of the Christian story—the death of Jesus—and uses it as the lens through which all human experience must be projected and seen afresh. The cross becomes the starting point for an epistemological revolution. Paul evaluates divisions in the church and, more fundamentally, our understanding of wisdom, power, and wealth. Grasp the paradoxical logic of this text, and the world can never look the same again.

God’s Foolishness and Human Wisdom (1:18–25). Paul begins with a forceful statement of the central paradox, backed by Isa 29:14. The word (logos) of the cross–which looks like nonsense to a lost and perishing world–is the power of God for salvation to those who believe (Rom 1:16). Though this seems surprising, it accords with the prophetic word of Isaiah declaring that God will destroy the wisdom of the wise (1 Cor 1:19; Isa 29:14).

“Wisdom” in the Corinthian setting can refer both to the possession of exalted knowledge and to the ability to express that knowledge in a powerful and rhetorically polished way. Much of the controversy may have been stirred up by the tendency of new Christians to regard Paul and other Christian preachers as rhetors [teacher of rhetoric] competing for public attention and approval alongside other popular philosophers. Paul’s forceful rebuttal is designed to reframe the categories of the debate and to put the gospel in a category apart from other varieties of “wisdom” on offer in the popular marketplace of ideas/slogans/ideologies. The gospel is not an esoteric body of religious knowledge, not a slickly packaged philosophy, not a scheme for living a better life; instead, it is an announcement about God’s apocalyptic intervention in the world, for the sake of the world.The word of God divides all humanity in 2(1 Cor 1:18). It’s Paul’s apocalyptic perspective in the encounter between world and gospel. 2 contrasting groups–those perishing/those being saved–indicates the judging and saving activity of God in the present moment. Paul describes the church not as those who have been saved, but as those who ARE being saved. The distinction is important, as he continues to insist throughout the letter on the not–yet–completed character of salvation in Christ. The trouble with those who claim wisdom is that they suppose themselves already to have arrived, already to be in possession of full truth. For Paul, however, the power of God is presently afoot in the world through the gospel, bringing both destruction and deliverance (Rom 1:16–18). The books are not closed yet; the eschatological verdict has not yet been rendered. Thus, as the power of God is at work in the world through the proclamation of the gospel, members of the church find themselves on a trajectory toward salvation, but they cannot unqualifiedly claim salvation as a present possession.

This apocalyptic sundering of humankind creates a sharp epistemological division. The whole world is now perceived differently by those who are being saved. In the present, the Christian community’s fixation on a crucified Lord appears the height of absurdity to those who are on the way to destruction. It’s not wisdom but “foolishness” (“moron”–Gk moria). Those who celebrate their own wisdom/slogans/ideology are not celebrating the gospel, but are still seeing the world from the perspective of the old unredeemed age, while those being saved, recognize the cross as the power of God, which changes the way they understand everything else.

God will destroy your wisdom. Paul quotes his Bible: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart” (I Cor 1:19, quoting Isa 29:14). Isaiah’s verb “I will destroy” (apolo) is echoed by Paul’s reference in 1 Cor 1:18 to “those who are perishing” (apollymenois, literally “those who are being destroyed”). God will particularly annihilate, according to Isaiah, sophia, “the wisdom of the wise”—what the Corinthians prize.

Trusting self. The full force of Paul’s meaning is understood only in the wider context of the OT quotation. Isaiah was pronouncing a judgment oracle against Judah, whose political and religious leaders are trusting in their own wise and “realistic” plans to protect the kingdom by making a military alliance with Egypt, rather than listening to the word of the prophet and trusting in God. To grasp its pertinence to the Corinthian situation, include the preceding verse: “The Lord said: Because these people draw near with their mouths and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their worship of me is a human commandment learned by rote [mechanical, habitual]; so I will again do amazing things with this people, shocking and amazing. The wisdom of their wise shall perish, and the discernment of the discerning shall be hidden” (Isa 29:13–14).

God-talk is cheap is Isaiah’s point and that God’s action will shut the mouths of the wise talkers. Did Paul recall this full context when choosing an opening sermon text to chastise the Corinthians who were puffed up about their ability to speak in tongues and to speak about the things of God with eloquent rhetorical flourish? Likely he did. The Corinthians, with their prized speech-gifts, make a show of possessing wisdom and honoring God with their lips, but their fractious behavior shows that in fact their hearts are far from God. Thus, like Judah in Isaiah’s oracle, they stand under the sentence of divine judgment which will nullify their professed wisdom and unmask their professed piety as a sham.

This is the first Scriptural quotation that undergirds Paul’s argument (1 Cor 1:19, 31; 2:9, 16; 3:19–20). Each quotation—with the possible exception of the obscure case of 2:9—triggers chains of association with the original OT context. This is characteristic of Paul’s use of Scripture, and it offers rich poetic and theological possibilities for the preacher/Christian.

Contrast the wisdom of the world and the foolishness of the kerygma (20–25) is how Paul cranks the tension of the passage even higher. The rhetorical questions 1 Cor 1:20 pose a direct challenge to the world’s talkers: the wise philosopher (sophos), the scribe (gram-mateus: the expert in Jewish Law), and the “debater of this age” (the popular rhetorician). All belong to “this age” (Paul’s apocalyptic categories) and all are therefore swept away—or made to appear ridiculous—by God’s strange way of manifesting grace.

Rhetorical eloquence was highly prized in the ancient Greco-Roman world. Powerful orators were publicly adored like todays movie stars, sports heroes, popular politicians. But to Paul such acclaim is utterly negated by God. Where are they now? he asks rhetorically (Isa 19:12). This presupposes that their talk has already been swept away by God’s shocking and amazing act of reversal: the cross.

The esteemed pundits [experts] of Paul’s day–philosophers, Torah scholars, popular orators—fail to understand what is really going on in the world. Their “wisdom” fails to grasp the truth about God. To Paul this failure is itself a mysterious part of God’s own purpose. It is “in the wisdom of God” that the world has failed to know God through wisdom (1 Cor 1:21). Why? Because God’s ways are, as Isaiah declared, shocking and amazing, contrary to what our fallen minds would consider common sense. In contrast to “this age,” God has exploded common sense by an eschatological revelation of the truth “through the foolishness (moria) of our proclamation (kerygma).” Moria points to the utter craziness of the gospel message by commonsense standards. How can the ignominious death of Jesus on a cross be the event of salvation for the world? One would have to be a fool to believe that. Yet that is precisely what the gospel declares.

The paradoxical twists of God’s grace. This is not, however, just a Pauline rhetorical tour de force. The fundamental theological point is that if the cross itself is God’s saving event, all human standards of evaluation are overturned. This outlandish message confounds Jews and Greeks, who quite understandably seek evidence of a more credible sort, either empirical demonstrations of power (“signs”) or rationally persuasive argumentation (“wisdom”). Paul offers neither. Instead, “we proclaim Christ crucified” (1 Cor 1:23).

To proclaim a crucified Messiah is to talk nonsense. The scandal of this message is hard for Christians of a later era to imagine. Crucifixion was a gruesome punishment administered by the Romans to “make an example” out of rebels or disturbers of the Pax Romania. As a most horrible form of public torture and execution, it was designed to demonstrate that no one defies Rome. Yet Paul’s gospel declares that the crucifixion of Jesus is somehow the event through which God has triumphed over those powers. Rather than proving the sovereignty of Roman political order, it shatters the world’s systems of authority. Rather than confirming what the wise claim to know, it shatters the world’s systems of knowledge.

This baffles Paul’s hearers in the ancient Mediterranean world. Jews, who have suffered long under the burden of foreign oppression, look for manifestations of God’s power: signs like those done by Moses at the time of the exodus, perhaps portending at last God’s powerful deliverance of his people again from bondage. The Messiah should be a man of power, manifesting supernatural proofs of God’s favor. Greeks, with their proverbial love of learning, look for wisdom: reasonable accounts of the order of things presented in a logically compelling and aesthetically pleasing manner. The Christ should be a wise teacher of philosophical truths. But no! God blows away all reasonable criteria: Christ is a crucified criminal.

Paul‘s whole message is “Christ crucified” (1 Cor 2:2)–known to those converted to the Christian faith through his preaching. Proclaiming the crucified one is a stumbling block (skandalon) to Jews and craziness to Greeks. But for those who are part of God’s elect people of Jews and Greeks together, “the called ones” (1 Cor 1:24, 2, 9) at Corinth and elsewhere—this mind–warping paradox is God’s power and God’s wisdom.

Paul’s relentless focus on the cross in 1 Cor 1:25 is difficult to appreciate in English translation. The words translated as “foolishness” and “weakness” (NRSV) are not abstract nouns but substantive adjectives. So a very literal translation would read, “For the foolish thing of God is wiser than humans, and the weak thing of God is stronger than humans.” This foolish and weak thing is the event of the cross. The cross is the key to understanding reality in God’s new eschatological age. Thus, to enter the symbolic world of the gospel is to undergo a conversion of the imagination, to see all values transformed by the foolish and weak death of Jesus on the cross.

Reference:

1. Richard B. Hays. First Corinthians. Interpretation. A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. 1997.
2. Gordon D. Fee. First Corinthians. The New International Commentary on the NT. 1987.

Sermon Divisions:

1. Always Thank God (1:1-9) [1 Cor 1:4].  Cosmic Epic Calling [1 Cor 1:2].
2. The Devil Divides, God Unites (1:10-17) [1 Cor 1:10]. All Agree. No Divisions. Perfect Unity.
3. The Cross is Kinda Dumb (1:18-25) [1 Cor 1:18]. The Cross Stumbles. The Cross is like a Cop Out. Foolish Cross.
4. What You Were (1:26-31) [1 Cor 1:26]. No Boasting  [1 Cor 1:31].
5. Christ Crucified (2:1-5) [1 Cor 2:2].
6. Mature Wisdom (2:6-16) [1 Cor 2:6].
7. Field Laborers (3:1-9) [1 Cor 3:5].
8. Construction Workers (3:10-15) [1 Cor 3:10-11].
9. God’s Temple (3:16-22) [1 Cor 3:16].
10. True Self (4:1-5) [1 Cor 4:4].
11. Become Scum (4:6-13) [1 Cor 4:13].
12. Final Warning (4:14-21) [1 Cor 4:19].