I Corinthians 1:18-31

 I Corinthians 1:18-31

At its core, the message of the gospel is foolishness, or put another way, it’s just plain crazy. This passage is a little difficult for us to understand because we have no personal experience with crucifixion. We have almost 2000 years of history of looking at the cross as a reminder of the death of Christ and the salvation that it brings. We have sanitized across the hard edges and the sharp, painful part. We have made it beautiful, made it a fashion accessory, and made it acceptable. Not so with the Romans. Within the Roman Empire, the cross was the agency of state domination. It was the means of capital punishment that produced mind-boggling agony and helpless humiliation. Nothing in the entire world was worse than crucifixion. What a swastika would be for a Jew or a mushroom cloud would be for someone from Hiroshima or a KKK flag would be for a Black man, that is with the cross was for everyone in the Roman Empire, a reminder or threat of pain and misery.

Along come Christians saying the message of the cross is salvation. Try telling a Jew that the message of the swastika was the best news that they could have. Tell a Black man that he needs to come and submit to the flag of the Ku Klux Klan. That might give you the kind of reaction you would get to the cross in the first century. The good news of the cross in the mind of the Roman world was just plain crazy.

The Jews wanted to sign. The law came with signs, the plagues on Egypt, the Red Sea parted, and the voice of God from the mountain. The Greeks wanted wisdom, to know how it all fit together. They wanted a bit of insight to explain philosophy, history, science, and religion to find the supremely elusive principle that could make sense of everything. Along come the Christians, and rather than offer miraculous proof or a unifying theory that explains everything, Christianity offered a condemned criminal hanging in agony. It seemed crazy. The cross was and is, until we understand who He was and what He did, madness. But as a perfect sin-bearing sacrifice whose death is a substitution for the sin and death of all men, Jesus on the cross makes signs inconsequential and a unified theory banal. This crazy thing God did in the atonement removes all the wise things we might want to appeal to for understanding. Signs and wisdom are replaced with God’s own wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. If someone says Christianity is the craziest thing the world has ever seen, we should reply thankfully, “Yes, it is.”

“Thank You< Lord, for the Cross. AMEN”