Countercultural Christianity
The apostle Paul had his work cut out for him. Although Jewish followers of Jesus were familiar with the idea of a God who champions the cause of the poor, the weak, the vulnerable, the ashamed, and the oppressed, the Gentiles to whom Paul preached the gospel of Jesus must found that sort of God confusing. Why would a God who has the power to triumph over all the enemies of God’s people accept defeat and humiliation in the cross?
On that point, even the Jewish Christians needed convincing. They were accustomed to hearing and celebrating stories of how God chose a tiny, underdog people to become a light to the nations, but the concept of a crucified messiah was too much. Crucifixion was not only a physically horrendous method of execution. It was also a humiliating way for the all-powerful Roman Empire to signal its unequivocal dominance over its subjects, especially those who would dare to reject its authority. The cross was where rebels and their dreams went to die shameful deaths. Any claim Jesus may have had to a royal lineage or a divine anointing, a reasonable observer could conclude, died along with him in tortured, degraded agony.
Nevertheless, as Peter declared in the reading from Acts that we heard in church last Sunday, “Let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified” (2:36). Peter argues that the resurrection is proof that Jesus’ messianic identity overcomes the shame of the cross: “This man, handed over to you according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law. But God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power” (Acts 2:23-24). Without the empty tomb, therefore, Jesus’ death would have been fatal to his movement as well.
Before his conversion on the Damascus Road, Paul must have been perplexed and enraged by those disciples of Jesus who refused to give up their rabbi’s cause. Paul was a zealot—one who believed that God’s final triumph over the enemies of God’s people was near and would be accomplished whenever God’s people finally returned to lives of faithfulness. Jesus, by accepting sinners and moral outcasts into his religious fellowship, threatened everything that the pre-Christian Paul stood for. The zealot would do anything to purge this threat from Judaism in order to make God’s kingdom come, including having Jesus’ disciples put to death.
In the midst of his anger-fueled violence against the church, Paul was confronted by the risen Christ. “Why are you persecuting me?” the Lord Jesus said to Paul in a vision at noonday. In that moment, Paul, too, encountered God’s vindication of Jesus in the power of the resurrection. Despite his commitment to the faith, the persecutor who would become an apostle had been blind to God’s plan of salvation. The humiliation and death Jesus had suffered on the cross were no longer understood to be his defeat but the very means by which God’s redemption of God’s people was accomplished. For Paul, the cross, which had been the principal sign that God had rejected Jesus and his teachings, was now the fullest expression of God’s power.
But how do you convince a world that expects divinity to be associated with things like wealth, power, prestige, invincibility, knowledge, and beauty that the Way of Jesus, which is embodied by the one who calls upon his followers to renounce all those things, is the way that leads to true, abundant, and everlasting life? How do you teach people who have always associated goodness, holiness, and divine favor with prosperity, strength, and intelligence that the savior of the world saves the world by suffering and dying for their sake?
In 1 Corinthians, we see Paul trying to remind the community of new Gentile converts to Christianity that the Way of Jesus is a way of humility. He had preached to them the faith of Jesus as a faith of unconditional love. Through Baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection, they had been incorporated into the body of Christ and the family of God—not because of their observant faithfulness but because of their confidence in God’s grace. But, after he left, that freedom in Christ somehow mixed with the philosophical traditions of the Greco-Roman world, including stoicism, to produce toxic, libertine attitudes that resulted in the breakdown of the Christian community.
In an attempt to bring them back to the countercultural truth of Christianity, Paul writes, “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,” and “For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:18, 22-23).
Until the cross of Christ revealed the true nature of God, the whole world—what Paul means by “Jews and Greeks”—expected the divine to be manifest either in feats of earthly power or in impressive intellectual pursuits. The cross, as the wisdom and power of God, showed a different way, and Paul knew that Jesus’s followers must be faithful to that understanding of power and wisdom—the sort that the rest of the world instinctively and categorically rejects as weakness and foolishness. When we are living out the Way of Jesus, we imitate Christ by routinely giving up our own status for the sake of others.
I am beginning to think that the world may need convincing all over again. Although Christianity is no longer a minority religion trying to justify its legitimacy to a hostile world, I think the dominant expression of Christian culture looks more like the religion from which Gentile Christians were converted than the Way of Jesus. Instead of pursuing humility, gentleness, and sacrifice, so-called Christians celebrate their strength, power, and wealth.
Throughout the centuries, Christians have reminded those in power of the importance and value of protecting the vulnerable, welcoming the stranger, and providing for those in need. Followers of Jesus have advocated for the poor and the disenfranchised not because it is politically popular or economically advantageous but because we understand that being Christians compels us to sacrifice our own interest for the sake of others. That Christian moral imperative still exists, but it is being overshadowed by those who use the Bible, the cross, and Jesus Christ to justify their efforts to accumulate wealth, security, and earthly renown.
I don’t think we can convince those who have made a blasphemous, anti-Christian version of the gospel their raison d’être to accept the Way of Jesus by appealing to logic, doctrine, tradition, or conscience. Instead, it will be by embodying that way of sacrifice and suffering that the truth of the gospel of grace gets through to those who do not yet understand it. Only by living and dying with Christ can we make Christ manifest to the world.
Our response, therefore, is not new. It is as old as the Way of Jesus. I propose that we, who believe that Jesus’s call to take up our cross means real sacrifice in this life, begin to embody the sort of evangelism that made Christianity attractive in the first and second centuries. I think we need to commit to radical self-dispossession for the sake of others in the community without regard to how it will help us. I think we need to build up a community of faithful people who are motivated by the welfare of the whole body rather than the individual well-being of its stakeholders.
One of the ways that early Christians convinced pagans to convert to Christianity was their willingness to care for the sick during pandemics. Christians not only took care of other Christians. They sacrificed their lives to care for their non-believing neighbors who had been left behind by family members who had fled the city in the hope of avoiding their own deaths. The Christians knew that tending to the sick would cost them their own lives, but they considered their deaths a way to do what Jesus did—to sacrifice their lives in order to help those in need. Anyone who was wiling to do that, the pagans observed, were either crazy or motivated by love in a powerful way, and the consistency of the Christians’ love for one another and for complete strangers was compelling.
How can we share that joy and deep fulfillment with those who are primarily motivated by earthly power? How can we share the power of God’s love that is the cross of Christ with those who actively reject it? By loving each other, our neighbors, and the whole world just as Christ did. I believe that our commitment to care for others by radically and fully giving up our own safety and security has the power to win hearts and minds to the Way of Jesus.
As the death and resurrection of Jesus shows, God’s plan of salvation will not make sense to those who seek earthly power or earthly wisdom. We cannot use the value system of this world to convince someone to follow Jesus. Anytime we speak of our hope in Christ as if it meant prosperity, security, or superiority of any kind, we are undermining the true power of the cross. We must proclaim to them the real Jesus, the crucified one, whose death is the way that leads to everlasting life.
“When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom,” Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “for I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:1-2). Our only hope is in the one who died for our sake, and he is the true hope of the whole world. We will only make him known by taking up our cross and following him—by loving the world as he loves us.
Yours faithfully,
Evan D. Garner
