Cross-Shaped World
Does it bother you when other people use Christian language to justify behaviors or beliefs that you think are antithetical to the Way of Jesus? Yeah, me too. Often we hear these sorts of statements from individuals who belong to a different denomination than our own, but occasionally it is the people who worship right beside us who speak about God, Jesus, the Bible, sin, judgment, heaven, and hell and their collective implications for public life that we find astonishing. How can someone who prays to the same God and receives Communion at the same rail believe the exact opposite of us? How can they read the same Bible and hear the same sermon and claim that Jesus is on their side instead of ours?
In the Rector’s Bible Study, we are two weeks into an in-depth exploration of 1 Corinthians, and it seems that Paul faced a similar problem in Corinth. After spending eighteen months introducing an economically, socially, culturally, ethnically, and politically diverse community to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, Paul left under duress. As was often the case for the Apostle to the Gentiles, the things he had been saying about God and Jesus had gotten under the skin of both the Jewish and non-Jewish authorities in town. The Gospel’s message that, in Christ, the non-elites of society (e.g. notorious sinners, freed slaves, displaced veterans, and women) had been included in the egalitarian family of God was not popular among those with power, and Paul and his companions had been arrested, beaten, and eventually chased out of town.
During the year or two after he left, however, things turned sideways in Corinth. Apollos, another apostle, arrived in Corinth and continued the work that Paul had begun. Of that shared endeavor, Paul later wrote, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth” (1 Cor. 3:6). Somehow, though, the Christian community in Corinth began to splinter. Apollos was a gifted speaker—more so than Paul. According to Acts 18, his rhetoric was so polished and powerful that he consistently refuted his opponents during public debate. Although many of the details are lost to us, we gather from Paul’s letters and from Acts that some of the Corinthian Christians began to align themselves with Apollos’ more philosophical approach, while others preferred Paul’s more earthy tone.
For Paul, the news that the church he had planted—a church that had attracted and united people from all walks of life—was now divided along intellectual and, thus, economic and cultural lines was devastating. In the cross of Christ, God had untied humanity to Godself and to each other, yet somehow the proclamation of the cross in Corinth had done the exact opposite, splitting once-untied Christians into bitterly opposed factions. Sound familiar?
Apparently, Paul was so angry that he wrote a rash letter to Corinth—the existence and character of which is verified in 1 Corinthians though the text did not survive and which seems to have done more harm than good. The letter we know as 1 Corinthians is Paul’s attempt to repair their relationship and set the record straight, and in it he boldly claims that unity is an undeniable imperative for the church.
In the opening chapter of 1 Corinthians, Paul writes,
The word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God…For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God (1 Cor. 18, 21-24)
With these words, Paul claims that what happened on the cross is not only evidence of Jesus’ divinely appointed mission but a sign of God’s true power and wisdom—a category of power and wisdom that are unknown to the world. As Paul understands them, real power and truth are found not in expressions of earthly might or understanding but in what is revealed to us in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
Paul’s language about Jews and Greeks is not intended to disparage either group but to highlight the universal nature of the world’s rejection of God’s other-worldly power and wisdom. As he understands it, the entire world could be divided into two groups—Jews and non-Jews—and, while the children of Abraham were accustomed to looking for evidence of God in miraculous feats of power (i.e. signs) and while the rest of the world sought truth and divinity through philosophy and learning (i.e. wisdom), only those who had been called to follow Jesus, regardless of their ethnic identity, could perceive God’s true power and wisdom. Paul was distraught that the Corinthian church had lost its way.
Perhaps Paul should not have been surprised to learn that the Christians in Corinth had begun to undermine the message of the cross with an affection for impressive rhetoric, polished speech, and higher learning. Maintaining a sense of community is always easier when everyone comes from the same background, speaks the same language, has the same level of education, earns approximately the same amount, and lives in the same neighborhood. Church is hard when we take seriously the belief that, in Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female.
After Paul had left and a new, more intellectual preacher had taken his place, the church in Corinth began to split between those who liked rhetorically sophisticated sermons and those found those sermons pretentious. It may not have been as simple as dividing the congregation among purely demographic lines, but the effect was to separate the rich from the poor, the powerful from the weak, and the connected from the outcast. As Paul understood the schism, some Christians had claimed that the Way of Jesus only made sense to intellectually gifted people, which for Paul was the antithesis of what God had done for the world in the cross of Christ. His letter to Corinth sought to undo that.
For Paul, the only way to make sense of the world is through the lens of the cross—the self-emptying, self-sacrificing love of God in the death of Jesus Christ. As those who have been reconciled to God through the cross, that message must define us completely. A cross-shaped church does not use Jesus to accomplish its agenda; it submits itself to the will of God in all things.
If, as Paul claimed, the cross of Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God, God’s will can always be discerned by the language of the Magnificat. Mary’s song reminds us that, if something works toward the pulling down of the haughty and the lifting up of the lowly, it is of God. If something helps fill the hungry with good things while sending the rich away empty, it is of God. Those who claim that Jesus is on the side of the rich and powerful or that following Jesus will make you prosperous and secure are not proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ but the idolatrous and blasphemous false gospel of earthly power and wisdom.
What are we supposed to do when we disagree with other Christians? Can someone be right and faithful if they speak about Jesus in ways that we find antithetical to our understanding of the Gospel? Some of our differences cannot be reconciled in this world. Sometimes people who are equally motivated by God’s preference for the poor and vulnerable still disagree.
Nevertheless, we are called by God to “be united in the same mind and the same judgment” (1 Cor. 1: 10). How is that possible? In the unity that is accomplished for us in the cross of Christ. If we believe that, in the cross, God has reconciled all things, we believe in a God who invites us to let go of our need to be right even about important, godly matters. God is not asking us to make sure that everyone agrees with us but to seek the unity that comes from the cross. That unity is not our doing but the gift of God—a gift given not only to us but to the whole world.
Yours faithfully,
Evan D. Garner
