Sermon by Noel K. Anderson, First Presbyterian Church of Upland, September 6, 2020
TEXT: 1 corinthians 1: 12-25
BACKGROUND
Corinth, California—Corinth, the first city of Greece, was diverse, pluralistic, wealthy with a large slave population, and a home for ancient elites. Corinth was the California of its day, a combination of San Francisco, Laguna Beach, LA, and Palm Springs. Like Newport Beach in the 70s, it was the place to be, and like California, it was a cauldron of pop philosophies and many kinds of spirituality. Variations in sexuality was the norm. Corinth was well-to-do, and even the lower classes took pride in the eloquence of being from Corinth.
To boil it down to a few words, Corinth was driven by its love of eloquence, wisdom, and superiority.
Amid the many competing worldviews, the young churches—planted by Paul himself—were tending toward division. House churches formed around cliques: rich with rich, woke with woke, charismatic with charismatic, and so on.
Paul founded the church at Corinth. He brought the gospel to Corinth and started the fire. He had been publicly beaten and humiliated by the Corinthian government in the past, and the growing church—and its many house churches—had begun to challenge Paul’s authority. Eloquent speakers, pseudo-philosophers, had eroded the central message and adapted the gospel to accommodate their various philosophies and fashionable ways of thinking.
Someone—or a group of someones—had written to Paul for help in solving their divisive disputes (unfortunately, the letter itself is lost to history), but 1 Corinthians is Paul’s response. And Paul, though claiming to have little interest in eloquence, writes a truly eloquent letter. The form of the letter was a well-known style of oration (Corinth was packed with great orators) called homonia. A homonia was a speech delivered to a city, addressing the entire city as though it were a single body. It was a kind of health report—think of Dr. Fauci at a press conference, instructing the nation to wear masks and wash our hands, but with the language that the nation is a body that we are all responsible for keeping healthy.
Paul uses this style to address the one church of Corinth that had fallen into many divisions, and he writes to encourage them to act and function like a single body, which in Christ they are.
The key issue for Corinth was division—not unlike the divisions we know as Californians. What divides Californians? You name it—politics, faith, spirituality, and of course, sports.
The antidote? Paul brings them back to the cross.
FOOLISHNESS OF THE CROSS
The chief problem with Christianity, from the very beginning, was the crucifixion. No one in the world had a hero who ended up crucified, let alone a deity. But the problem goes beyond this, because when Paul talks about the cross, he doesn’t mean just Good Friday; he means the whole series of events: suffering, humiliation, death, the tomb, resurrection, and ascension to Heaven. Every bit of this proved problematic for people, so Paul is aware that in the eyes of the world, this new gospel seems like foolishness.
Paul says, “the Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom.” The Jews demanded signs because they believed that such signs were possible. They believed God could do anything, so they expected signs from God as authorization as to who and what was of God and what was not. The cross is the stumbling block, because to those Jews who did not experience the resurrected Christ, all they saw for a sign was a prophet teacher who got crucified. That was less than a sign; it was an anti-sign—signifying to them beyond all shadow of a doubt that God was not on that person’s side. They looked at Jesus and saw a pretender to the Messianic title whom Rome killed, and therefore not the Messiah. The cross is the problem.
Likewise, the Greeks would have found it bizarre that this group of Christians followed a man whose destiny had been sealed in crucifixion. How strange should it seem? How have we become desensitized and grown used to the scandal of the cross? From the world’s eyes, we Christians are utterly crazy, for we follow and worship one who was captured, humiliated, tortured, and killed two thousand years ago.
It’s right that we should remind ourselves with fresh eyes that the crosses we wear even as jewelry—polished gold or silver—that these are worse than electric chairs. These are the instruments of the most brutal death Rome could devise. They are icons of capital punishment.
Aside from the offense of Jesus’ defeat (in earthly eyes), the Greeks were put off by the idea of resurrection—specifically, bodily resurrection.
We’ll be talking about Gnosticism and the context it created as we go through Corinthians, but for today, just know that the Greeks would have thought Jesus better off without a body. They had no trouble with the idea that He ascended through the heavens, but once He was purely spirit, why on Earth would he bother wearing lowly flesh again? The Greeks found this ludicrous, laughable.
And so the cross is foolishness to the Jews and the Greeks. But to these we need to add the modern world, which also sees it as foolish, perhaps for the same reasons, but also for many others.
We don’t need to dignify the insults and offenses of the past 15o years, but we do need to take every care not to minimize the cross in our proclamation.
BEWARE CORINTH, CA
The cross is central to the gospel. No cross, no gospel.
If you look through church history, you’ll find it unfortunately full of folks who have tried to present something like a cross-less Christianity. They’re usually very upbeat and pride themselves on being very positive. These churches tend to do well, because they are joy factories week to week and make people feel good. Personally, I put Norman Vincent Peale, Robert Schuller, and Joel Osteen into this group. I may be mistaken, but I never—never—hear them speaking about the cross. They’re fine about resurrection and having high self-esteem, and living your best life now—and they will talk about Jesus as great example of upbeat, positive thinking—but they stay away from the cross.
Like the people of Corinth, we can tend toward a love of eloquence, a preference for wisdom above love, and find ourselves in service to some vague, personal ideas of superiority.
Take a look at our crosses—our Protestant crosses—what’s wrong with them? They’re clean, anesthetized, bloodless, painless, and pretty. When I was young, I remember a lady at church explaining to me: “This is the cross of the RISEN Christ!” That’s a nice idea—I’m not against it—but it is incomplete. For every cross you have, be it on your wall or around your neck, you need to have a crucifix as well—a cross with Jesus on it, suffering and dying, for that is what the cross is all about. The clean, silver cross doesn’t offend or scandalize anyone, which is an indication that it does not participate in the gospel as Paul and the Apostles understand it.
The cross is central—absolutely central—and whenever we minimize the offense and scandal of the cross, we present a watered-down Christianity, a message tarted up to appeal to the easily offended.
SCANDAL OF THE CROSS
Let us instead commit—or recommit—ourselves to the central proclamation. Let us never neglect the cross at the center of the gospel and let us rather embrace the shame of it.
We, like the early church, are meant to be one body—one body in Christ. We are called to sacrifice our eloquence, our secondary philosophies (yes, that includes politics), and any secondary spirituality that might threaten our unity in Christ.
We stand by the simple, troublesome stumbling block of the cross, and we know of no Christ other than the one who was incarnate, suffered, was crucified, buried, and is raised—bodily—to all power, glory, and authority in Heaven and on Earth.
As we prepare to receive Him at the table, may we long for the unity in Him with the same longing He has expressed to us.