Gracious God, help us to follow your way of the cross which is the way of life. Amen.
This Holy Week, we continue to consider different ways of approaching the cross, as it is something like a gem that shimmers differently depending on how the light hits it. Tonight, by focusing on the reading from First Corinthia
ns, we see that the cross subverts all that we thought that we knew about the order of the world.We all have things that we take for granted – that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, that the next election will be contentious, that we will drink a cup of coffee in the morning. Things that we take for granted are based on things that we have observed so many times that we no longer need to think about, we can just assume that they will happen. Well, one thing that we take for granted, and this was true not only in St. Paul’s time but also ours, is that power goes to the victors, that strength is seen in triumph over enemies, that the winner is the last one standing. Sure, we love watching an upset in sports where the favored team loses, but over the long haul, the winner is always the biggest, fastest, strongest, and most well-financed. This is just how things work, and so we take it for granted that we know what a winning recipe looks like.
The cross explodes these sorts of assumptions. As we heard, “The message about the cross is foolishness.” The word here for foolishness is moria, where we get our word “moron.” There is nothing polite or subtle about this. The cross is utter nonsense only to be believed by morons. The Cross flies in the face of everything we have been taught and every pattern we take for granted. Because we are so used to seeing crosses in churches, tattoos, art, and jewelry, we sometimes miss the shock of this. The cross is a shameful and repugnant symbol of death and execution. In Deuteronomy, we read “Cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree.” In any other context, the cross would be seen as something offensive and inappropriate. Actually, when we first introduced the altar crucifix in Lent several years ago, it was met with some resistance of exactly the right kind. Several people were turned off by there being a body on the cross and they said it made them uncomfortable. That’s exactly the point.
Yes, we interpret the cross on this side of Easter, but the cross remains an instrument of torture and degradation. The cross calls into question and subverts all of those things that we have taken for granted about what power, strength, and victory are all about. As we know, it is when we take things for granted that we can miss new learnings and opportunities. The cross shows us the grain of the universe – the direction in which things run. And what we see in the cross is that love is stronger than death, that vulnerability is more courageous than authority, that power is found in being resolute more than it is in being strong, that winning comes through faithfulness and not through domination.
When we live with these things as our central truths, we are put in alignment with God and find that the way of the cross really is the way of life. If the cross reveals to us what is the epitome of truth, goodness, and beauty, which we believe that it does, then everything about modern society is subverted. Our priorities are shifted from trying to have more and be better to being obedient to God and open and vulnerable through love. Our focus is no longer on getting to the top, but rather finding the blessings and joy of humility. Our values are no longer on making our name great, but rather on using our lives to point towards the one through whom we are given abundant and eternal life: Jesus Christ. In the Gospel, John the Baptist says of Jesus, “He must increase and I must decrease.” This is the subverting power of the cross – it shames and subverts the broken and sinful order of this world and points us toward the unfathomable and inexhaustible love of God.
This is why St. Paul writes “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.” What we are proud of is reoriented by the cross because the old assumptions about power and victory are exposed as temporary and partial. Sure, we can plan the real-life game of Monopoly and try to amass a fortune, and even if we succeed in that, when we die, the money is gone. We can live for pleasure, but all the pleasure in the world will not fill the void of emptiness we carry in our souls. We can have all sorts of awards and achievements, but our own family won’t even remember our names in just a few generations. No matter what we may have to boast about, it is all vanity. In reality, it is our modern sensibilities that are foolishness.
The cross is God’s way of shocking us and awakening us to true wisdom. This does not though mean that the way of the cross is an easy one to walk. To a world that still lives by the values that put Jesus on the cross, things like obedience, humility, mercy, and love are still seen as rather foolish. We will likely be seen as fools for living in such a way to be oriented towards the cross of Christ. So we pray on this Holy Tuesday that God would grant us the courage and grace to align ourselves with the folly of the cross. And we ask that the Spirit would meet us in our following with the peace that passes all understanding so that we might keep our hearts and minds in knowledge and love of Christ crucified.
