"For 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." (1 Corinthians 1:18)
The world has some assumptions about how things get done.
For example, the world's loud voices these days insist that the way to succeed is through brute force. You shoot first, and ask questions later... or preferably not at all. You get the other guy before they get you. You look out for your own interests, and you bully everybody else until they give in and surrender what you want. Conventional wisdom calls all of that being a "winner," and it can't stand the thought of being called a "loser." The loud voices, the talking heads on TV, and the bombastic barkers at podiums will all insist that in "the real world," this is just how things have to be--you resort to force, coercion, and threats, and you do it before the other side can do it to you.
To such a perspective, the notion of a God who saves the world by dying for it sounds like nonsense, pure and simple. It looks weak. It seems like defeat. It makes God to be a loser, rather than a winner. And the logic of the world just can't accept that.
It's interesting to me that one of the titles Caesar applied to himself was "Savior." If you asked the Empire what a Savior looked like, Rome's response would have been, "Salvation is when we come to conquer you, and the emperor leading the charge is the savior. Hail Caesar, the Savior of the World!" For the Empire looming in the background when Paul wrote this letter, "saving" was about applying brute force to make others do what you wanted them to do. The Romans were proud of "saving" the lands and peoples they conquered from any undesirable barbarian opposition. They were bringing "civilization," "prosperity," and "health" to all whom they conquered. And they seriously thought that made them the liberators, the good guys, the saviors. I suppose if you tell yourself long enough that you are unquestionably the hero, you start to believe it--and from there, it's easy to assume that anybody you are opposed to is a villain, and your very act of vanquishing them is what makes you a savior. It's terribly circular logic, but that's how empires think.
The Christian claim, by contrast, sounds completely bonkers to that sort of worldview. Instead of the Savior as the one commanding armies, killing enemies, and defeating any and all resistance, the One whom Christians confess as Savior got crucified by the empire, praying for God's forgiveness for his executioners, breaking the cycle of violence, and laying down his life rather than taking somebody else's. That's the crucial (literally) difference: the world insists that victory looks like zapping your adversaries to show them you are more powerful, and the message of the cross says that God's victory comes as Jesus puts his body between the murderous powers of death and those who are in its target sights. There are two competing pictures of strength out there in the world, you could say: one insists that power means you obliterate your opponents to make everyone else fall in line, and the alternative says that real strength looks like offering up your life to shield and guard someone else and make sure that they are going to be ok. Paul insists that the power of God is the latter of the two, and you see it supremely in the cross of Christ.
To be a follower of Jesus is to be called to share in an upside-down point of view. We are called, not just to recite a creed that Jesus is Lord and Savior, but to recognize that if we confess Jesus as Lord and Savior, then we are committed to his way of saving rather than the world's kind. We will be the ones who lay down our lives for others, but we will not give in to bullying and intimidating others. We will be the ones who shield others with our bodies, but we will not be the ones to threaten or harm. We will interrupt the age-old cycles of violence and retribution, but we will not repeat them. And even when the loudest voices of the world tell us that we look like fools for that sort of cross-shaped way of life, we'll know that in truth we are tapped into the real power of God.
Today those two competing pictures of power are on display. The choice for us is this: whose version of strength will guide us today--the conquering sort used by every empire in history, or the cross-shaped kind revealed in Christ Jesus?
Lord Jesus, enable us to see the world through your kind of power--the self-giving love of the cross.
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