The Foolishness of God--May 13, 2022

The Foolishness of God--May 13, 2022

"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. for God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength." [1 Corinthians 1:22-25]

My kids were just about the ideal age to be the target audience for the Disney movie "Frozen" when it came out, and I have to admit, too, that movie surprised me.  For one, I guess I never expected to see my son as a preschooler belting out "Let It Go," or even Olaf the talking snowman's song, "In Summer," at the top of his lungs around our living room. But it was the ending that really threw me for a loop, because all of my expectations for how the story was "supposed to go" were turned upside-down.  And honestly, I'm really thankful for that.

Now, the movie's been out for nearly ten years and has spawned a sequel, tv spin-offs, and countless other merchandising opportunities, so you may well already know the big twist.  But--spoiler alert--I was floored that the movie's climactic moment of heroism wasn't a battle where a valiant knight or warrior or fought off a villain, or where some variant of Prince Charming kissed an endangered princess.  Instead, (again, spoiler alert), Queen Elsa is saved from an unexpected opponent when her sister Anna sacrifices herself in an act of self-giving sisterly love.  The love that saves the day isn't shallow romanticism, and the triumph of good doesn't come at the point of a sword, but in fact destroys the villain's sword against the ice that Anna becomes at the final moment as she succumbs to a frozen heart.  It took all the old tropes about fairy tales, especially decades' worth of Disney-fied fairy tales, and turned them upside down.  It wasn't what anybody was expecting--and yet, it was exactly the kind of story we were hungry for without knowing it.

I can remember sitting in a darkened theater, my jaw hanging open, as I realized that this story wasn't what I was expecting, and that it wasn't what I had seen a million times before in children's animated movies.  The character who seemed to be breaking toward being cast as a tragic villain is rescued, the most naive and self-absorbed character turns out to be selfless and brave, and nobody needs to kiss or kill their way into victory.  It was marvelously refreshing.

Something like that is what Paul wants us to see in the Christian story as well.  The gospel is centered on God's victory, to be sure, but it is a strange and unexpected kind of victory.  It's not won by supernatural spectacle, raw political or military power, or advanced technological know-how and strategy.  God's victory, God's strength, and God's wisdom, are all seen most clearly, not on a cosmic battlefield, not in a duel of wits like a chess match between good and evil, and not even in some obvious gesture of derring-do.  Jesus doesn't slay a dragon or rescue a damsel in some tower while riding up in gleaming armor--he dies. And not just that he dies, he dies with utter shame, humiliation, brutality, and dehumanization from the powers of the day.  He dies at the hands of the empire, which gloats and worsens the pain in every way it knows how, as a way of intimidating and threatening everybody who see this wretched human form lynched on a stake of wood.  And even though it certainly seems like an utter loss and a humiliating defeat for God, the scandalous news is that this turns out to be the very way God triumphs--even if it's not what anybody expected.

I love the way former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams puts it:  "Jesus crucified is God crucified, so we believe. Jesus is the total and final embodiment in history of God's loving mercy; and so this cross is a unique, terrible, extreme act of violence--a summary of all sin.  It represents the human rejection of love. And not even that can destroy God: with the wounds of the cross still disfiguring his body, he returns out of hell to his disciples and wishes them peace...whatever the deficiency and the drying up of the human capacity to love, the killing of love by pain, there is still, at the heart of everything, a love that cannot be killed by pain."  That's it--it's the surprise victorious ending nobody saw coming, because we have all been conditioned to expect that winners kill their enemies rather than dying for them, and we expect obvious heroics when God prefers to overturn our expectations with a win that looks like loss and a divine comedy that at first only reads as a tragedy.

We still live in a world where it the default expectation is that winners have to humiliate and demolish the losers.  We still live in a time where demagogues like to brag about their greatness, their power, their influence, their wealth, and their genius--only to have the gospel come along and tell us that is all the exact opposite of the way of God.  To a world that proudly sings, "They'll know we are winners by our power," the community gathered around the cross sings an alternative song in graceful defiance:  "They'll know we are Christians by our love."  We have learned that tune from Jesus, the Crucified One.  We have seen in his way the surprise victory of God.

Now our challenge is to sing it wherever we go--both to a skeptical world full of empires and big deals who still think they need to demolish and intimidate, but also to fellow respectable religious folks who have been swindled into that kind of antichrist thinking and believe it is God's way.  It's time--as Queen Elsa might sing to us--to let go of that old, cliche and deathly way of thinking and living our lives.  It's time to tell the story of God's unexpected victory through a cross.

Lord Jesus, give us the courage and joy to sing your surprising song to a world still caught in the old ways of domination and fear.