"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]
It is the bullies and blowhards who brag about who they can beat up; it is the living God who identifies with the beaten.
That's the truly scandalous, but deeply beautiful, picture we get of God in Jesus. God chooses to take the place of the victim rather than stand with the victimizers. God chooses silent solidarity with those who suffer, rather than loudly gloating over the defeated and the bruised. That's because of how love works--love is always more concerned to do what is needed for the beloved than to get attention for doing it. Love doesn't need to boast, and it certainly doesn't need to bully. Love is willing even to look foolish to everybody else, and therein is its power.
The apostle Paul knows that sounds like utter nonsense to the logic of the world. That's clear in this powerful sentence that many of us heard this past Sunday in worship. Paul is saying that the logic of God's love runs completely counter to the boastful impulses of the world to intimidate, gloat, and boast. And he shows us how God's love completely confounds the world's thinking at the cross.
The conventional wisdom--and the official position of the Empire, by the way--was that the meaning of the cross was devastatingly final: the Empire won, and Jesus lost. The crucifiers are the winners, said Rome, because they took this person deemed a potential threat and they annihilated him. The Empire believed--and boasted it loudly so that everyone else would believe as well--that the cross of Jesus was proof of its own greatness and power, because they had done their worst to this homeless itinerant rabbi and snuffed out his claims of another kingdom, greater than Rome's. But Paul begged to differ. He insisted that the fact of the cross has to be read differently--and that Rome was getting the meaning of the crucifixion of Jesus completely wrong.
Paul insists that the cross of Jesus doesn't reveal Jesus' defeat at all--just the opposite. It reveals the surprising victory of Jesus, who exhausts the worst possible thing that the powers of the day could do to him, and broke that power open between Friday's cross and Sunday's empty borrowed grave. The cross doesn't show the empire's strength, but rather its impotence--all the empire knows how to do is to kill and smash and destroy, like a toddler throwing a tantrum. And at the very same time, the cross reveals God's quiet strength in the willingness to be made vulnerable, weak-looking, and defeated in the broken body of Jesus. The cross reveals that God has a different kind of power than the one that Rome recognizes, but ultimately God's kind of power can exhaust and outlast all of Rome's efforts. And what's more, God doesn't need to boast about that power--it is evident simply in the way divine love outlasts everything else.
That's just it: Rome looked at the cross of Jesus and said, "We killed him. We are the winners." But Paul insists we look at the cross and see, "Jesus laid down his life for them, even when they had made him their enemies. That's Jesus' victory--and it even redeems his killers." Jesus' kind of victory in the cross will not let our evil, our violence, and our rottenness be the last word about us--rather, the last word over us will be Jesus' own prayer of mercy, "Forgive them, for they don't know what they are doing."
These are two completely different readings of the same exact set of facts. Now, either boastful Rome is right, and Jesus is just one more victim of humanity's wicked need to dominate and destroy. Or Jesus is right, and the cross turns out to be God's hidden way of absorbing the worst we can do, exhausting the power of our evil, and exposing the emptiness of our impulse to build empires and dominate one another. The cross is either proof that might makes right and you have to make an example of your enemies before they rise up to stop you, or the cross is the end of that kind of deathly logic and the victory of God's own quietly self-giving, enemy-embracing love. You could, I suppose, interpret the cross either way--but Paul is insistent that only the second one is correct, over against all of Rome's arrogant protests.
To folks stuck in the logic of empires (past and present), the cross is something to be embarrassed about if you are Jesus, and something to gloat about if you are the one holding the hammer. To the followers of Jesus, however, the cross is the sign of the victorious love of the One who took the nails, because it breaks the power of those who use death to intimidate, and it reconciles even with the enemies of God.
It really amazes me that the earliest followers of Jesus didn't try to hide or soft-pedal the cross of Jesus, or downplay the idea of a crucified Savior--they understood that it's the cross that reveals God's amazing love, and how different that love is from the obnoxious and boastful way of the powers of the day.
Today, it falls to us to continue to speak that revolutionary word, and to live the same kind of love that doesn't need to stand and shout with the bullies, but bears the worst they can dole out.
Where will that direct us in this day?
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