EPIPHANY 4
The Wisdom of the Weak

1 Corinthians 1.25   What seems to be God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and what seems to be God's weakness is stronger than human strength.

Few Christian congregations today feel comfortable in their relationship with non-churchgoers, who frequently think of Christians as misguided. Paul faced a similar charge from his fellow Hebrews. They accused him of distorting traditional teachings and consorting with corrupt outsiders.

First, they said, it was highly offensive to suggest that this convicted, crucified criminal called Jesus could have been the glorious Messiah the Hebrews expected would liberate them.

Second, circumcision was a physical passport to God's messianic kingdom. It was nonsensical to accept uncircumcised men into the Hebrew fellowship.

Third, only Hebrews who went through proper cleansing procedures had access to God. To admit ritually unclean Gentiles was foolishness of the most extreme sort.

We should remember that for the first 20 years after Jesus' death his followers were Jews. It's difficult for us today to fully comprehend the staggering cheek of Paul in his time and situation to assert that "this world's wisdom is foolishness". To say this was in effect to reject the sanctity of the Hebrew religion. He endured great suffering as a result, putting his life at risk to contradict traditional wisdom (2 Corinthians 11.16-23). 

It's all-too-easy to mentally place ourselves for Paul and against his Hebrew persecutors. After all, isn't there some similarity between ourselves and Paul? Don't non-Christians also tell us we're talking rubbish, just as they told Paul? Don't they regard our wisdom as foolishness? How often have you or I and recognised almost total incomprehension as we talk about our faith?

But perhaps on the other hand we're rather like the Hebrews. Have we perhaps turned the criminal Jesus into a respectable churchgoer? Hasn't baptism become a sort of spiritual circumcision? And don't we secretly regard outsiders as spiritually unclean because they don't believe as we do?

Or perhaps it's a bit of both.

Let me illustrate. There are those who think - as I once did - that homosexuals are depraved. Then one day realisation dawns that they are people just like me and just as acceptable to God. Or I may regard manual labourers as my inferior - as I once did. One day something happens to open my eyes that money, social position or academic achievement make no difference in God's eyes. Or it may one day dawn on me that though I thought I was worth little as a person, I am loved just as I am.

Such changes of perception are often called "conversion". Conversions are very often lasting because they are not only a matter of the intellect, but become as it were welded into our being by emotion.

There seems to be a potential snag, however. Somehow the converted in their enthusiasm or out of long habit often begin to think that their answer is an absolute truth - the answer, one way or the other, to all life's problems. Anyone who is different must come into the magic circle to be acceptable. A series of fences must be jumped before a person qualifies as a child of God. One is a second-class human until one conforms to norms laid down by the converted.

Christians tend to think that way about non-Christians - which is pretty much how Hebrews once thought about Christians, Paul among them. 

When Paul writes to the Corinthians is these difficult terms, he implies a series of radical truths. Naming Jesus as Messiah grants me no special privileges in the great scheme of things. My weakness can become strength regardless of what rituals have been performed by ecclesiastical officials. God's wisdom, offensive nonsense even to some Christians, belongs to nobody. 

And finally, as Paul states elsewhere (Romans 8.35-39), not even the converted can separate us from God's love.

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