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How Foolish We Are! Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis March 23, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill I Corinthians 15:12-28 Luke 24:1-35
Nikos Kazantzakis, in his tale of St. Francis, records the ascetic saint’s words to a novice: “Listen, my child,” Francis says, “each year at Easter I used to watch Christ’s Resurrection. All the faithful would gather around His tomb and weep, weep inconsolably, beating on the ground to make it open. And behold! In the midst of our lamentations the tombstone crumbled to pieces and Christ sprang from the earth and ascended to heaven, smiling at us and waving a white banner. There was only one year I did not see Him resurrected. That year a theologian of consequence, a graduate of the University of Bologna, came to us. He mounted the pulpit in church and began to elucidate the Resurrection for hours on end. He explained and explained until our heads began to swim; and that year the tombstone did not crumble and, I swear to you, no one saw the Resurrection." Such is the fate of many on Easter Sunday morning: the tangible evidence for the resurrection is put before the congregation and appeal is made to a handful of details from ancient history for confirmation of this non-analogous event. The resurrection is explained and explained until our heads begin to swim: an interesting exercise to some but inconsequential, I am afraid, to most. For we leave the church unchanged. Convinced only of the fact that two plus two equals four when we entered, we have been invited to fit the resurrection into that way of knowing. The resurrection does not happen. The Enlightenment is where most of us in truth still begin and end when revelation is made to do business with reason. “What you call a fact,” said Albert Einstein, “depends on the theory you bring to it.” Since the eighteenth century the theory we have brought to human knowing, including our knowledge of God, is the theory that the world gives up its truth to reason. Only what we can in some way measure...what can be tested and reproduced…can be a candidate for truth. “How curious,” said another theologian of consequence, though I would say how stunning in relation to the providence of God “that the pews are swelled by essential strangers to the church’s proclamation on the one Sunday whose premise is the virgin birth and the other Sunday whose starting point is the resurrection." What fools we are to attempt to convince such a smart crowd of this ancient idiocy. Yet our text reminds us that this ancient idiocy was foolishness from the beginning! There was never a time when the world embraced the proclamation of Christ’s death and resurrection. For the early church it was not the Enlightenment and its arrogation of human reason which was problematic. Rather the apostles had to bear witness to the cross as it ran counter to the wisdom of the Greeks and as it flew in the face of the law and the messianic expectations of the Jews. “Morality and religiousness,” according to New Testament scholar Ernst Kasemann, “…in arrogance or in despair…attempt the impossible, namely to effect salvation and to transcend the world. The cross of Jesus still remains scandal and offense for Jew and pagan insofar as it exposes man’s illusion that he can transcend himself, work out his own salvation, and exalt himself against God by his own capabilities, whether of strength, wisdom, piety or self-love.” The early church’s solution to the apparent foolishness of the cross--the scandal of a dead Messiah--was to take refuge in the resurrection as God’s reversal of this ignominious death: the Messiah was never dead but is alive. The scandal was thereby removed for Jewish Christians. As for the Greeks, the Hellenistic-Jewish Christian community borrowed a concept from Wisdom that supposed the benefits of the death of a suffering, righteous person would accrue to believers. The wrath of the gods is satisfied, said Wisdom, by the suffering and sacrifice of an innocent human being. In both cases, theologians of consequence were attempting to fit the crucified and risen Lord into the existing ways of knowing. Paul would bow to none of this. Writing to a church of the culturally accommodated who, on the one hand, denied the resurrection of the body in favor of the Greek notion of the soul's immortality and, on the other hand, believed themselves already resurrected, raised above the reality of this earth and especially above the fact of their own death, Paul as much as rubbed their Corinthian noses in the scandal, in the weakness, in the foolishness of a crucified Messiah and so in the offensiveness of the cross. We preach Christ crucified, he insists. Neither Wisdom nor the Torah nor the culture at large could account for or accommodate a Savior hung on a tree. No human way of understanding ever has because Christ’s death and “resurrection cannot be accommodated in any way of understanding the world except an understanding of which [they are] the starting point,” wrote the late Bishop Leslie Newbigin. What you call the truth, to paraphrase Einstein, depends upon the revelation of God, depends on the light Christ’s death and resurrection shine on it. Start then, says Paul, with Christ crucified--even in the places where the enlightened have gathered to entertain the reasonableness of the Christian claim. Start with Christ crucified not only because it is a foolish place to start for the wise and the strong and the powerful--for those who are perishing, in other words, and do not know it. But start with Christ crucified for the sake of those here today who suddenly know enough to know they are in need of saving, for the sake of those who soon must face the reality of death, for the sake of those who are wrestling with the darkness of sin, the hopelessness of suffering, the sharp sting of the world's rejection. Start with Christ crucified for the sake of any who at least know that nothing they do or think can spare them the fact of being finite. Yet the matter is more enormous than this! Start with Christ crucified because in Christ’s death and resurrection, says Paul, history itself had been snapped in two. The consequences of the cross for Paul were cosmic rather than merely personal! “The death of Christ does not refer primarily to the death of an innocent suffering martyr,” writes Pauline scholar Christiaan Beker, “…it does not mean a new moral beginning for the ‘old’ person, or primarily the forgiveness of…former transgressions so the [one] can begin with a clean slate. To the contrary, the death of Christ addresses itself to sin as a cosmic power and slavemaster, that is, to the human condition ‘under the power of sin.’ It announces the negation of the power of sin that controls the world, and thus it has not only a moral” meaning but a meaning that literally changes the human condition. The death that was, before the cross, in the hands of tyrants is assumed by God in Christ and defeated. Therefore Christ’s resurrection is the first glimpse of life after death—that is to say, not life in the great by and by but of life no longer under death’s dominion! So on this Easter Sunday and in the first place, we proclaim Christ crucified because no other way of understanding the world has as its starting point the truth about death. No immortality of the soul, sidestepping the grave; no new age to be found in the stars, removing our gaze from the temporal and terrible things of this earth; no exclusive exultation of the enlightened, forgetting the inexorable wages of sin which await even the brightest and the best. The foolishness of the Christian faith is that it takes the reality of death with a seriousness no secular philosophy or Gnostic mysticism can bear. The foolishness of the Christian community is that it looks directly into the freshly dug grave, calls death by its true name: the enemy, and confesses, “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” Moreover the foolishness of the community that actually does believe this also looks directly into the eyes of the tyrant who lives under the illusion that the power of death is still in human hands. “Who, after all, was it who didn’t want the dead to be raised?” asks theologian N.T. Wright. “Not simply the intellectually timid or the rationalists. It was, and is, those in power, the social and intellectual tyrants and bullies; the Caesars who would be threatened by a Lord of the world who had defeated the tyrant’s last weapon, death itself….And this,” he says, “is the point where believing in the [death and] resurrection of Jesus suddenly ceases to be a matter of inquiring about an odd event in the first century and becomes a matter of rediscovering hope in the twenty-first century.” Therefore in the second place, we preach Christ crucified on this Easter Sunday because no other words tells the truth about the world in which we really live. The true we tell is two-sided: we live in a world which still rejects, still despises, still hates what it is not; yet we live in the same world God has redeemed. “Paul’s unique contribution to the theology of the cross,” wrote Beker, “is that the dialectic relation of Christ’s death and resurrection [the opposing facts that, when held together, tell the truth] intersects the consecutive relation.” That is to say on the other side of the cosmic divide, resurrection proclaims “Life is not just life after death but life [really dared] in the midst of death.” We preach Christ crucified because the place in the world where God’s redemptive work is revealed is the place of suffering, of hatred, of rejection: the place is the cross! No happy community of the redeemed removed from the tragedies of human sin will do for Christ’s church. The foolishness of the Christian witness is that it is borne for the sake of any who have suffered at the hands of the world’s power and wisdom, whether in church or state, confronting the weakness of the world’s power with the power of God’s weakness and confessing on behalf of those hopelessly in pieces, “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” But finally we preach Christ crucified on this Easter Sunday because no other word has the power to call us, even now, from death to life. So it was with Saul. On a death-dealing road, to one untimely born, to the least of the apostles, to one unfit to be called an apostle, the risen Christ appeared. Saul’s starting point had been the law: that is to say had been the certainty of his own righteousness and wisdom. Saul’s starting point is our own. On that road Saul’s certainty was blind-sided by the risen Lord in the middle of his life, when he had made a name for himself and established a reputation, when he was certain every truth claim had been settled. Just then he was wrenched from certainty and given grace enough to start again: to begin not with the truth he possessed but with the truth that claimed him in the One he had persecuted. “I came to you in weakness,” Paul confessed, “and in fear and in much trembling. My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom….For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” “To proclaim a man who bleeds from his wounds/A God and the ruler of the universe,” writes poet Czeslaw Milosz,
That our species tends to reach for the impossible. To place such a man at the center of the cosmos! And to send out caravels armed with sails and the sign of the cross To take possession of lands and seas. To tidy up interstellar ships And send them into the ocean of space and time. Yet the man from the town of Nazareth Who initiated all this was not a spirit. His body, stretched on the tree of shame, Suffered real torture, about which we try every day to forget. |