1 Cor 1.10-31
Where’s The Wise Guy?

“The one who dies with the most toys, wins.”

That was a bumper sticker that was popular in the eighties. It was the rallying cry of the Yuppies; young, upwardly mobile professionals who marked their status by buying extravagant toys for themselves.

Of course, it wasn’t just about the BMW, or the power boat, or the expensive clothes themselves. It was about other people noticing that you had the BMW, and the power boat, and the expensive clothes. It was about status; what other people thought of you; how you were viewed by those around you.

For an earlier generation the goal was a nice house in the suburbs, two cars in the driveway and an immaculate lawn;  “Keeping up with the Jones.” Someone once described “keeping up with the Joneses” as “spending money you don’t have, to buy things you don’t need, to impress people you don’t like.”

I was talking with someone this week who works with refugees here in Hamilton. Her daughter is trying to become a professional musician; and the refugees she works with simply can’t understand why she would let her daughter do that. Surely the only acceptable jobs for your children are as doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects, or maybe nurses or teachers? Something with some status!

We all have our own ideas of what conveys status. Certainly, in many circles, big houses and fancy cars continue to mark you out as someone to be reckoned with. In other circles, it’s riding your bike to work and recycling everything to reduce your ecological footprint that will win you the respect of your friends and colleagues. In other circles it may be the number of letters after your name. You often see that with older church congregations who will list their pastor as “The Reverend Doctor so-and-so BA MA PhD AAMFT” and so on. We may use different yardsticks to measure status, but we all make judgements about who deserves our respect and honour.

Getting to the top?

That universal human habit of ranking people on a scale of honour and respect is one of the core issues that Paul deals with in his letter to the Corinthians.

¹⁰ I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought. ¹¹ My brothers, some from Chloe’s household have informed me that there are quarrels among you. ¹² What I mean is this: One of you says, “I follow Paul”; another, “I follow Apollos”; another, “I follow Cephas”; still another, “I follow Christ.”

The word translated “divisions” is the word used to describe a tear in a fishing net or garment. Paul isn’t talking about people not disagreeing. We all have limited understanding, so we will never all agree on everything. What he’s pleading for is that we agree not to tear apart the body of Christ for our own petty reasons.

The Corinthians had taken to identifying themselves with different labels; “I follow Paul”;“I follow Apollos,” and so on, but it wasn’t about doctrine.

One of the ways that you achieved status in Corinth was by being well spoken. Not in the sense of being polite, but in the sense of being able to talk circles around your enemies and demolish them in public debate. Wealthy people would send their children to study with great orators so they could learn these skills. In many cases, it wasn’t about learning to communicate truth clearly. It was about learning to be what today we would call a “spin-doctor,” someone who can bend words so that they appear wise and their opponents appear stupid. It was about learning to use the power of words to your own advantage.

As we’ll see as we go through the letter, some people in the church in Corinth felt that Paul was really second rate as a speaker so they wanted to hitch their wagon to another star, like Apollos, who, Acts tells us, was a great speaker. But it wasn’t about what they taught. It was about status, about being one-up on someone else because you’re associated with someone famous.

Last year we planted “Morning Glory” in our back yard. It’s a pretty flower, with trumpet shaped blooms, but it can’t support itself. It climbs up other plants that have a strong stem. That’s the way these people in Corinth were behaving. They were attaching themselves to important names so they could climb higher than their brothers and sisters. It was all about the competition and status seeking that defined the culture of Corinth.

All churches are shaped to some extent by their environment. If you’re one of those people who listen to podcasts of preachers, you can usually tell within the first few minutes what kind of audience they’re speaking to. Tim Keller, who ministers to the urban professionals of downtown Manhattan, sounds very different from someone whose audience lives mainly in America’s Bible belt.

In some ways that’s a good thing. As Christians, as churches, we need to be addressing the issues and questions that fill the lives of the people around us. If we don’t do that, then we’re not being faithful to God’s call on our lives.

But the danger is that, rather than addressing our culture with the gospel, we allow ourselves to be shaped by the culture around us. And so, for instance, you get churches that preach a “prosperity gospel” that glorifies greed and has more to do with the American dream than it has to do with the gospel. They’ve allowed the culture, rather than the gospel, to shape the church. At the other end of the scale you have churches that ordain practising homosexuals. They, too, have allowed the culture, rather than the gospel, to shape the church.

Those are some of our society’s issues. The Corinthians’ issue here was status seeking; but I think that Paul’s response is still valid for us, no matter what the issue. He points them, and us, back to the cross.

Or looking to the cross?

¹³ Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized into the name of Paul?

He says, “It’s not about me, or Apollos, or anyone else. It’s about Christ, and there’s only one of him. It’s Christ and the good news about him that needs to be our focus.”

¹⁷ For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel—not with words of human wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.

The gospel is the message of the cross. I believe that we need to work hard at making that message clear to people, in terms that they understand. But it’s the content of the message that God uses to bring people to himself, not how slickly we package it or how powerfully we deliver it.

And it’s the content of the gospel that brings the real division. ¹⁸ For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

It is politically incorrect to say this; but the gospel divides the world, into those who are perishing and those who are being saved. Jesus said as much himself, ³⁴ “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword… anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. ³⁹ Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. (Matt 10:34,38,39)

“The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

The message of the cross is a fork in the road. Those who see it as foolishness take one fork, and are on their way to perishing. Those who see that the cross is God at work to save the human race take the other fork, and are on their way to being saved.

Where’s the wise guy?

The Corinthians had it all wrong. Being a Christian is not about how smart or how eloquent you are. God says in the book of Isaiah that he will, “destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.” And to a church that was proud of its intellectual status Paul says, ²⁰ Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?

Paul is not anti-intellectual. Far from it! He was a top notch scholar in his own right. From his writing it’s clear he had a razor sharp mind. He had had the best education possible. He had studied under Gamaliel, the leading bible scholar of his day. He spoke Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek. He knew the Bible inside out and backwards. He knew Greek writers too. He quotes them from memory in Athens. He might even have known some Latin, but probably the way I know French. (I can read cereal boxes – why is it always the French side that faces you in the morning? – and I can manage research papers with a dictionary, but I can’t carry on a conversation.)

Paul wasn’t against education; but he was against finding your value and your status in education. He was against giving highly educated people some kind of preferential treatment or power. And that is a message we still need to hear today, maybe even more so, as we look to scientists and experts as the high priests of our culture.

The cross turns things upside-down

And why is Paul sceptical about the power of education, of “wisdom” and “knowledge?” Because, ^“the world through its wisdom did not know God.” You see, there are limits to what human wisdom and understanding can discover. When the Russians first went into orbit one of the messages they sent back was, “No God here!” As if they expected to see an old guy with a beard floating alongside them in orbit. That was foolishness pretending to be wisdom. We may be able to come up with all kinds of theories about what we think God should be like, but hat’s just theory and speculation. We can only know God as God reveals himself to us. And that’s what he does in the cross.

“God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe.

This is how the gospel “works,” if I can put it that way. Christ’s death on the cross is proclaimed as God’s revelation of himself and his love for sinners. (That’s what that word “preached” means, “proclaimed.” You can proclaim it loudly from a pulpit, or you can proclaim it quietly in a conversation with a friend in Tim Hortons. What’s important is the content, not the style.) And God’s good plan is to restore people who believe that message to relationship with him. It’s that simple! You hear the gospel message; that God came to earth in Jesus Christ and died on the cross to open the way back to our Heavenly Father. You believe that this is true. God accepts you on the basis of that belief and restores you into relationship with him. You’ve taken the right fork in the road and you become one of those who are being saved.

It really is that simple! And it’s the simplicity of the gospel that’s the problem. Because, ²² Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, ²³ but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles,

The Jews thought they knew what to expect when God’s plan of salvation went into action. They were looking for miraculous signs. The messiah would be like Moses in the desert, carrying out miracles on a massive scale; rolling back the sea, making food and water appear out of nowhere for millions of people. He would be like King David, subduing all the surrounding nations and building an empire centred on Jerusalem. They were wrong.

To the extent that Greeks were looking for any kind of saviour it would have to be some kind of god-man from the Greek myths; physically beautiful, able to project power and authority through his words, some kind of semi-divine being. In fact, you can find a lot of parallels between modern super heroes and Greek mythological figures.

Today we have people pedalling all kinds of ways of salvation. At one end you have the spiritual approach of preachers like Oprah who encourage us to discover that we really are God, we just didn’t know it. At the other end you have the wise men, the educated elite who tell you that they understand the universe and you just have to put yourself in their hands and you’ll be fine.

What no-one is looking for is a poor man who was executed as a criminal on a cross. For the Jews the idea of a crucified Messiah was an oxymoron, like “dry water.” For Greeks, like the people of Corinth, the cross was a scandal. (The word translated “stumbling block” is the Greek word “scandalon.”) Although crucifixion was a well known fact, you didn’t mention it in polite conversation. It was deeply offensive. Far from giving anyone status, all the cross communicated was social stigma and vulgarity. Crucifixion was about taking away status, not giving it. But that is how God chose to restore humanity to himself, by turning everything upside down. As one writer puts it, “In the cross of Christ, God has affirmed nothings and nobodies.”

And that’s exactly where Paul goes next. ²⁶ Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth.

Most of us are nothings and nobodies. Most of us will never get our names in the newspapers. We’ll never be on TV. We’ll never change the world. They won’t name streets or buildings after us when we’re dead. The only people who will mark our passing will be those close to us, those who have known us. And that’s OK, because…God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. ²⁸ He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, ²⁹ so that no one may boast before him.

The Corinthians had nothing to boast about, and neither do we. As Paul says, not many of them were anything before they became believers, but now some of them see the church as a place to gain some kind of power that they’ve been unable to attain to in other areas of their lives. They’re trying to become big fish in a little pond. That’s still a problem in the church today. We’ll be having our annual meeting in a few weeks and electing people to positions in the church. The temptation is always to use any position to advance your own power or your own agenda, to try to become a big fish.

The antidote to that is to remember that, ³⁰ It is because of [God] not anything you’ve done or anything you’ve achieved that you are in Christ Jesus.

On that basis we are all equal; the newest believer and the oldest saint; the university professor with multiple degrees and the child in kidzchurch; the successful businessperson and the guy who hasn’t had a job in years. As the old saying says, “the ground is level at the foot of the cross.” Nobody has any status except that which comes from Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption.

Where do you get your value, you status? Is it from how smart you are, or how athletic you are, or how good looking you are, or what you’ve achieved? All that we have comes from God. Not only those things but: our righteousness, our acceptance by God, is a gift from him. Our holiness, being made more like him, is something that God is working in us by his Spirit. Our redemption, our freedom from bondage and oppression, is something that he has achieved. We have nothing to boast about, except that Jesus Christ has come into our lives and is changing us to be more like him.

 ³¹ Therefore, as it is written: “Let anyone who boasts boast in the Lord.”