“For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's
weakness is stronger than human strength.” I Corinthians 1:25*
Before the gospel is good news, it is paradox, so when Paul
describes the cross of Christ, the only way he can do so is with paradoxical
statements: foolishness is greater than wisdom and weakness is better than
strength. Might as well say green is yellow and down is up!
In our world, from sports to entertainment to business, we
love and celebrate winners. We don’t waste our time on the losers—in fact, we
ignore them. Who can recall the loser of the last year’s Super Bowl?
In King Lear,
Shakespeare pictures a world is which the philosophy of winning at all costs
has prevailed. The characters who seem to be winning are those like Regan and
Goneril and Edmund who are willing to lie, cheat, steal, and bully to gain
power. By contrast, the characters like Kent and Edgar and Cordelia who
demonstrate love and loyalty and self-sacrifice appear weak and ineffectual—in
short, losers. Paradoxically, the characters who appear to be weak and foolish
by human standards are strong and wise when measured by divine standards. As
Lear says of Cordelia’s death, “with such sacrifices the gods are pleased.”
Paul, it seems, wants to encourage his readers in Corinth
not to view Jesus’s death on the cross as a loss, but rather as a victory—one
that demonstrated once and for all the rejection of the values of power and
violence in favor of those values that Jesus lived: welcome, acceptance,
inclusion, and self-sacrificial love. It demonstrated once and for all that
love conquers hate, that the foolishness of God is wiser than the world’s
wisdom and that the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.
Loving God, grant us a clear vision so we may reject the
violence and abuse of power so evident in our world and practice instead your
radical welcome and self-sacrificial love. Amen.
*Third Sunday of Lent
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