THE FOOLISHNESS AND MYSTERY OF THE CROSS

I Corinthians 1:18-31

Isaiah 44:24-28


 The message of the cross:

"For God so loved the world, that God offered up God’s one of a kind Son as a sacrifice for our sins, so that whoever clings to, trusts in and relies on him shall not come to destruction and be lost, but have everlasting life.  For God did not send God’s Son into the world to pass sentence on the world but that the world may be saved, reconciled and made whole through the Son." (Based on John 3:16-17)

My husband and I are big fans of spaghetti westerns, especially those staring Clint Eastwood.  That's why I love the animated feature, "Rango," because it pays homage to the Man with No Name and the westerns we love.  It even has the stock characters -- a gila monster with an Australian accent wearing a derby hat and smoking a stubby cigar.  Rattle Snake Jake is a tip of the hat to Lee Van Cleef, complete with a skinny mustache.

 Rango, the title character, is a chameleon who finds himself stranded in the desert in desperate need of water.  He encounters a mystic armadillo who talks about the Spirit of the West and a spiritual journey.  Rango insists that what he needs is water, not some mystic foolishness.

 The armadillo replys, "To find water, you must first find dirt."

 Huh?

In I Corinthians 1:18, Paul wrote:  “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are being destroyed. But it is the power of God for those of us who are being saved.”

The Christians in Corinth were trying to live out the gospel in a city where their fellow citizens went "Huh?" and called their faith ridiculous and absurd.  The Jewish community was scandalized by a belief system that ran counter to their concept of the conquering-hero-Messiah.  The Jews demanded quantifiable proof -- signs and wonders, something they could see, touch and experience for themselves.  

The Greeks wanted something they could investigate and, through logic and rational thinking based on their experience of the world, prove that somehow Jesus fit into their cosmic view of the perfect Good, which they couldn’t do.

Ideas, once human beings have latched on to them, don’t die – they just keep re-surfacing.  During the Enlightenment of the 16th and 17th centuries, based on rationality and a challenge to institutionalized religion and the legitimacy of the Bible, “Deism” arose.  Deism, while it held to the concept of reward and punishment for behavior, believed in an aloof creator who did not intervene supernaturally in the lives of human.

Thomas Jefferson created what is now commonly known as the “Jeffersonian Bible” in which he rewrote the gospels, removing all miracles and other foolishness.  Jefferson’s Jesus was a great teacher of common sense based in the morality of absolute love and good works.

 Humankind has moved from the Age of Enlightenment to the Information Age.  There’s very little that happens in the worlds of politics and science that we don’t have access to through 10- to 
30-second sound and sight bytes.

We are gluttons for information.  We love to investigate, hypothesize, prove, quantify and measure everything on the earth and in the heavens.  Unfortunately, it seems that awe and wonder has been dropped for our usage of the world “mystery.”  A mystery is something to be dissected and solved like a puzzle.

All this information and knowledge isn’t the problem.  On the contrary, the more we learn about God’s creation, the deeper we appreciate it’s complexity and wonder.  And there’s no doubt that medical science and technology has improved the quality of life for many, many people.

No, the problem is us – our egotistical, self-centeredness.  If we can’t prove it or conceive of it, it is foolishness and impossible.  That was the reaction in Isaiah 44:24-28 to the news that God would rebuild Jerusalem and the temple out of the ashes and rubble of destruction.

Our knowledge is conceived as the basis of our power and control.  We as human beings don’t like to give up our control, and we certainly don’t like surrendering our power and submitting ourselves to something that looks like foolishness to us.

Throughout the ages, even to our present time, the world has not been able to comprehend the foolishness and mystery of God.  God is not an aloof creator who can be easily described by a set of human criteria or fit into the box of our limited understanding.

 Likewise, the message of the cross doesn’t originate from the finite wisdom and knowledge of human beings.  It is a gift God’s unconditional love, procured through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and freely offered to us.  Such love cannot be fully understood by human wisdom and philosophy.  Nor is such love attainable through research and rationalization.  The Grace of love is not meant to be solved.

When Rango does find Dirt, a town, he begins a journey of struggles and transformation.  When he submits to the call of the Spirit of the West, he becomes the hero the town needs.

We become the people we were created to be, the world-changers and difference-makers when we surrender our lives to the foolishness and the mystery of the cross.

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