Holy Tuesday

"The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God" (1 Corinthians 1:18).

The readings for Tuesday in Holy Week include Paul's contrast of 'the wisdom of the world' with 'the wisdom of God.'  He stresses that the message about Christ and his cross carries a power of a very different order to the power of human rhetoric.  The cross does its own speaking, its own work in those who see it, not as a sign of madness, but as a sign of the true nature of reality.

The message of the cross still cuts against the grain of our frameworks of rationality and tolerance.  To believe that God shared our human nature by appearing in first century Galilee as an itinerant Jewish rabbi, and beyond that, died the death of a common criminal for the "sins of the whole world," remains as much a stretch for sophisticated moderns as it did for the people of Israel, Greece and Rome in their day. If Jesus died for any reason, some progressive scholars would say, it was because of his politics and passion for God's justice, not as something that had to happen, as a "dying for the sins of the world." 

I'm all for notions of Jesus' passion for God's justice, his wide embrace of all people, particularly those on the margins of society, but that argument alone does not square with what I know about human nature.  What I do know is that when I apprehended the astonishing notion that Jesus' life and death had something to do with my own, that his passion opened a way for my well-being, a release from shame, and inclusion in the community of faith, it changed my life.  To my own astonishment, I found joy.  And since that awakening years ago, I have seen hearts open, relationships heal, communities transform, all because they have been grasped by the "foolishness" of the cross. 

This is the transforming evidence Paul has in mind as he writes to the Christians at Corinth. This life evidence in no way diminishes the gift of human wisdom. Nor does it devalue the importance of Biblical scholarship and theological discipline, without which our faith and practice would be impoverished.  But as Augustine wisely said, "Knowledge alone cannot save us."  Tuesday in Holy Week reminds us that the cross presents a different order of wisdom, a different way of knowing. The cross bears a power that can save.

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