The Upside-Down Wisdom

Corinth, the city where Paul would one day sit and write to Rome, was a busy port full of sailors, shops, and speech-makers. (People there went to hear a clever speech the way we go to a ball game, and they cheered for their favorites.)

Paul had lived there for a year and a half, sewing tents in the market and telling anyone who stopped to watch about Jesus. A church grew up: a synagogue leader named Crispus, a few people with money, and a good many slaves and workers, all squeezed into one house.

While Paul was across the sea in Ephesus, some people from Chloe's household came with bad news.

"They are picking teams," they told him. "One says, 'I follow Paul!' Another says, 'Well, I follow Apollos!' Another says, 'I follow Peter!' And one says, very proudly, 'I follow Christ!'"

Paul picked up his pen. "Has Christ been chopped into pieces?" he wrote. "Was Paul nailed to a cross for you? Were you baptized in Paul's name? I'm glad I baptized only Crispus and Gaius. Oh, and the family of Stephanas. After that, I don't remember."

(Paul could write a letter people would still be reading two thousand years later, and he could not remember whether he had baptized anybody else.)

Then he wrote about what was really wrong. The Corinthians wanted to look clever, and the clever people in the streets laughed at what they believed.

"Your king was killed on a cross?" they jeered. "What kind of king is that? How foolish!"

Jesus really had died on a cross. (A cross was how the Romans killed the worst criminals. In those days, no one would have worn one on a necklace.)

"The message of the cross sounds foolish to people who are lost," Paul wrote, "but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God." Long ago God had said through Isaiah, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise." So Paul asked, "Where is the wise man now? Where is the great debater?" Some people wanted miracles, and some wanted brilliant ideas. Paul gave them Christ, crucified. "God's foolishness is wiser than people's wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than people's strength."

"Look around the room," he wrote next. "Not many of you were wise, the way the world counts it. Not many were powerful. Not many came from important families." God chose the foolish to shame the wise and the weak to shame the strong, so that no one could stand in front of him and brag.

All that bragging about teachers was upside down. Christ Jesus had become their wisdom. He had made them right with God, made them holy, and bought them back. "If you want to brag," Paul wrote, using the prophet Jeremiah's words, "brag about the Lord!"

Paul was no great speech-maker himself. A little further on in the same letter, he admitted that he had first come to Corinth weak and shaking with fear. Nobody in that crowded house had been won over by clever talk, so whatever power was in the message, it was not Paul's.

The speech-makers of Corinth kept their cheering crowds for a while. Then the crowds went home, and their speeches blew away like dust in the market.

The man those crowds laughed at did not stay dead. He is alive, and in rooms all over the world a leader and a worker sit on the same bench and call each other brother and sister. The best thing they have to brag about is how kind God has been to them. They come for Jesus, the crucified king, who is the wisdom of God.