Sermon Lent 3
“We preach Christ crucified”
1 Corinthian 1:18-25
Last Sunday we took up the cross with Jesus. The Word of God demonstrates to us plainly that we are all sinners in need of a Savior whether we perceive it or not. The ten commandments are the Law we are required to keep and it is the Law the Word we are unable to keep.
Therefore It is necessary for Jesus to go to Jerusalem, suffer many things and die a shameful death on the cross at the hands of the church and political leadership. This is the wrath of God that comes from not keeping the commandments. It was not an action on Jesus part that condemned him. Jesus kept the commandments. It was our disobedience and sin that were imposed upon him, which he took willingly, to please his Heavenly Father. However, Jesus being innocent would rise after three days after the debt was paid for our sin on the cross.
For Christians this story should not be unfamiliar. It is called the doctrine of vicarious atonement. The cross is the instrument of our justification. Justification that is imposed upon us sinners. Yet there are churches that bear the Christian name that are embarrassed by this doctrine. They say this doctrine is paternalistic and that it makes the Father in Heaven out to be a child abuser. This should not surprise us in a culture where we remove all consequences for sin whether it be the repeal of the death penalty or government funded abortion. We live in a sinful, lawless and adulterous generation. God have mercy on us for doing so little to curb this great evil. Other churches simply ignore this doctrine or they briefly mention it while they move on to build up there church’s earthly kingdom. The cross is not want people want to hear. It does not sell well. People don’t want to hear it, they don’t want to see it. Neither do those outside the church. What they want to hear is that God loves them without the cross, without Christ. This sort of love would be irresponsible and unjust, not forgiveness but amnesty.
What was Paul going to say to a congregation in Corinth who had it all. The Corinthian congregation was wealthy and they were extremely gifted. They appeared to manifest the power of the spirit as they spoke in heavenly tongues. They had the best speakers, orators and preachers of their time, each appeared to have their own following. This unfortunately resulted in little cults of personality and divisiveness in the congregation. Instead of confessing the one true faith, they began confessing multiple and contradicting faiths.
Corinth’s perceived giftedness and success was at the expense of love and unity. Different clichés within the congregation formed so that when they celebrated the Lord’s Supper they segregated themselves. The elite would meet in one room while the not so elite would receive communion in a more common place. Despite having heavenly tongues they even lost Jesus words of institution.
What would be Paul’s message to this congregation? Simple, “we preach Christ crucified.” It was a message I am sure they had heard once before. It was this preaching that made these people into Christians in the first place and it would be the same message that would reconvert them.
The Corinthians were impressed with rhetoric, with well reasoned arguments. They were surrounded by schools of philosophers who speculated on the existence of god and its implications for society. Not unlike today the people of Corinth were looking for an advantage in dealing with circumstances that were outside of their control. Self denial, the cross, would seem like foolishness.
To gentiles, enmeshed in a culture enamored with power and success, it made no sense for a crucified criminal was held up as the Savior of the world. (1 Cor. 1:18) Not only the Greeks but especially the Romans with their thirst for power would find the notion of a crucified Messiah ridiculous.The first-century B.C. Roman statesman, Cicero, expressed the Romans’ abhorrence of the cross. “May the name of the cross be absent not only from the body of Roman citizens but also from their thinking, their eyes and ears.” The Roman historian Tacitus and the statesman Pliny the Younger both condemned Christianity as a perverse superstition. The second-century philosopher Celsus spoke of Christians as, “actually worshiping a dead man,” a practice he considered absurd. [1]
The speaking of the cross in today’s terms would be politically incorrect, considered profane. Preaching the cross as Paul suggests runs counter to any evangelical opportunities. The culture does not get it. It is not interested in giving up power and success.
Does this mean we should give the culture what they want in order to attract them to the Gospel. It is difficult to offer something to someone that they do not think they need. If I were to announce to you this morning that I have a kidney to donate to you. Would that excite you motivate you? Would it cause you to break out in praise and thanksgiving? No it would not. You don’t need a kidney. Your kidney’s right now are working just fine. Plus my kidneys don’t work they are essential dead.
But if someone were to announce to me I have a kidney for you. Then I would break out in praise and thanksgiving for to me a kidney donation means life.
If you unaware of your sins, than the message Christ crucified for you is meaningless. Paul writes, “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing,” This is explains the resistance to the message. The old Adam in side of us is perishing because it is hostile to God. It is born that way naturally. Without the intervention of God’s word are predetermined path is destruction and wrath.
However Paul also writes, “but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” Notice who the actor is in our Salvation. It is God. We are passive participants it is God who is actively saving us by the foolishness of preaching.
God lives outside of time. His saving work occurs in the past, the present and the future. Christ was crucified 2000 years ago and so accomplished with that act in time the propitiation of your sins. He is saving you today in the present through preaching and the sacraments. And as you are not free from sin, He in the future will raise you sinless from the dead.
It is quite possible and some scholars suggest that Paul was not a strong orator. Perhaps he lacked physical presence and stature. Perhaps his voice was not very strong. Perhaps his spoken message was not as clever or weighty as his epistles, his letters to the churches. Despite these attributes of weakness, Paul assures his listeners that the power of Paul’s message does not come from Paul but from Christ and it is a message of a weak Christ who humbled himself by submitting to the shameful abomination of the cross.
I wonder at all the tricks and techniques preachers are taught to communicate the message. It seems that the assumption is that if we vary are style our technique our rhetoric then we may be able to reach more people save more souls. But we must remember it is God who does the saving and he gives us the word to use.
Those come before Jesus at the final judgment complaining that they did not understand the message or that the Pastor who God sent to them and chose for them was difficult to hear or lacked talent or charisma will not be met favorably.
So Paul writes, “But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; 28 God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, 29 so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.
Again it is not by your own reason or strength that you come to Jesus. But is the preached word entering your ears the content being the crucified Christ, that kills the old Adam and makes you alive in Christ a new creation. It is the hearing that your sins are forgiven that is both a confession of your weakness and guilt and the reality that you now have salvation and life.
Paul further writes, “And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, 31 so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”
We have nothing to boast about when it comes to our salvation, sanctification or redemption for Christ does all these things for you through His means of grace which is the preaching and the sacraments that declare you righteous for Christ sake. Christ crucified means you have new life in him as he has crucified your sins.
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