he can climb up to God, or will accept the fact that in Jesus Christ, God has come down to him. And because of that Paul says that Jesus Christ became for us from God: wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, redemption.
WISDOM, RIGHTEOUSNESS, SANCTIFICATION, REDEMPTION
Wisdom was what the Greeks in particular were seeking—understanding of God and humankind. But there is no need for me to try to paint a picture of the ancient world in its quest for an understanding of life, because that quest is still going on. It is bound to go on as long as human beings are caught in the baffling circle of existence, as long as we have lives to live and lives to love, and as long as we remained self-centered, we shall go on trying to evolve the knowledge and wisdom we require, out of our own heads.
Righteousness and sanctification. Paul says that Jews sought for signs, and we do them wrong, if we suppose that this means that they wanted to see astonishing, prodigious miracles that would inevitably compel the wandering assent of the world. The best of them anyway wanted the sign of righteousness, complete, holy and satisfying to God, lived out on the stage of history. And redemption was what everyone wanted, release from the burdens of life, release from the slavery of the inevitability of corruption and death.
So Paul, summarizing one of the greatest chapters he ever wrote, points to Christ. “Your wisdom and your signs are outmoded, antiquated now, for Christ is the wisdom of God and the power of God.” As Luther said, “our holiness is in heaven, where Christ is and not in the world before our eyes, as some paltry product in the market.” The place of understanding, the place of righteousness, the place of redemption has been found, and it is the Cross.
This hath He done, and shall we not adore Him? This shall He do, and can we still despair?Come, let us quickly fling ourselves before Him, . Cast at His feet the burden of our care. (F. W. H. Meyers)
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10. Editor’s Note: I was present when this gripping sermon was delivered at Elvet Methodist in the spring of 1978, and I remembered especially the opening portion of the sermon and its illustration that I later used in my own preaching.
11. Editor’s Note: One of the unanswerable questions these sermons, which were preached many times over numerous decades, raise is—“To what degree were they tailored to the different situations?” So far as I can tell, only a few of these sermons were rewritten for later occasions, and what you have here is the first writing up of these sermons. Rarely, but once in while, a paragraph is apparently later crossed out, but this is a rarity in this corpus. I have no doubt that CKB did orally adopt and adapt these messages on the spot for varying situations, as I heard this one and various others along the way. But the texts as we have them reflect when the sermon was first composed. What does come with this sermon, which is also rare is a sketched outline on one facing page of the notebook, from which the whole must have been composed.
“CHRIST AND HIM CRUCIFIED”—1 Corinthians 2.2
[Preached five times from 4/15/92 at Sherburn Hill to 2/10/08 at Sacriston]
Can you use your imagination? Imagine this church does not exist; there is no church in Darlington. There is no Christian in Darlington, not a soul who has heard the name of Jesus. You take out an old chair, or a soapbox, in the High Row; you climb up on it, and the crowds thread their way passed you, and some of them look up and wonder what this idiot is about. And you begin to speak, “I’m going to tell you about someone called Jesus.” A voice in the crowd says, “Who on earth was he?” “A Jew, he lived in Palestine, and they thought he was a terrorist, or a traitor, or something and they killed him, executed him.” “So he’s dead then?” “Yes he is, and no he isn’t. He was but he isn’t now.” “Sounds like a lot of nonsense.” “No it isn’t. Because of him, because he died, we can all be children of God and members of his people.”
Can you imagine it? It was a lot easier fifty years ago when I used to take a chair out on the High Row on Saturday nights and talk to whoever would listen. In those days most of them had been to Sunday School and remembered that they had heard something about Jesus, something of the story of the Cross. And it was wartime and everyone knew there was something wrong with the world, and ministers were supposed to believe that Christianity could put things and people right. Not that even that was something that you would look on as a picnic, and I still remember with gratitude a man, half-drunk into benevolence who pressed a 3-D piece into my hand and said “There, you spoke very well laddie.” I wonder if that ever happened to Paul.
For of course I am only introducing Paul, who brought Christ crucified into the great, wealthy, noisy, unknowing city of Corinth. How do you introduce Christ where Christ has not been named or known? I made up my mind, he says, that I would make no attempt to dazzle you with rhetoric; I wouldn’t impress you with imposing abstract philosophical arguments. I would simply tell you about Christ crucified.
Some people say that Paul, when he had left Athens, felt he had made a mistake there in trying to beat the philosophers at their own game, and determined to try something different in Corinth. I don’t believe that for reasons which this is not the time to talk about. But in any case, the contrast remains “Christ, and him crucified” and philosophy or any other theme you might like to think about. Only Christ; let me tell you about him.
It is one of the greatest of privileges to be back in this pulpit, and on this day; and I wondered for a long time which I should take of the two lines I oscillate between for many years on Good Friday; something taken from the story of the crucifixion, or one of the great theological pronouncements in the New Testament about the death of Jesus. As it is, I think I am making the best of both worlds, just as well perhaps this time. For there is no doubt that we are just on the edge of one of Paul’s great theological pronouncements, and he tells, he must have told or he would have had no sermon, the story of the Cross.
So what does it amount to? What is there in it for us? Paul in Corinth a long time ago, us in Darlington today. What can we learn from him and his more thematic communication on Christ and him crucified, the Jesus of Good Friday? I think we begin with the negative, the “not to know anything.” What is this denial, this rejection?
NOTHING
There is a side of it we can understand very easily, and very well. He is rejecting the skilled methods, the techniques of oratory which played so large a part in the education theory and practice of those days; the art of making a good case, of persuading people, of convincing them to your point of view. All this he rejects, and perhaps the cynical observation that this was part of the technique is not entirely wrong. “I am no actor as Brutus is,” says Marc Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “I only speak right up.” And of course Antony was a far better orator than Brutus and was practicing the old trick of representing himself as just a plain, honest fellow, no tricks, no guile. I dare say Paul knew something about that too, but there was more than that. He did not aim at getting people to agree with him just long enough to vote in the election. He was inviting them to change the foundation on which they built their lives, and he wanted a foundation that would last, not one that would fade, and disintegrate as soon as the flow of eloquence ceased. His aim was that this faith should stand not on the wisdom of human beings but on the power of God.
Well enough so far; but “nothing” and “not knowing” will go farther. Wisdom is not only the fancy wrapping, it is the content of the parcel too. How was Paul going to get his hearers to turn (as he would say to the Thessalonians) from idols to the living and true God? There was, and there is, a place for philosophical argument. The idolatry, the polytheism, that confronted Paul susceptible themselves to philosophical criticism, and so does the materialism and determinism of our own day. But negation goes further than that. It
