A Community Shaped by the Cross

How does Paul’s message of “Jesus Christ and him crucified” form and shape the communities of those who follow Jesus? What can we learn from the examples we see in Scripture? Richard Hays unpacks the significance of Paul’s message of Christ crucified from 1 Corinthians for contemporary teachers and preachers in his commentary in the Interpretation Commentary series. Let’s look at his conclusion regarding the significance of the cross for our congregations.

Reflections for Teachers and Preachers on 1 Corinthians 1:18–2:5

This passage is foundational for understanding Paul’s message and grasping the teaching that he will give throughout this letter. It is worthwhile, therefore, to reflect at some length about how 1 Corinthians 1:18–2:5 might shape our teaching and preaching of the gospel. I would call attention to six implications of this text.

1. Paul’s message focuses on the cross.

We should ponder seriously what implications this might have for our own preaching, if we take Paul as a model.

It would mean, first of all, that we must recover and emphasize the apocalyptic significance of the death of Jesus. Notice that in this passage Paul says nothing about blood atonement or forgiveness of sins as the meaning of the cross. Rather, the cross marks God’s intervention to destroy the old age and bring the new into being.

Next, preaching that focuses on the cross in a Pauline fashion must emphasize that the death of Jesus is God’s act for our salvation. All the weight of proclamation must fall on what God has done, not on how we respond to God. The only reference to faith in the passage is in its final sentence (2:5), which insists that faith rests “on the power of God.” We have become so accustomed to anthropocentric preaching and theology that we hardly know how to talk in theocentric terms, but this text insists that we must—and models how we might do it. The preacher should note how often God is the subject of the verbs in this passage (especially in 1:18–31), both explicitly and implicitly: God destroys and saves, God made them foolish, God decided, God chose, God is the source of your life in Christ Jesus.

Finally, preaching that focuses on the cross will not be comforting and cheerful. Such preaching will take the full measure of human depravity and meditate deeply on the radical character of God’s solution. No upbeat self-help message here! This kind of preaching may sound foreboding, but in an age when we are surrounded on all sides by sugar-coated public relations hype and superficial gladness, the honest preaching of the cross will strike a responsive chord deep in the human heart. We want to be told the truth about our desperate situation; indeed, only when that truth is told can the depth of God’s grace be rightly grasped.

2. Paul’s message confronts human boasting.

Where do we confront boasting in the church in our time? Where the church is infested by flag-waving nationalism or denominational chauvinism, “boasting” has corrupted our common life. Paul’s own words are also pertinent to individuals who think of themselves more highly than they ought to (cf. Rom. 12:3). There is, however, a less obvious way that Paul’s assault on boasting might address us. We should recall that the Corinthian targets of Paul’s critique were those who boasted of wisdom, which was linked closely with rhetorical eloquence. In our increasingly postliterate age, rhetorical eloquence of a classical sort is no longer highly valued, but self-presentation is. Image has become everything. This phenomenon is closely analogous to the ancient Hellenistic obsession with rhetorical self-presentation. Thus, anywhere we find the church infatuated with impressive individual leaders, Paul’s critique of boasting becomes relevant. It is God who should receive glory, not forceful charismatic leaders. Wherever we find Christian faith presented in slick, high-tech, high-gloss images, as though it were a product to be marketed, we should ask ourselves immediately whether the gospel that is being proclaimed here is the word of the cross or whether it is some form of human boasting through image manipulation.

3. The meaning of “wisdom” is controlled by “Christ crucified.”

This word of warning applies both to scholars who may be tempted to idolize learning for its own sake and to those whose celebration of sophia tacitly becomes a form of human self-affirmation. Wisdom is a dangerous category and it can be employed rightly within the grammar of Christian theology only when it is grounded firmly within the canonical narrative whose climax is the death of Jesus.

4. The word of the cross creates a countercultural world for those who are called.

Because God has confounded the wisdom of this world and shown it to be foolish, Christians must see the world differently and live in light of the wisdom of God. When people tell us that we must be “responsible” or “realistic,” or act in ways that will be “effective,” we should be wary and ask whose wisdom, whose rationality is being urged upon us. Is it God’s? To whose power are we deferring in the choices we make day in and day out? Preachers and teachers will want to work carefully to help their congregations engage in critical discernment about such questions.

This point also means that Christian apologetics, if it can be done at all, cannot proceed in such a way that we identify the culture’s questions and then provide satisfying Christian “answers”. In fact, according to Paul, neither Jews nor Greeks will get the answers they seek. What we have to offer instead is the story of Jesus. To believe that story is to find one’s whole life re-framed, one’s questions radically reformulated. Therefore, much of the work of Christian apologetics will be to say to people, “No, you are asking the wrong questions, looking for the wrong thing.”

5. The social composition of the church should be a sign of God’s election of the foolish, the weak, the low and despised.

We should look around our congregations on Sunday. If we see too many of the educated, the powerful, and the wealthy and too few of the poor, we should ask ourselves whether we have somehow gone astray from God’s purpose, distorted the gospel of the cross, and fallen into captivity to human wisdom. Paul does not exactly condemn education, power, and wealth in this passage, but merely suggests that God has made it foolish and irrelevant and gathered a community around different norms.

6. The Old Testament texts in 1 Corinthians 1:19 and 1:31 are heard as God’s word addressed directly to the Christian community.

The readers of this letter should learn to understand themselves within the larger story of God’s dealing with Israel. If the Corinthians had done that rightly, they would have recognized that their excitement about wisdom must be tempered by the prophetic word of judgment. Paul is trying to reshape the thinking of the Corinthian Christians in such a way that they will discover their own identity as heirs of Scripture and find themselves addressed by it. We will see this hermeneutical strategy employed again and again in the letter. Here we simply note it for the first time and suggest that teachers and preachers might want to begin pondering how to enable our hearers similarly to live increasingly within the world of the biblical story and to hear themselves addressed by God’s word to Israel.

The Interpretation Commentary for Teaching and Preaching

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