Friday 20th May - 1 Corinthians 2

Today’s chapter is 1 Corinthians 2, you can read it here

Tom writes:

The ruthlessly counter-cultural nature of the cross turns our vision of maturity upside down. The contents of the mind of Christ have been made known to us... but they are not neat things to tweet. Instead they are weak things to live. How can that make sense? We often think a more mature “us” would be faster, stronger and smarter. We work and pray towards that vision of ourselves. But that vision is wrong. A more mature version of us is one that is more like Jesus. To be really spiritually mature is to embody the wisdom that took Jesus to the cross. If Jesus was in our shoes would he vy for attention? Would he jostle others out of the way, or prance past those who won’t be useful to him in his pursuit of his vision? The wisdom of God is to stand before a bustling, jostling world and to show God’s love in our weakness, God’s power in our trembling. That was what Jesus did, so why on earth would we think a mature church should do anything different? Our demonstration of weakness is not because we are intimidated by “strength”. Too often I’ve met Christians (and been a Christian) who have lived out of insecurity and cowardice and called it weakness. No. Weakness isn’t a lack of courage. Trembling isn’t fear. Instead weakness is a deliberate effort to show to everyone that this world is not about me. My success is not about me. In philosophical terms, this kind of weakness is to deliberately live a life out of Realism rather than Materialism. Materialism says what you can touch and taste and examine under a microscope are all there is. If you want to get your way then you need more material than those who oppose you. But realism says there is another realm that is just as real as what you can see and taste and that the power from that realm is the power that sustains my life.

The power that courses through me is GodIy is instead a pouring of our strength into being like Jesus was, and ; it is recognition that we cannot beat the world at its own game. It is a fear that if we even try then we will quickly become like the world that is so utterly foolish to God. The trembling is the trembling of one doing something different from everyone else, which many others despise, and yet which we know to be the wisest thing of all. For Paul that meant whittling down his presentation of himself to the simplest of phrases - I know nothing except Jesus the King who was crucified for me. Paul is very clear that God’s power was also seen - it was abundantly seen in Corinth - but it was seen through a man who pursued a vision of weakness in his life. His vision of maturity was to become weaker and less impressive in himself. I wonder what it would look like for us to pursue that vision in our workplaces? For us to be people who don’t pretend, who don’t put on a front, who don’t jostle for position but who freely admit where we have failed, what we don’t know, what we can’t do. I think that is to embody the wisdom of the cross. Or at least it is when we are also calling on God to pour out his power through our trembling lips and hands. For the cross led to the empty tomb. Our embodiment of weakness allows God to show his strength. As we aspire to just know Jesus, we enable others to know him as well.