Year B, Lent 3
March 8th, 2015
By Thomas L. Truby
1 Corinthians 1:18-25 and John 2:13-22 (The Common English Bible)
Destroying the Wisdom of the Wise
In the gospel lesson from John where Jesus drives out the occupants of the Temple in Jerusalem we see Jesus destroying the wisdom of the wise and rejecting the intelligence of the intelligent, to quote Paul. The seriousness in what he is doing is seen in the passion with which he does it. “He made a whip from ropes and chased them all out of the temple, including the cattle and the sheep. He scattered the coins and overturned the tables of those who exchanged currency.” The way they were using God’s house completely distorted God’s character and sent a terrible message about God to the world. This is why Jesus acts. He is communicating on his father’s behalf.
The “wisdom of the wise” placatesa God who is seen as angry and in so doing controls the fearful people below them. Paul writes, “It is written in scripture: I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and I will reject the intelligence of the intelligent.” The strong language is not directed against persons but against human wisdom itself. It works like this. The wisdom of the worldly wise finds expression in managing the casting-out function at the core of culture so that it is the other guy who gets sacrificed and not them. Often politics is the art of shifting blame and managing impressions to keep public opinion on their side. Wise politicians know how to do this and corrupt ones don’t mind using distortion and bold-faced lies tomake it work even better.
This week a story broke in Missouri. The State Auditor, Mr. Tom Schweich, a close friend of former Republican Senator, John Danforth, decided to run for governor. A sensitive, competent, hard-working and fair man, and a graduate of Harvard Law School, Schweich tried to live his ideals. With his decision to run for governor, his political rivals decided to start a “whisper campaign”. They said he was Jewish though he worshipped as an Episcopalian (his grandfather was Jewish) and in paid political ads they said he looked like Barney Fife and they would crush him like a bug. He did look a bit like Barney of the Andy Griffith show but that is where the similarity ended. Schweich became very upset and took his own life while Father Danforth’s staff was on the phone with him. Danforth has become an Episcopal priest and gave the eulogy at Tom Schweich’s funeral. The whole state is in shock at the depth to which Missouri politics has fallen and Danforth wants Schweich’s death to be a turning point.
It was this blame shifting pattern that Jesus came to expose. God doesn’t need that, doesn’t want it and this was the central function of the Temple that Jesus came to supplant. This blame shifting sequence gets destroyed when you expose the mechanism of the pointing of the finger so that the other is sacrificed. It doesn’t work when you see how it works. And the cross reveals how it works for it shows that we did it to Jesus. This is God destroying the wisdom of the wise non-violently (at least in terms of violence to us).
Paul wants us to think in specifics. He asks, “Where are the wise? Are they in league with the accusing mechanism that promotes its own innocence and points the finger at those it wishes to condemn?
Where are the legal experts? Are they those who are supposed to be concerned for fairness and equality who often administer a justice already distorted by the mechanisms of discrimination built into the law? Think about Ferguson, Missouri and the many towns it represents.
Where are today’s debaters?” Are they the talking heads who prominently comment on the day’s news but are typicallyblind to the truth the victim and potential victim see so clearly? Think about it.
“Hasn’t God made the wisdom of the world foolish?” It’s a rhetorical question. When we start from the solid foundation of the cross we can see the foolishness. Jesus, operating from this solid place,symbolically dismantles the Temple and the institutions it houses.
According to Paul, God in his wisdom, knew we would never figure it out on our own no matter how wise we became. That’s why Jesus had to live it out in front of us. Philosophy which I see as the apex of human wisdom has come to a dead end. It goes around in circles and never penetrates the dark heart that drives human sin and finds forgiveness in God’s mercy. It can’t bring itself to seeing God’s love as the driving force underneath reality and revealed on the cross and in the resurrection. “In God’s wisdom, he determined that the world wouldn’t come to know him through its wisdom.” “Instead, God was pleased to save those who believe through the foolishness of preaching.” The foolishness of preaching!
Nearly every week I get up here and walk us through how it all works. Week after week my job is to point to the cross, to Jesus, to this non-sacrificial understanding of what Jesus did. At first it seems so strange but it works on us at a deep level and we find ourselves coming to think differently. It is unusual to get there quickly, in one Sunday. More often change occurs very gradually, requires many Sundays, study groups, music and prayer. The “foolishness” of the gospel does not overwhelm. It inducts us without shoving us aside. It creeps up on us and changes us from within.
It sounds repetitive in a way. Jesus allows himself to be caught in our habitual doings, we kill him thinking we are doing the right thing, and then after his death he returns to us to say we are forgiven and still loved. He then asks us to live out this same pattern with our friends, family, enemies and other nations.
It does sound like foolishness. It’s not the world’s wisdom. It doesn’t need to be pronounced by the most intelligent and in fact, is not a product of the intellect at all. As we hear it over and over again many of us find ourselves changing and strangely, coming to believe. It comes through “the foolishness of preaching.” Someone has to lay it out. Unless someone explains it we likely won’t get it. That’s why I think good preaching is so important; it is God’s chosen method by which we come to believe.
Everyone stumbles over Jesus, both Jews and Greeks. Jews believe in a relational God who is interested in them as the chosen people. They want proof that Jesus has special power directed toward them. Instead they get a cross and a death and they are put off by the whole scene. This can’t be from God they say. They often fail to see the deeper truth being revealed in their midst.
The Greeks see God or the God’s as beyond it all, operating in abstract purity and not dirtied by relationships with smelly humans. Their God would never let himself get tangled up in human affairs, much less killed by human hands. The whole idea is foolishness and impossible. As Paul puts it, “Jews ask for signs, and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, which is a scandal to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.”
But to those who are called, to those who get it, to those who somehow get beyond the scandal of the cross as the center of human history, to those, be they Jew or Greek, “Christ is God’s power and God’s wisdom.”
The cross cuts through human wisdom, and the supposed weakness of the cross, resting as it does in what appears to be a defeat, proves to be stronger than human strength. Amen.
Page 1 of 3