God's Foolishness

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
- 1 Corinthians 1:20-25

God’s foolishness is the act of death upon the cross, and its saving power. God’s weakness the God in human form, vulnerable to the evil in the world and its workings. By this foolishness and by this weakness we are saved. We are taught what it is to fight the good fight, to live the life of service to that which is wiser than wise and stronger than strong.

Here we are again in the presence of mystery, where life intersects with the dimensions of the sacred and the gospel to bring us another message of paradox. These messages of mystery, of paradox, require faith to understand. Faith involves a relationship of love and trust. It involves a system of values that don’t come from conventional wisdom or conventional strength but by the formation of relationship, of an understanding within this reality of Christ crucified, and what it is to experience a love and trust with this man who is God and the Father in him, and his Spirit sent into the world. We are in the presence of that which stands the rules of the world upside down, a region that requires of us discernment, and not the usual way of thinking.

I believe that we can never forget that our religion is founded upon mystery, and that regardless of what we do to follow what we consider to be the good, the true and the beautiful we must remember that we will always turn back to mystery. Just as Christ’s ministry begins with baptism, with a ritual of death and rebirth, so it will end with death and resurrection, and we also seek a death to ourselves so that we may be reborn into a life of faith. The mystery into which we are reborn is a source of endless dimension, from which transfiguration can work through us as it did through Christ. This is the wisdom and the strength of God, that "weak" and "foolish" human beings should share with Christ this mystery and work of redemption.