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What Crucifixion Actually Meant in the Roman Empire · Faith at Work

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: I was driving my son Harrison home from grade school one afternoon when he told me
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: that he finally figured something out.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: He said, I finally understand how God can use you to do such incredible things.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: I liked where the conversation was going.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: I assumed that my son had arrived at last at a considered judgment about his father's gifts.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: We learned about Balaam's donkey today, he said next, and I felt my heart skip a beat or two.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: God used Balaam's donkey to tell him what God wanted, he told me.
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  SPEAKER_00: And if God can use Balaam's donkey, God can use anything.
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  SPEAKER_00: Even you.
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  SPEAKER_00: He was not wrong and he was also not trying to compliment me.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I have never let go of what I and he learned about God that day.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: That is close to the whole argument that Paul is making here in 1 Corinthians.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Paul is writing into a city that had been built around the idea of being impressive
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  SPEAKER_00: and being noticed.
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  SPEAKER_00: Corinth had been leveled by the Romans in 146 BC and left in ruins.
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  SPEAKER_00: For an entire century.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then Julius Caesar in 44 BC established it once again as
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  SPEAKER_00: a fresh Roman colony sitting on the isthmus between two seas.
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  SPEAKER_00: Trade moved through it in both directions and money moved with it.
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  SPEAKER_00: And what developed in that place was a city that prized what showed rhetoric.
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  SPEAKER_00: Public benefaction, status, prestige, reputation.
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  SPEAKER_00: A city built a second time almost entirely on visibility.
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  SPEAKER_00: And Paul tells us what two groups in that city were shopping for.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Jews demand signs and the Greeks seek wisdom.
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  SPEAKER_00: Jewish hopes wanted proof of power,
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  SPEAKER_00: a Messiah who looked like a Messiah,
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  SPEAKER_00: someone who would break the empire's grip the way the prophets had promised
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  SPEAKER_00: that they would, visibly, decisively, strongly now.
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  SPEAKER_00: Greek expectations wanted sophistication,
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  SPEAKER_00: an argument tight enough and a teacher polished enough to survive the marketplace
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  SPEAKER_00: of ideas that ran through that city.
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  SPEAKER_00: Paul had neither one of those things to offer.
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  SPEAKER_00: He had a man who had been executed by the state of It is worth reflecting deeply
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  SPEAKER_00: on what that actually meant in the world Paul was writing to
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  SPEAKER_00: because we have had 2,000 years to turn the cross into jewelry
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  SPEAKER_00: and stained glass windows and Corinth had no time for that.
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  SPEAKER_00: Cicero Prosecuting a corrupt Roman governor who ruled in Sicily just a few decades
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  SPEAKER_00: before Paul ever set foot in Corinth needed a way to describe how far outside of
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  SPEAKER_00: the bounds of decency a man's cruelty had gone.
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  SPEAKER_00: And he wrote at this person's trial,
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  SPEAKER_00: actually said at this person's trial,
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  SPEAKER_00: to bind a Roman citizen is a crime,
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  SPEAKER_00: to flog him, To kill him is almost an act of murder.
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  SPEAKER_00: To crucify him is, and there he stops.
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  SPEAKER_00: He says there is no word ugly enough that exists to finish the sentence of what crucify is.
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  SPEAKER_00: That was the standing opinion among educated Romans of Paul's own century.
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  SPEAKER_00: Crucifixion was not a solemn, sterilized symbol.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was the empire's most obscene punishment reserved for slaves,
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  SPEAKER_00: pirates,
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  SPEAKER_00: and rebels built to strip away every trace of a person's dignity in public slowly as
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  SPEAKER_00: a warning to everyone who walked by.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: A generation or two after Paul wrote this,
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  SPEAKER_00: someone sketched a cartoon in plaster on a building near the imperial palace
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  SPEAKER_00: at Rome.
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  SPEAKER_00: A man with the head of a donkey nailed to a cross and beside him a boy
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  SPEAKER_00: with one raised hand in worship.
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  SPEAKER_00: And underneath it, in Greek, alexamenos, worships his God.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was not theology.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was a joke at the Christian's expense.
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  SPEAKER_00: And everyone who passed it And that hallway was meant to get the punchline immediately.
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  SPEAKER_00: You could not have handed the ancient world a symbol less likely to gather
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  SPEAKER_00: a following if you had tried.
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  SPEAKER_00: Paul was not naive about this.
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  SPEAKER_00: He names both reactions himself in the two words that he chooses in this passage.
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  SPEAKER_00: To Jews, he says the cross is scandalous.
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  SPEAKER_00: The word behind our English word, scandal.
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  SPEAKER_00: A stumbling block.
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  SPEAKER_00: Something you trip over on the way towards what you actually wanted.
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  SPEAKER_00: And there actually was a scripture standing behind that stumble.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Hebrew law already said it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.
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  SPEAKER_00: A crucified man was not a candidate for Messiah.
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  SPEAKER_00: He was proof by their own reading and their own scriptures that God had already said no to him.
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  SPEAKER_00: To Greeks,
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  SPEAKER_00: Paul says the cross is moria,
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  SPEAKER_00: foolishness,
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  SPEAKER_00: the same root sitting behind our word moron,
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  SPEAKER_00: which, kids, you're not supposed to say.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not simply mistaken, beneath serious consideration.
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  SPEAKER_00: A God who dies and dies that particular way fails the most basic entrance exam
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  SPEAKER_00: for divinity as the Greek mind understood one.
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  SPEAKER_00: So here is the strange turn in the passage,
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  SPEAKER_00: I think, the one worth highlighting a little bit right now.
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  SPEAKER_00: Paul does not argue with either group's assessment.
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  SPEAKER_00: Instead, he agrees with it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Yes, he says, to the ones perishing, the message of the cross really is foolishness.
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  SPEAKER_00: He is not building a sharper argument that will make the cross look wise
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  SPEAKER_00: on Corinth's own scoreboard.
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  SPEAKER_00: He is telling them that their scoreboard is broken.
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  SPEAKER_00: That is not only
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  SPEAKER_00: a first century problem Barna Group released research this past August
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  SPEAKER_00: on how much Americans actually trust Christian institutions.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the result ran against what you,
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  SPEAKER_00: I think,
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  SPEAKER_00: would predict if bigger and more polished automatically earned more confidence.
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  SPEAKER_00: Small churches scored a trust index of 61.
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  SPEAKER_00: Christian churches overall scored 57.
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  SPEAKER_00: Mega churches scored 36 and celebrity pastors scored 30,
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  SPEAKER_00: barely half of what neighborhood pastors received.
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  SPEAKER_00: The research said it clearly, trust runs local and it runs small.
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  SPEAKER_00: Nobody engineered that Outcome on purpose,
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  SPEAKER_00: it is simply what happens once people go looking for something real
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  SPEAKER_00: and quietly walk past whatever was only built to look impressive.
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  SPEAKER_00: The New Testament scholar N.T.
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  SPEAKER_00: Wright has spent a career making a related point about this passage.
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  SPEAKER_00: He says that Paul is not trying to smuggle the gospel past Corinth's rhetoric class
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  SPEAKER_00: by dressing it up cleverly enough to pass inspection.
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  SPEAKER_00: His argument is closer to a diagnosis, he says.
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  SPEAKER_00: The instrument that Corinth was using to measure power and wisdom were never built
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  SPEAKER_00: to register the real thing, N.T.
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  SPEAKER_00: Wright says,
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  SPEAKER_00: because the real thing arrived looking like a dying man on a Roman execution device.
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  SPEAKER_00: He says,
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  SPEAKER_00: if your instrument cannot detect what you are pointing it at,
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  SPEAKER_00: the trouble's not the object.
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  SPEAKER_00: The trouble is the instrument.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that is where the passage lands for us today.
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  SPEAKER_00: In verse 24,
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  SPEAKER_00: Paul says,
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  SPEAKER_00: to those who are called,
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  SPEAKER_00: both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.
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  SPEAKER_00: Same cross, same execution.
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  SPEAKER_00: Nothing about the object changes between verse 23 and verse 24.
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  SPEAKER_00: What changes are the eyes looking at it.
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  SPEAKER_00: They are not sharper eyes,
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  SPEAKER_00: they are not more educated eyes,
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  SPEAKER_00: just eyes that have finally stopped grading the cross on Corinth's curve.
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  SPEAKER_00: Some of you spend your life reading a room or a field or a marketplace,
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  SPEAKER_00: whatever the room that you happen to be reading is,
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  SPEAKER_00: and you already know
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  SPEAKER_00: that whatever actually produces something worth having rarely looks impressive
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  SPEAKER_00: while it is happening.
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  SPEAKER_00: Some of you are working out what smart is,
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  SPEAKER_00: even supposed to look like, and who gets to decide that for you.
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  SPEAKER_00: And some of you,
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  SPEAKER_00: with enough mileage on you,
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  SPEAKER_00: now remember a time that you put your full attention on something
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  SPEAKER_00: that looked strong, and later you learned that it was not.
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  SPEAKER_00: And another time that you nearly walked past the one thing that actually was strong
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  SPEAKER_00: because it never looked the part in the first place.
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  SPEAKER_00: And if you're watching this at home,
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  SPEAKER_00: which many of you do,
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  SPEAKER_00: from wherever you happen to be in the world this morning, this includes you as well.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because this is not a niche experience Paul is describing.
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  SPEAKER_00: It is close to a universal one.
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  SPEAKER_00: That same instinct is going to try to talk some of you out of something concrete this week.
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  SPEAKER_00: Next Sunday is worship in the grove.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I already know a few of you have thought about someone to invite.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then you talk yourself back out of it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because the grounds are still torn up out there from construction.
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  SPEAKER_00: And we don't look all put together.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the service is probably not going to look like something that one of
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  SPEAKER_00: the big churches down the road can put together.
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  SPEAKER_00: But nobody invited a friend to church in Corinth because the building was impressive
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  SPEAKER_00: or the service ran without a hitch.
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  SPEAKER_00: That church met in someone's private home.
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  SPEAKER_00: They were arguing with themselves over which apostle they liked the best
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  SPEAKER_00: and had just been told that their central message sounded like foolishness to most
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  SPEAKER_00: of the people around them that heard about it.
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  SPEAKER_00: But God did not wait for that church to look finished before working through it.
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  SPEAKER_00: And God is not waiting on the grove to look finished either.
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  SPEAKER_00: So invite the sister, the neighbor, the co-worker who has never even asked about church.
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  SPEAKER_00: Tell them the truth along the way as well.
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  SPEAKER_00: Ground around here, it is torn up.
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  SPEAKER_00: And this will not be a performance.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that is not something that you should apologize for before you say it.
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  SPEAKER_00: In fact, it might be the whole reason that the invitation works.
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  SPEAKER_00: Nobody had to clean up the cross to make it fit for God's use.
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  SPEAKER_00: Jesus was not the sign that the Jews were watching for.
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  SPEAKER_00: He was also not the wisdom the Greeks were arguing about around the dinner table.
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  SPEAKER_00: But he was the power of God.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the wisdom of God hanging on a device the empire built as a punchline.
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  SPEAKER_00: Whatever you are still waiting on to look strong enough or to sound wise enough,
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  SPEAKER_00: before you will trust it, the cross was never going to clear that bar.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it was never designed to do that either.
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  SPEAKER_00: It cleared a different one.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that is the one that actually holds eternity.
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  SPEAKER_00: My son figured this out on the way home from school with a story about a donkey.
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  SPEAKER_00: If God can use a donkey, God can use anything.
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  SPEAKER_00: Even you, he told me, and I laughed it off at the time.
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  SPEAKER_00: Paul is telling the church at Corinth something that they cannot laugh off as easily.
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  SPEAKER_00: If God can use a cross, God can use anything.
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  SPEAKER_00: Even the thing that you are about to walk past because it never looked the part.
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  SPEAKER_00: So go from here practicing a different kind of arithmetic this week.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not the one that counts what impresses,
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  SPEAKER_00: but the one that counts the one who came looking foolish and turned out to be
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  SPEAKER_00: the whole of what God had for us.
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  SPEAKER_00: Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God.
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  SPEAKER_00: Amen.