As long as there has been a Christian Church that has sought to be a dignified and well respected institution in society, there has also been “holy fools”.  St. John the Baptizer, who ate bugs, slept under the stars and gave his head in order to call the insecure King Herod to account.  St. Brigid, who kept herself in perpetual poverty by giving everything that she had, or her parents had for that matter, to the poor.  St. Francis, who lavished kisses on the wounds of lepers, risking contamination by making his home among the most feared and diseased people of his time.  St. Paul tells the Church at Corinth: “Timothy and I, we are fools for Christ’s sake… we are weak… despised… hungry… homeless… dressed in rags… cursed… persecuted… slandered… humiliated… beaten… we’re the scum of the earth… the refuse of the world… like jesters who trail at the end of a long procession, doomed to die in the arena… a spectacle for the universe to watch… so now imitate us holy fools.”  They were fools because they found their guiding wisdom in only one place – the cross.

In the cross, Jesus subverts all that we think is wise or powerful. Jesus says, “I hear that you are interested in power.  Here’s the clearest act of God’s power…  Not creating all that is seen and unseen.  Nope.  Not, taking down corrupt rulers and kingdoms.  Nope.  Not hurricanes and earthquakes and floods.  Not even close.  God’s power is revealed in one clear act – me hanging on a cross for you.  And I hear that you are interested in wisdom.  The clearest articulation of God’s wisdom is not captured in the vast science of nature, it’s not captured by the doctrines and scriptures of religion.  The clearest articulation of God’s wisdom is me hanging on a cross for you.”

The cross doesn’t ask us to say, “This really isn’t that foolish.  This makes a lot of good sense, you just got to know enough about theology.”  Because the extent to which we make the cross acceptable, dignified, beautiful, and no longer an offense to our wisdom is the extent to which we take control of the wisdom and power of God and use it for our own means.  Instead, the cross asks us to say, “Yep.  This is ridiculous.  So I wonder how God continues to break my arrogant heart and heal me all at once in the cross.”

Paul, with a little help from Eugene, describes this masterfully:

“The Message that points to Christ on the Cross seems like sheer stupidity to those hellbent on destruction, but for those on the way of salvation it makes perfect sense. This is the way God works, and most powerfully as it turns out. It’s written,

“I’ll turn conventional wisdom on its head,
I’ll expose so-called experts as sham.”

So where can you find someone truly wise, truly educated, truly intelligent in this day and age? Hasn’t God exposed it all as pretentious nonsense? Since the world in all its wisdom never had a clue when it came to knowing God, God in his wisdom took delight in using what the world considered dumb—preaching, of all things!—to bring those who trust him into the way of salvation.  While the religious clamor for miraculous demonstrations and non-religous go in for philosophical wisdom, we go right on proclaiming Christ, the Crucified. The religious treat this like an anti-miracle—and non-religious pass it off as absurd. But to us who are personally called by God himself—both religious and non-religious—Christ is God’s ultimate miracle and wisdom all wrapped up in one. Human wisdom is so tinny, so impotent, next to the seeming absurdity of God. Human strength can’t begin to compete with God’s “weakness.”

Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don’t see many of “the brightest and the best” among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow pretensions of the “somebodies”? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have—right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—comes from God by way of Jesus Christ. That’s why we have the saying, “If you’re going to boast about someone, boast about the Lord Jesus.”

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