I Corinthians 2:1-16
Honestly? I don't like the first part of this passage. I love the Paul whose "great learning [was driving him] insane" - the man who studied the scriptures with youthful zeal, the theologian, the witty orator who inspired the Greeks. I like the idea of a cultured, urbane traveler, converted in power to Christ and dramatically as eager to profess for his newfound faith as he was zealous against it at the beginning. I love the idea of a Paul who is absolutely confident in his own knowledge, in his own power, in the wisdom and God that he knows.
But that was not Paul - at least, not Paul when he met the Corinthian church - and he is completely proud of it. Fear? Trembling? It irks me - but what could be more Christlike than that? Here we are just after Epiphany and I am already forgetting the lessons of the manger. Paul, blessed with rhetoric and theology and decades of training and a full kit of coercive techniques, voluntarily sets aside these things for the benefit of these people - people who, for reasons we'll see in a minute, would come to need the raw power of the Spirit and the raw message of Christ's resurrection more than they would need the beauty of a systematic theology or a complicated argument.
I am going to make a digression here. I love to know things, and in that way I can empathize with the other Paul we can see here. If it makes sense to me then I am happy with it, and if I can put some logic behind it so much the better. But I know this is not Jesus' way, or at least his only way, and it is myself that I see when I read the story of Thomas. What a blessing that Jesus did not condemn Thomas; instead he loved him, and humored him, as indeed we intellectuals are humored with any shadow of understanding that we might come to have - and then I am immediately humbled by the next part, "blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe." (NRSVUE) What a blessing to receive the story of Chist in humility and grace, to hear and understand and be brought to health in the Spirit without the baggage of human understanding!
So back to Corinth, and Paul, and indeed his choice to set all of that aside. Eventually we'll get to the wisdom and I'm going to get less peevish, but for now Paul is busy reminding these folks of their source - not wisdom, not knowledge, not even love or following a great leader or being born into it, but because the simple story of the gospel - Jesus Christ and him crucified - brought them to repentance. In another study this morning we were reviewing the letter in Revelation to the church in Ephesus, and I was reminded of this passage: they had forgotten their first love, the love that inspired them and built them up and led them to do the good works that they had continued to do. Clearly Paul is reminding these Corinthians of the same: yes, you are growing up. You need solid food. You should be thinking about why and how and when, you should be seeking wisdom and asking God for it. You should learn. But always remember that the simple message is the one that mattered, really. People don't need a theological framework: at its core, we need the work of the holy Spirit, we need the mind of Christ. we need the power of God in our lives.
...And then, we come to verse 6. Here I start to get more comfortable, we can start to pursue wisdom and with it understanding and knowledge and all those things that I respect as an intellectual. Except... perhaps not? First let me start with the idea of secret wisdom. Oh my dear Lord God! Sometimes I forget that Christianity was a cultish spinoff / subsidiary of Judaism, and then I hit this kind of thing. "Hidden mystery" puts me in mind of all the cults through the years, where people are indoctrinated by steps so the most absurd and destructive aspects of their theologies and practices are secret until the victim is sucked in and has a very difficult time escaping. If you are in one of these groups, you really ought to get out - true wisdom is always true, and if someone isn't willing to let you at least hear about it from the outset then it is because the wisdom is ... not.
...which, by the way, is exactly where Paul goes with this. Literally half of his starting message is the antithesis of natural law - everyone knows that dead stays dead. Really, that's the definition! Yet here comes Paul, the one smart guy who really ought to know better, and he starts his message with this completely impossible thing. There is no gentle, natural, logical progression, just Christ crucified. Truly it must have been the work of the Spirit for the Corinthian church to have started with that kind of foundation - any reasonably clever person would dismiss such a thing out of hand. And... that is exactly the point! For Paul, the end goal was not to rack up points, to get more converts than Apollos or Cephas or whomever, to have some spiritual authority that he could lord over the people - his complete end goal was to make space for the Holy Spirit to work in power in these people, and bring them to repentance.
I am very often caught up in intellectualism, and how I can do this or that in the hopes that it will grow the kingdom - but Paul, in Corinth, reminded us that the Spirit is the only way that God calls people into His service. Yes I can brush aside objections to the gospel, I can argue theology and sin nature and the history of the Bible, I can clothe and feed and shelter and do all the nice things - but in the end my actions, my brilliance, my work is not going to bring people to God. Without the Spirit no one can come to Christ, and indeed all of our finely tuned theology only makes sense in the context of an extra-worldly divinity. That is not to say those things are not important - Jesus told us to feed the hungry, care for the sick, love our enemies, shelter the homeless, protect the weak, completely apart from seeing them as lost souls or whatever - but only the work of the Spirit can bring our fellows to salvation and into the true wisdom of God.