1 Corinthians 2:1-12 (13-16)
2:1 When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom.
2:2 For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.
2:3 And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling.
2:4 My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power,
2:5 so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.
2:6 Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish.
2:7 But we speak God's wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.
2:8 None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
2:9 But, as it is written, "What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love God"
2:10 these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.
2:11 For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within? So also no one comprehends what is truly God's except the Spirit of God.
2:12 Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God.
2:13 And we speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual.
2:14 Those who are unspiritual do not receive the gifts of God's Spirit, for they are foolishness to them, and they are unable to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.
2:15 Those who are spiritual discern all things, and they are themselves subject to no one else's scrutiny.
2:16 "For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?" But we have the mind of Christ.
What you have just read is part of one of two, and possibly three letters to the people of the church at Corinth written by the Apostle Paul. Scholars believe we may actually have three different letters, or at least parts of them, recorded in our Bibles as First and Second Corinthians. Why is this important? Partly because it shows that Paul was regularly trying to instruct about and arbitrate for numerous “complications” in this church. The city of Corinth was a prosperous seaport, with the kind of diverse population one might expect in such a center of commerce. From rich to poor, wealthy to “blue collar,” and manifesting a wide variety of religious practices and experience, the rapid growth of the “new” religion of Christianity had brought samples of this diversity into its house churches and meeting places. Paul, raised and educated as a Jewish religious leader, was extremely challenged by this smorgasbord of humanity. We should remember that before meeting Jesus on the Road to Damascus, Paul had been charged with “enforcing” the unity and purity of the Jewish faith by persecuting Christians, who were seen as a blemish on its Jewish roots and heritage. Now, the transformed Paul is trying hard to look past HIS past and see the kind of future the Holy Spirit had for the fledgling Christian church. This would be a church that had to somehow embrace its diversity, even celebrate it. But this meant finding a way to teach and guide the church inclusively. The difficulty of doing this is not even lost on us TODAY, over 2,000 years later. Imagine Paul’s mind and method trying to apprehend it! But try, he did. We can learn a lot from Paul.
In today’s passage, Paul is endeavoring to get the Corinthian Christians to see things in a very different way. While it is nigh unto impossible to remove the human “fingerprints” from what we believe God is doing in our midst, Paul appeals to a novel “mind’s eye” to view it all differently—the ageless wisdom of God Almighty. While addressing a Corinthian congregation about moral issues might more compare to writing a congregation of “believers” assembled in Las Vegas, in our day, the notion of “wisdom” was something central to a Greek-speaking, Greek-educated people. When Paul turns to wisdom as his subject, the readers (or hearers when his words were read out loud) would have grown quiet. Even as we see in the first chapter of the Gospel of John, an appeal to the logos, or collective wisdom and truth of the Divine, got people’s attention, post haste. Paul’s description of God’s wisdom as “secret and hidden” would have directly played the “E string” of the violin of these people’s curiosity. Who doesn’t like a good mystery, and who doesn’t like to hear a secret that has been hidden by the Divine mind for “ages”? They would have wanted this secret, and they would have sought this wisdom. To go even further, Paul brings in the words “power” and “spirit” with his idea, making his appeal even more winsome and impossible to top.
Paul is basically selling the idea that in Jesus Christ, God has revealed God’s hidden wisdom to those who trust in Christ. God will empower believers via the Holy Spirit—the Spirit of Jesus—to see their lives, their world, and the in-breaking Kingdom of God VERY differently. While these Greek people held human philosophy and wisdom in high esteem, they also understood its limitations, and even its impotence in the face of the things they feared, be it war, tragedy, illness, or even the seemingly continuous arguing and infighting going on in their new church.
Paul draws a parallel between what humans can know because we are human with what God can know because God is God. Again, his audience knew Plato, and that Plato postulated a huge chasm between God and humanity, with only the “things” humans could fashion and possess being very poor “copies” or representations of the Divine “ideas” in the mind of God. Now, here was Paul saying that in Christ, this chasm had been bridged by the very Son of God, and that the Holy Spirit of God would “hook us up” to the wisdom of God, the wisdom of the ages, if we reached out in faith. It all sounds so mystical, but Paul tries so hard in this letter, and in today’s passage, to make it possible, practical, and even inevitable for the Christian believer and for the church. Now, if that isn’t a tough order, I don’t know what is!
Interestingly, Paul starts so simply in this passage, claiming to know only “Christ and him crucified,” in an effort to “dial down” the lofty theological rhetoric that was typical in religious discourse. He does, however, go on to describe the incredible, almost unbelievable truths of the Christian Gospel, namely that God had come among us and revealed the great mystery of the ages, and that it was God’s desire that they would share in these. No longer were the precepts of faith entrusted only to “Holy Men,” but they were now offered to all of God’s people. I can say as a retired pastor that every one of us, when we mounted the pulpit on Sunday, sought to bring the incredible truths of the love, grace, and “the big reveal” that God has wrought in Jesus Christ to a level that everyone listening would get “caught up” in them, claim them as her or his own, and embark on the grand journey that is the Christian faith. We also hoped that for those who had long been on that journey, we might offer new light for their path, or significant homiletical challenges that might further spur and nurture their faith. Honestly, we preachers OH so much want to do this, and often “amen” the sermon feeling like I think Paul often felt when addressing the Corinthian church—“Close, but no cigar.” Even when we descended from the pulpit on that rare Sunday when we thought we accomplished at least a good part of our goal, the fight at the next church board meeting or nasty phone call from a parishioner suggesting “you don’t know your Bible, pastor” called our evaluation—and sometimes our whole ministry—into question. So it was for Paul here, if you read the Corinthian epistles honestly. But he never stopped trying, and neither do we modern grassroots “apostles.” The good news is that thanks to Paul’s efforts, the church is still here, and is quite thriving in many corners, and maybe thanks to our efforts, it will continue for another 2,000 years.
Seeing things VERY differently is the key, not just to the survival of the church, but to its continual efforts to remain relevant. The church IS still here because in each age, it found new ways to reach unbelievers with a message and public witness that caught their interest, or that led to their healing. But if it puts down anchors and tries to “stay” in any one age, time will pass it by, and it will have yielded to the “comfortable” wisdom of humans and got passed over by God’s available “wisdom of the ages.” As I said earlier, we can’t ever totally removed the fingerprints of humans from what we believe or claim to believe God is doing in the world, nor should we, if we are to be truly Christian. After all, we follow a Savior who claimed to be both fully human AND also be the “fullness of the Godhead, bodily.” Seeing things differently means that we understand the we MUST be the actors in ushering in the Kingdom of God to our age, AND God’s Holy Spirit and God’s wisdom can flow though us in these efforts almost like George Lucas’s “Force.” The efforts must be ours because we ARE the “hands and feet” of Jesus, and through the Holy Spirit, are also his witnesses. We can believe this and let the Spirit lead and empower us, or we can take matters into our own hands—which the church has so often done—and look so pedestrian that unbelievers are not spurred to inquire about us, and believers within the walls of the church lose interest. And what happens when believers lose interest? Usually, we provoke some kind of theological or biblical divergence and SPLIT. That’s never a good witness to the uninitiated, by the way. Never. Doing this yet again is evidence of church leaders seeing things the “same old way,” instead of very differently with the wisdom of God. Shame on us.
But there is much good news in this passage! In verse 9, Paul writes: “…as it is written, ‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love God.’” God has great things in store for YOU, for ME, for the CHURCH, and for the WORLD, if we will just open our minds and hearts to seeing things differently. How differently? Different TODAY than what the church saw twenty years ago, ten years ago, five years ago, maybe even yesterday! The Spirit of God looks at what IS and what WILL BE, and offers the church wisdom as to how to “put our hands to the plow and not look back.” Yet, we are so easily seduced into plowing the same ground, over and over again. That is seeing things as they WERE, not how they CAN BE. Seeing things “differently” is about claiming the promise and recipe of verse 9—seeing things that NO EYE HAS SEEN (yet), nor EAR HEARD (yet), nor what our “pea-pickin’” little hearts can imagine (yet). Around a hilly and confusing city like Pittsburgh, we often say, “You can’t get there from here.” Paul is telling the Corinthian Christians—and US—that it's time we start believing we CAN get there from here! We CAN be a diverse, inclusive church AND we can be a Holy Spirit led church as well. We CAN put our human fingerprints on the gates to the in-breaking Kingdom of God, in fact, we MUST, but we do so knowing our Savior is God AND “one of us,” and that our fingerprints are also HIS fingerprints. Open the gates! Let the “captives” out and welcome the those seeking redemption in! We all need new eyesight, if this is to happen in our time. The old way of seeing will not take us to the new places the Kingdom of God needs to go.
There is great news here, too, for each and every Christian believer, regardless of where you are on your journey. God’s “wisdom of the ages,” the “secret” that was “hidden” for so long, have been revealed, and they are YOURS for the taking. His name is Jesus Christ, and he cares for YOU as much as he cares for the whole world. The Spirit of God that resides in your heart right now is proof of that. Trust the wisdom, trust the grace, trust the embrace of God’s love in Jesus. And trust the new way of seeing things they will lead you to! Amen.
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