Exodus 20:1-17 (paired well with Psalm 19) was the focus of my blog for October 8, just twenty weeks ago, so I’ll refer you there for my stuff about Torah as dream, Zora Neale Hurston and more. I'll also point you to this sermon from 3+ years ago, and this one from October 8. I do like the idea of the commandments as a jumping off point during Lent as we ponder what God requires, and how much repentance and mercy we require.

1 Corinthians 1:18-25 focuses us squarely within the movement that is the season of Lent. As a preacher, I worry that when I preach “the Word of the Cross is folly,” it will turn out that my words about the Cross will be folly. The gravest risk for preachers who’ve grown up in our thin, vaguely revivalistic environment, is that we will minimize, individualize, trivialize and thus confuse and empty the Cross of its richer meaning. If you had time to read N.T. Wright’s The Day the Revolution Began: Rethinking the Meaning of Jesus’ Crucifixion, you’d be well-served; suffice it to say that his endeavor is to broaden the context and significance of Jesus’ crucifixion, which is more than Jesus died for our sins. Such eloquence:

“When Jesus of Nazareth died on the cross, something happened as a result of which the world is a different place… The death of Jesus was the moment when the great gate of human history, bolted with iron bars and overgrown with toxic weeds, burst open so that the Creator’s project of reconciliation between heaven and earth could at last be set in powerful motion… Christian mission means implementing the victory that Jesus won on the cross.”  

A revolution in all of creation began, and we aren’t saved from the trouble but are called to be active participants in God’s undeniable labor of reconciliation.

We have pretty crosses adorning our churches, not to mention jewelry, posters, clothing… The cross in the first centuries was horrific, something from which you would avert your gaze. Christian art avoided the cross for several centuries, and even then the first ones were golden and bejeweled (Robin Jenson’s The Cross: History, Art & Controversy is a lovely study of the cross in historic art). Consider the first instance of a cross — in that laughable graffiti found near the Palatine Hill in Rome — depicting a man bowing down before a crucified figure with a donkey’s head, with the inscription, “Alexamenos worships his God,” clearly ridiculing a late second century convert to Christianity.

We speak of “apologetics,” the intellectual defense of the faith. Paul surrenders before beginning, making zero apologies for the absurd, unexpected and not prophesied idea that the Messiah would not crush his foes but be crushed by them; the Scriptures themselves indicated that being killed on a tree was an offense. How can the preacher resuscitate the disgust, the offense, except just to name it? Or maybe we show horrific images, maybe von Grünewald's Christ, pierced hundreds of times...

Or maybe that startling bronze crucifixion by Floriano Bodini. This is God? Looks entirely God-forsaken — which is a pitch-perfect way of speaking of it, since Jesus screamed in misery, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” So many Protestant churches suffer from adornment with slick, brass, polished wooden crosses that are allegedly empty — due to Easter? The crucifix tells the deeper truth of God's heart. As Rick Lischer put it in his memoir about his son's death (Stations of the Heart), when battling the cancer, they looked into a church and saw a crucifix, prompting them to know this was the place for them, for such a church, and such a God, "is not freaked out by death."

God certainly gave us brains God would have us use in the life of faith, but the perils of being so smart and learned are many — perhaps especially for the clergy. Martin Luther, when castigating some foe, loved to label him “Mr. Smart-Aleck.” Anthony of Padua was one of Francis of Assisi’s most brilliant followers, but Francis was exceedingly wary of the life of scholarship, fearing that books and learning would become property to be protected and would puff people up. Finally and reluctantly, in a fascinating letter, he agreed to allow Anthony to pursue a life in scholarship, but only “on the condition that you do not extinguish the spirit of prayer and devotion.”

Speaking of St. Francis and the folly of the Cross: while most devout Christians have gazed at the cross and felt considerable relief that Jesus suffered in their place, Francis longed so deeply to be one with Jesus that he prayed, “My Lord Jesus Christ, two graces I ask of you before I die: the first is that in my life I may feel, in my soul and body, as far as possible, that sorrow which you, tender Jesus, underwent in the hour of your most bitter passion; the second is that I may feel in my heart, as far as possible, the abundance of love with which you, son of God, were inflamed, so as willingly to undergo such a great passion for us sinners.” And with that, a seraph flew toward him and burned wounds, the holy stigmata, into his hands, feet and side, which bled intermittently until his death two years later.

If we ponder the cross, we try to choose among or amalgamate various theories of the atonement. I love Robert Jenson’s remark (in Systematic Theology):

“The Gospels tell a powerful and biblically integrated story of the Crucifixion; this story is just so the story of God’s act to bring us back to himself at his own cost, and of our being brought back... Therefore what is first and principally required as the Crucifixion’s right interpretation is for us to tell this story to one another and to God as a story about him and about ourselves.”  

Wow. Can the preacher simply trust the story, which has worked for centuries, instead of over-explaining it?