Paul mentions this absurd view of baptism. Then he mentions the historical reality, namely that he baptized so few among them, thank goodness. And he did this ultimately in order to expose the folly of their allegiance to human leaders.
22 Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom.
This mindset of choosing leaders based on their wisdom and talent and eloquence and stature was not uncommon in their day. It’s the same mindset that made celebrities out of certain rabbis in their day. Rabbis would start schools and young Jewish boys would crowd around certain rabbis because they wanted to study under a rabbi of note. Or Greek philosophers in the first century like Epictetus or Ptolemy gathering around themselves students who adore them. Rock star rabbis. Famous Greek philosophers. Gifted orators. These were the celebrities of the first century and certainly that was the case in a cosmopolitan, trade center like Corinth.
And the same mindset exists today in the 21st century. You pick up a book and what’s the first thing you do? You turn over the book and you look for the author’s credentials. For biblical commentaries, I look for professors from a certain tier of school. If I never heard of the school, I am less inclined to read their work. Maybe if they are not from a well-known school but there is a glowing review from someone famous, then I might read it. If the author goes to a top tier school, then I’m all ears.
What about among graduate students doing research? Everyone wants to get into the lab of the Nobel Laureate. Am I right? Because getting a publication with that person’s name on it goes a long way in academia.
Who’s got the credentials, who went to the good school, who is well educated, who has wisdom? And when we find a wise person with all these credentials, we are all ears. We are all attracted to human wisdom. This is one of the main idolatries of man.
22 Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom
Now, we are ready to tackle the first half of that verse — Jews demand miraculous signs. In addition to the idolatry of human wisdom, power is the second idolatry of man. We are attracted to worldly power. We don’t have to go very far to see this idolatry at work. Who is popular in high school? Is it the valedictorian who studies all day in his room? Is it the scholar or the philosopher? If that is you, I hate to break it to you. You probably were not that popular. Who’s popular? It’s the captain of the football team. Someone who is strong and powerful. Of course, later on, the valedictorian ends up becoming the boss of the football player, but that’s not the point I am trying to make.
We are attracted to power. We celebrate athletes like DeShaun Jackson from the Philadelphia Eagles who seems to have a second gear burst of speed on the football field. Or Ryan Howard from the Philadelphia Phillies who has freakish homerun power at the plate. Or Andre Igoudala from the Philadelphia 76ers who can jump out of the gym and dunk over people. Or Hope Solo, the goalie for the US Women’s soccer team who is considered the best goalie in the world. I had to give a plug for the women’s team as they are playing today in the World Cup Final.
We are attracted to CEOs like Donald Trump who buy whatever they want and if they tell people to jump, the people answer, how high? We all want to be powerful. We want to walk into a room and people to stop what they are doing and to notice us.
It was a major power trip for me to become a black belt as a 15 year old kid. I was so proud of myself. I gave a speech in my Honors English class about taekwondo in my taekwondo uniform. For my senior year talent show, I did a taekwondo demonstration where I broke boards on beat to the song, Eye of the Tiger. I was part of a very traditional taekwondo studio where we were taught the importance of respect. And even though I was just 15, by virtue of being a black belt, I would walk into the studio and the highest ranking belt would call the entire class to attention. And as a class, they would bow to me altogether. And as I am walking to the dressing room, each person, even men in their fifties, would bow to me one by one. I must be a sinner because boy, it felt good. I felt powerful.
Power is when a concert master walks on stage and all the instruments stop what they are doing. And the concert master plays the open A string and he holds it for 5-10 seconds and then the rest of the orchestra tunes themselves to his pitch. That’s power.
Power was a big motif in the Old Testament. To a Jewish believer of Yahweh, God was a God of power. He spoke the universe into being. That’s power. God parted the Red Sea and delivered the people from slavery in Egypt with a miraculous display of power. He defeated pagan armies even when His people were vastly outnumbered. That’s power. While the Israelites were wandering in the wilderness, God appeared before His people in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. That’s power. God gave Abraham and Sarah a son even though they were a hundred years old. The God of the Old Testament is one of power and that power was often displayed through miraculous signs.
Sometimes, people wonder, how come God just doesn’t do miracles today like he did in the Old Testament? If God parted the ocean at Redondo Beach or He appeared in a vision next to the Hollywood sign, I’m sure many would believe. Even in Jesus’ day, the crowds were always looking for signs, displays of power. And here and there, Jesus would perform miracles. He restored sight to a blind man. He gave a lame man at the pool of Bethesda the ability to walk. He fed over 5,000 people using 5 loaves and 2 fish. But whenever crowds started gathering and Jesus’ popularity was on the rise, He retreated. He did not want people to follow him just to receive the benefits. He wanted people to follow him out of a love relationship.
The problem with power is that many times you follow a powerful person, not necessarily because you love that person and value the relationship, but because you are scared of the consequences of not following. Or you are afraid of losing the privileges and benefits of being aligned with a person of power. Do you think Donald Trump’s employees love him? Maybe, but I would say probably not. They are loyal because they have a lot to gain by being loyal. And they certainly have a lot to lose by not staying on his good side.
So how does Jesus weed out those who are just looking for what they can get from him FROM those who really want to follow him out of love?
He dies on a cross.
What is the human reaction when we see the supposed Son of God dying on a cross?
Paul sums up our collective, gut-level response to Christ dying on a cross in v18 —
18 For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
We look at the cross and think, what a fool. Only a fool would claim to be God and yet die so helplessly. It doesn’t make sense. Something about the cross just rubs us the wrong way. Yet this is what Paul preached — a crucified Messiah.
22 Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
We preach Christ crucified. A crucified Messiah, a Savior nailed to a tree. That’s the core of our Christian message. And wouldn’t you say that a “crucified Savior” is an oxymoron? Christ crucified is a contradiction in terms akin to fried ice. You can have a Messiah or you can have a crucifixion but you can’t have both in the same sentence, at least not according to human understanding. Messiah meant power, splendor, triumph while crucifixion meant weakness, humiliation, defeat.
Why does God put these divergent concepts side by side? How come the Savior of the world could not, or would not, even save himself as he hung on the cross? Those were the taunts that were hurled at Christ while he was hanging at Calvary. King of the Jews, save yourself. That’s to be expected. To an unsaved, unregenerate non-believer, the cross is utter foolishness. It simply doesn’t make sense.
Who in their right mind would have dreamt up something as absurd as the gospel of the Son of God crucified on a cross? Just let that thought sink in for a moment. When the wise and learned look at the cross, they see it as folly. But the connotation of the word in the Greek is stronger than merely foolishness — it is better translated as madness. The cross is madness. Anyone who believes in Christianity is crazy. I think if you grew up in the church, you may have never really sat down and examined the ridiculous nature of the cross. Because you always assumed the gospel to be true. And you never doubted because the teaching has become so familiar and acceptable, even mundane. But just imagine if you were a Jew or a Greek in the first century — could you believe a story as outrageous as the gospel? Not a chance.
The cross is not an advanced form of wisdom that the philosophers would have eventually figured out on their own. No, the cross smashes all conventional boundaries of human wisdom. The cross is a wisdom that is totally out of this world and exclusively from God. Not from man. Therefore, it had to be revealed to us by God. This wisdom came from outside of the sphere of human reason. That is why, for the Greek mind, the cross was foolishness because they did not have the capacity on their own to recognize its truth, nor do we apart from divine intervention.
For the Jew, to the religious person, the cross was a stumbling block. Meaning, they stumbled over, they tripped over the cross, they failed to recognize that Jesus was the Messiah they were waiting for. Why? First of all, to be crucified was to be under the curse of God. On top of that, Jesus died as a criminal of the state of Rome.
How could this kind of ignoble figure be the long awaited Messiah? But they also stumbled for deeper reasons. From reading the Old Testament and seeing God working in miraculous ways with displays of divine power coupled with their tradition passed down from their forefathers, who can blame them for expecting the Messiah to be a reigning king, a powerful political figure to wipe out the Romans? Isn’t that what God did for the Israelites in Exodus — he delivered them from Egypt with a mighty display of power? Who can blame them? That was their precedent. And thus, they had a box called religion and Jesus didn’t fit into the box. Plain and simple. Jesus was too different, too radical, He didn’t fit into their preconceived notions about what a Messiah should do for them..
But if you were completely unbiased and you know your Old Testament well, I think you would have to conclude that the Jews SHOULDN’T have stumbled over the cross. If anyone should have recognized Jesus as the Messiah, it should have been the nation of Israel. Because there were so many pointers to Christ throughout the Old Testament. Out of Exodus, there was the Passover Lamb, which was a foreshadowing of the Lamb of God who had to be slaughtered in order to take away the sins of the world. There was Abraham about to sacrifice his son Isaac and God stops him as the knife is coming down and God promises that He himself will provide a lamb for the offering. There was Job in the midst of his suffering where he received a vision and he confidently proclaims in Job 19, I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth. There were prophecies hundreds of years prior to the coming of Christ about a Suffering Servant who would be pierced for our iniquities and by his wounds we would be healed.
All of these are pointers to Jesus. And out of anyone in the world, the Jews should have recognized Jesus as the fulfillment of Scripture. But they failed to recognize Jesus because they were blinded by the idol of power. Give me a sign.
In response to our tendency to idolize 1) wisdom in the case of the Greeks and 2) power in the case of the Jews, God’s response is the cross. And in that very cross, God displays an entirely new wisdom and power.
22 Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
Christ crucified, Christ, a new power and a new wisdom of God. God doesn’t just offer a more advanced form of wisdom as we know wisdom, nor does he offer a greater measure of power as we know power. No, he introduces new categories altogether. He turns the tables.
25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength.
He says, what we call powerful, to God, is actually weak and what we call wise is actually foolish.