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In our preaching and witnessing, our message and our very existence show we are foolish, weak and lowly. So if we are going to blow our trumpets about anything, it had better not be ourselves or any human leaders. Rather, “let the one who boasts boast in the Lord” (1:31).
Paul writes about this in his first letter to the Corinthians, skewering human pride. He does this by drawing a series of contrasts—wise/foolish, strong/weak, influential/ lowly—and showing how the gospel puts us on the “wrong” side of all of them.
Christian preaching is fundamentally foolish, at least in the eyes of the world. The world, in Paul’s day, had all sorts of wonderful techniques to make its messages more acceptable: wisdom, eloquence, intelligence, legal reasoning, philosophy.
Our generation has added the power of advertising, popular music, newspapers, movies, websites and television shows which push a particular vision of the true, the good or the beautiful, and by presenting it well make it seem more plausible. Meanwhile the church is stuck with a method that looked foolish in ancient Corinth and looks even more foolish now: preaching. Not with tricks or stunts. Not with high-budget special effects or virtual-reality immersive experiences. Not with wisdom or eloquence, “lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power”. Just proclaiming what God has done in Christ and trusting that God will use that message to turn people’s lives the right way up.
Hopefully this is obvious, but this is not an argument for long, dull, rambling, monotone, unimaginative sermons. I have sat through a few of those, and they have nothing to do with Paul’s point here. In this very letter, Paul proves himself a master of punchy, witty, direct, well-illustrated, concise, rhetorical, funny and incisive communication (and I spend a good deal of my time trying to communicate like that myself). Instead, it is an argument for recognising where the power to save really comes from: not from the polish, the pranks or the presentation but from the proclamation of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen.
As a recruitment strategy in a visually saturated world, this is foolishness. Yet that was how God saved the Corinthians and how he has saved everybody since: “God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe”. The Corinthian church, in which each member’s testimony was that they were saved simply by hearing the message of Christ crucified, was living proof that it works.
"The most apparently ridiculous thing that God has ever done is, it turns out, far smarter than the cleverest thing that human beings have ever come up with."
It is not just the method that is foolish, though; the message is foolish as well. “Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles”. Jewish people, as we know from the four Gospels, were eager for “signs” that would accompany and authorise the Messiah, just like many today look for religious experiences (for instance, Matthew 12:38; 16:1; John 2:18; 4:48). Greek people prized sophia, “wisdom”, in the same way that modern people might prize reason or science.
In that world, Paul says, our message is preposterous: a crucified Messiah looks like a complete contradiction to Jews and utter lunacy to everyone else. Yet when this crazy message is heard by people whom God has called, whether they are Jews or Gentiles, it turns out to be both God’s power and his wisdom (1 Corinthians 1:24). The most apparently ridiculous thing that God has ever done is, it turns out, far smarter than the cleverest thing that human beings have ever come up with.
Having shown the foolishness of Christian preaching and the Christian message, Paul moves to his masterful punchline: the Corinthian church’s very existence is foolish. Look at yourselves, he says. When you became believers, you weren’t a high-powered, rich, upmarket group of movers and shakers. But God saved you anyway. He took hold of the weak, the shameful, the vulnerable, the poor and the poorly educated, and turned them—you!—into demonstrations of his transforming favour. (The Corinthian church, like most revivals in church history, was mainly drawn from among the poor.)
The fact that this church exists at all is proof that God chooses foolish things over wise things, so that nobody might boast before him. You are not wise, righteous, holy and redeemed because of your backgrounds, Paul points out to them, but because you are “in Christ Jesus”. You were foolish people who heard a foolish message preached in a foolish way—and God has demonstrated his wisdom in you so powerfully that the smartest people on earth are left scratching their heads and wondering how he did it. So if you’re going to boast about anything, you should boast in the Lord.
Andrew Wilson is the author of 1 Corinthians For You, the latest edition to our God’s Word For You Series—expository guides by trusted Bible teachers that walk you through books of the Bible verse-by-verse in an accessible and applied way. These flexible resources can be read cover-to-cover, used in personal devotions, used to lead small group studies, or used for sermon preparation
Andrew is Teaching Pastor at King's Church London. He is the author of several books, including God of All Things, 1 Corinthians For You and Spirit and Sacrament, and is a columnist for Christianity Today. Andrew is married to Rachel and they have three children.
