Our Power, Wisdom and Glory
by Fr. Roger Landry - April 10, 2009
For the first several years of his preaching of the Gospel, St. Paul for the most part ducked the subject of the Cross. With Jews, he preached on how Jesus was the fulfillment of all the Messianic prophecies and the apex of salvation history (Acts 13); with the Gentiles, he sought to illustrate, among other approaches, how Jesus was the fulfillment of their search for God (Acts 17). His preaching bore little fruit, however, because there was an "elephant in the living room" left unaddressed, a subject that seemed to invalidate everything else he was saying about Jesus: the crucifixion.
St. Paul knew that Jesus' death on the Cross was a "scandal" to his fellow Jews. Accustomed to look for miraculous signs as a confirmation that someone comes from God, Jews saw in the Cross only an ineradicable failure. They believed that when the Messiah finally came he would reestablish the reign of his ancestor David and kick out all foreign powers; Jesus, on the other hand, was killed by those very powers in the most humiliating way conceivable. The cross was nothing but a sign of weakness totally inconsistent with a powerful signs a Messiah sent by God was expected to work.
St. Paul, moreover, knew that for the Gentiles, the crucifixion was utter foolishness. For them it was hard enough to believe that God would become man; it was altogether incomprehensible that God could or would be crucified. Anyone who believed that the crucified Jesus was God was, to them, a bigger fool even than the one they deemed the executed pseudo-Messiah.
So it is somewhat understandable that early in his preaching St. Paul didn't emphasize the Cross. After a dramatic failure in Athens, however, he resolved from that point forward to "preach" and "know nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified." Against the Jews' claims of scandalous weakness, he tried to show how Jesus manifests God's "power;" in response to Greek claims of the idiocy of the crucifixion, he stressed how Jesus on the Cross demonstrates God's "wisdom" (1 Cor 1:18-25; 2:1-5).
The cross shows God's power because it shows the strength of his forebearing love. It would have been easy for Jesus to come down from the cross and annihilate those who opposed and mocked him. He could have demonstrated to everyone his brute force as God. If Vince McMahon were God, that might have been the way it played out. Jesus, rather, like a parent who doesn't retaliate with superior physical force against an infant who strikes him, resists on account of his superior moral strength. Through his apparent weakness, he paradoxically shows the full power of total trust in God the Father. On the Cross, Christ also shows the supreme wisdom by revealing the highest morality, that of loving to the end of one's capacities. "The Crucified one is wisdom," Pope Benedict said in a catechesis on St. Paul last Fall, "for he truly shows who God is, that is, a force of love that went even as far as the Cross to save men and women."
It was when St. Paul started to preach the full Gospel of God's power and wisdom manifested paradoxically on the Cross that he started to reap the harvest of apostolic fruit. St. Paul, however, didn't merely preach the Gospel of Christ Crucified with his words. He lived it and preached it with his own bodily wounds. The Cross of Christ was not a theological concept for him but a way of life. As he recounts for us, he was imprisoned seven times; scourged five times; three times beaten with rods; stoned and left for dead; shipwrecked three times; in constant danger from assassins, false brothers, and robbers; and he likely suffered most of his adult life with an illness, probably malaria, that made him want to pull out his eyes (2 Cor 11:21-31; Gal 4:15). It was because of all of these sufferings voluntarily borne that he was able to say to the Galatians, "I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me" (Gal 2:19-20). Through all these hardships, Paul learned how to die to himself so that Christ was able to live within him. Rather than seeing the Cross as a foolish shame and a scandalous weakness, he exclaimed, "Far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world" (Gal 6:14).
These truths that St. Paul learned, taught and lived, Pope Benedict says, are "paradigmatic for all of us."
Like at the time of the apostle, many still treat the Cross — Jesus' and ours — as scandalous and foolish. In a world that seeks to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, suffering makes little sense, and hence in various places people with terminal illnesses are "put out of their misery," women who do not want to be pregnant are allowed to kill their babies, people struggling through marital difficulties can legally and easily abandon their commitments, human beings are manufactured and slaughtered to obtain cells to relieve those who are older, richer and stronger, those struggling with same-sex attractions are encouraged to abandon chastity in exchange for a counterfeit expression of love, and so many have recourse to drugs, sex without permanent and total commitment, and other escapes.
When the Church raises her voice against such practices, her message is treated as unenlightened and contemptible — as foolish and scandalous.
For this reason, many Christians, like St. Paul did initially, fail to live up to their vocation to announce and incarnate the power and wisdom of Christ Crucified. This omission is surely one of the reasons behind the deeply disturbing data from the recent Gallup survey that we print on page 4 of this edition. Since in many places priests and faithful haven't preached and lived according to Jesus' standard of cruciform love, huge percentages of Catholics, including those who attend Mass each Sunday, have conformed their minds to our hedonistic age rather than to the teaching of Christ and the Church he founded.
Today, on Good Friday, as Jesus is nailed to the pulpit of the Cross and proclaims with arms wide open the full power of his redeeming love, the Church in our country has a chance to choose to follow Christ crucified or to run away. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus three times begged his father to take the cup of suffering, the full measure of the Cross, away from him. Three times, however, he added, "but not my will but yours be done" (Lk 22:42). He was perfected through what he obediently suffered and became for us the source of salvation (Phil 2:8; Heb 5:8). Similarly for us to follow Jesus on that path of spiritual perfection toward heaven, we need to be obedient to God by submitting to Christ and to his action in founding the Church to teach definitively in his name. This is one of the principal ways by which we deny ourselves, pick up our Cross and follow Jesus (Mt 16:24). This is one of the chief paths by which we are crucified to the world and the world to us. This is one of the essential means by which we learn to live by faith in the Son of God, who loved us individually and gave himself up for each us.
The Year of St. Paul, presently underway, is a grace-filled opportunity for us to rediscover the full practical power and wisdom of Christ on the Cross, which the whole Church celebrates today and St. Paul made the fundamental core of his teaching. It is also blessed occasion for us to make his teaching and experience of the Cross our own and take it out to a world, much like the one St. Paul encountered, that once again desperately needs to hear the whole Gospel.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
