1 Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22

In the past couple of weeks, many of you may have read or heard in the media the story of the nine-year-old Brazilian girl who was recently discovered to be pregnant with twins – a pregnancy that allegedly resulted from sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather.  Those of you who have been following this story will know that the girl’s mother authorised doctors to terminate the pregnancy, with the result that the local Catholic archbishop has pronounced excommunication on both the mother and the medical personnel involved in the termination.

It will come as no surprise to anyone that this matter has become hugely controversial, both with respect to the termination of the girl’s pregnancy and the pronouncement of excommunication.  There are passionate advocates on both sides of the debate, as well as a welter of thorny questions.  Was it wrong to terminate the pregnancy; or was it justified under the circumstances? Was the archbishop right to excommunicate the mother and the doctors; or was this an overreaction? Do the rights and needs of potential life take precedence over the rights and needs of actual life?

I’m not going to give you the answers to any of these questions, because, quite frankly, I don’t have any.  More to the point, I suspect there aren’t actually any definitive, all-encompassing answers to the kinds of questions this situation raises.  Not, I hasten to add, because I’m a relativist and believe that all answers are equally valid; but because it seems to me that moral-ethical questions like this confront us – as few other things in life do – with the limitations of our humanity; with the strictly provisional nature of our knowledge; and, above all else, with the need for humility, for grace, for compassion, for a love that embraces a humanity as broken and limited as our own.

But, human beings being human beings, our inclination is usually to the exact opposite, dig our heels in, to stubbornly insist on both our rightness and our righteousness, and to condemn those who disagree with us – or with whom we disagree – as misguided at best or positively dangerous at worst.

Depressingly, Christian history is filled with innumerable examples of this kind of fractiousness. And in today’s reading from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, we have one of the earliest recorded examples.  For Paul was writing to a community riven by faction and dissent, split between competing interests proclaiming the superiority of this or that leader, and ascribing to those leaders competing virtues of outstanding wisdom or miraculous power.   Some were proclaiming: “I belong to Paul”, others: “I belong to Apollos”, or “I belong to Cephas.”  Some were even proclaiming: “I belong to Christ”, as though Christ were nothing more than a factional leader in their dispute.

Now, Paul could have tried to re-assert control over the church at Corinth.  Afterall, he had founded this church, it owed its existence to him, and if anyone had – by human terms – a moral right to the loyalty and obedience of the community, it was Paul.  Had Paul tried to re-assert his authority, he would no doubt have succeeded.  But Paul actually does no such thing; on the contrary, he does the exact opposite.  He does the thing which, by human standards, makes him look weak and foolish and most un-leader-like. 

Paul gives up authority.  He refuses to enter into the power games, he refuses to enter into the personality politics, he refuses to put himself forward as the person in charge.  And he does it by placing all claims to power and authority and leadership in the context of the Cross, by placing all claims to knowledge and rightness and righteousness in the light of the Gospel of Christ crucified.

It’s foolishness, of course; it’s absurd, it’s a joke.  Paul’s strategy for dealing with the division within the Corinthian church is not to ally himself with the strongest faction and overwhelm the rest, and then take control of the victors.  Rather, his strategy is to get everyone – even his own followers – offside by saying, your claim to wisdom is false, your claim to miraculous power is an illusion, because you make these claims not in Christ but on your own behalf.  You have turned away from faith toward egotism, away from God toward self.

As a strategy for restoring order and unity, I doubt it’s one of which Machiavelli would have approved.  But it’s precisely because Paul grounds himself in the scandal of Christianity that he makes this foolish, un-political appeal: he’s not interested in earthly power, he’s interested only in the Good News which the apparent absurdity of Christian faith proclaims to all humanity. 

And that scandal, that absurdity is this: that in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, God became incarnate in human form, suffered an abhorrent death usually reserved for traitors and criminals, and then rose from the dead in eternal and decisive victory over the power of sin and death – a victory in which we, by the unmerited grace of God, are included.

When you strip Christian faith back to its bare bones, when you reveal this central essence of the Gospel, you can see why Christianity has always been accused of absurdity and foolishness – and not just by the Johnny-come-latelys of fashionable, militant atheism; but throughout all of the Church’s history, by people who considered themselves to be wise or thoughtful or insightful.

Certainly, Christian faith was absurd to the wise and thoughtful and insightful of Paul’s time: it was, as he says, foolishness to the Greek and a stumbling block to the Jew.  And Paul knew this, because by his birth and upbringing, he had a foot in both the world of Jewish Messianic expectation, as well as the world of detached Greek philosophy.  The former waited for the Messiah to come in glory, to liberate the Jews and make of them a great nation as they had been in the days of David; the latter argued that God was remote and unconcerned with humanity, and that all people could do was resign themselves to fate and live as morally as their reason and their circumstances allowed.

And in the face of these competing viewpoints, these Christians had the gall and the temerity to say that the man Jesus of Nazareth, born in a stable, who lived as an itinerant preacher moving from place to place, and who was executed by the Romans as a troublemaker – this was the Messiah for whom the Jewish people longed; this person who could be seen and touched and heard and killed was also the incarnate God responsible for the stupendous wonders of creation!

When you put it like that, the conclusion almost seems inevitable that Christianity is a kind of delusion, a cruel confidence trick to hoax people into believing the impossible.  You can see why the detractors of Christianity often mocked it as a refuge for those too weak or to impatient to face up to the harsh realities of existence.  You can see why the scandal of Christianity has always attracted hatred and ridicule.

But it is in this scandalousness that Paul bases his appeal to the Corinthians.  They have forgotten the very essence of their faith, and have instead tried to reduce it, one the one hand, to a series of logical rational philosophical and theological precepts; or, on the other hand, to a kind of supernatural magic show highlighted by miraculous healings, speaking in tongues, and prophetic utterances.  What is more, they are doing so in order to serve their own agendas, to claim leadership of the community, to bolster their own egos, to be the person in charge.  They are creating these false divisions in order to serve themselves, and not Christ.

In other words, Paul was telling the Corinthians that they had forgotten the foolishness of Christ, who had often said some apparently absurd things – an example of which we have in today’s reading from John’s Gospel.  In reading this Gospel, you and I have the benefit of hindsight: like the Gospel’s author, we know in advance that when Jesus says he’s going to tear down the Temple and rebuild it in three days, he’s talking about himself: he will be torn from life and resurrected on the third day.  But imagine that you’re one of the people in the crowd: you’ve heard about this Jesus of Nazareth; you’re not quite convinced, but you’re curious.  And then you hear him make this astonishing claim about the Temple, a claim you have to come to terms with right there and then, without the benefit of hindsight or the advantage of prior knowledge.  Wouldn’t you actually have a good deal of sympathy for the people who say: “What on earth are you talking about, pal? This Temple took forty-six years to build, and you reckon you’re going to tear it down and rebuild it in three days? Pull the other one, Jesus of Nazareth – it recites the Psalms!”

Tellingly, the author of John’s Gospel writes that even the disciples didn’t get it until after the Resurrection; so you can imagine them hearing this and scratching their heads and wondering what kind of foolishness this is.  And the foolishness that Jesus is giving voice to is the foolishness of love: the kind of extravagant, abundant, gratuitous love that is given freely and with total inclusiveness; love that manifests itself on the Cross in an act of inconceivable solidarity of the divine for and with the human; love that, though we are utterly undeserving, nonetheless makes us acceptable to God. 

And that is why Jesus clears the Temple: because he is telling the people, “You have forgotten the love of God.”  You have made all these processes and procedures, such as money changing and the selling of sacrificial animals – processes which were meant to help the Chosen People approach the love of God with humility and thanksgiving – you have made them the reason for coming to Temple, you have forgotten the One to whom they point, the One who in love entered into covenant with you. 

And this is the same message that Paul delivers to the warring Corinthian factions: “You have forgotten the love of God.”  You have forgotten that, in Christ, God humbled God’s-self for our sake, God entered into our humanity and suffering that we might at last be free of sin and death, so that we might live as the Body of Christ on earth in service to one another and to all humanity.  Paul is telling the Corinthians that they have made themselves the centre of their life and community, not the One to whom that life and community point, not the One on whose love and grace they are utterly dependent.

And this issue of love brings us to other, equally thorny questions.  Is there enough love to forgive a man who rapes a nine-year-old girl and impregnates her? Is there enough love to forgive a humanity so broken that it puts that girl and her mother in the situation where they must decide between running the risk of having that pregnancy go to term or else terminating two potential lives?  Is there enough love to forgive a community that claims to be the Body of Christ on earth, and yet which time and again through its history forgets the foolishness of its faith, the Gospel of Christ crucified? We have already today received the assurance of forgiveness – but it is an assurance that comes to us, not through our own wisdom or our own power, because human knowledge and human strength are insufficient to answer these questions and provide these assurances.  On the contrary, the answers and the assurance come to us only in the shadow of the outstretched arms of a broken and bleeding body, nailed to a Cross, whose circumference encloses all of creation.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.