Wise Weakness

 

I Corinthians 2:1-12

February 8, 2026        

 

¹When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. ²For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. ³And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. ⁴My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, ⁵so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.

⁶Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish. ⁷But we speak God's wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. ⁸None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. ⁹But, as it is written,

‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,

nor the human heart conceived,

what God has prepared for those who love him’—

¹⁰these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. ¹¹For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within? So also no one comprehends what is truly God's except the Spirit of God. ¹²Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. 

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            When I was doing a student ministry internship at Duke there was a great group of people who worked together, sharing offices in the basement of the chapel, borrowing each other’s books and staplers, making fun of each other’s theology and making deals on whose group would get which room on which day.  One of those people was Frank, the campus rabbi.  He really worked out of Hillel House, but the chapel basement was more centrally located.  About halfway into one semester, he announced to the whole religious life staff that his wife had just been diagnosed with an inoperable, at that time untreatable cancer.  He was resigning effective the next week.  They had booked a cruise and were going to spend as much time together as they could, while they could.  If things went quickly, we would see him again in a few months or a year.  When he did return the following year, it was strange because it was good to see someone whom everyone liked and admired but we also knew that he was back only because he had completed a time of great love that was also a time of great loss, and we were seeing them both linger.

There is a deep holiness in that mixture, which is in one way or another part of being fully human.  It was especially holy in the way that they chose to draw closer to one another and to affirm the centrality of their love when the going became hardest, consciously setting everything else aside to focus on their shared life while it was still shareable and good, preparing for the time that they would share a goodbye.

Paul, another rabbi from a time long before this, one who had been a Pharisee studying at the feet of the best biblical scholars of his day, would have differed from Frank in many, many ways, chiefly with respect to Paul’s belief that Jesus had been the Messiah and all the implications that carries.  Paul spoke of human love and marriage as being a major example for understanding God’s even deeper love, and on that they would have agreed, and that the greatest love is ready to stand up even to death.

Love cannot be explained.  Sure, it has its biological side, and its social aspects.  Matches have been made and broken for political and economic reasons.  But why is it that some of the most loving marriages seem the oddest?  Have you never heard someone mutter under their breath, “What could she possibly see in him”?  Somehow, though, nobody can picture one without the other.  The writers of All in the Family dealt with that when they had to figure out what to do with Archie Bunker when Edith died.  In their story, he stayed numb for weeks until he found one of her slippers under the bed, then began talking to her.

"It wasn't s'posed to be like this, y'know; I was s'posed to be the first one to go. I know I always used to kid ya about you going first; you know I never meant none of that. And that morning when ya was layin' there, I was shakin' you an' yellin' at you to go down and fix my breakfast, I didn't know. Ya had no right to leave me that way, Edith, without givin' me just one more chance to say I love you..."[1]

            Why would God love people who, though made in his own image, are so unlike him?  Why has he not just written the world off?  The book of Genesis asks that. 

“The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, ‘I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.’” 

That’s Genesis 6:5-7.  Genesis 6:8, however, says,

“But Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord.”

So things go on.

            The love of God is as mysterious – more mysterious – than ours.  So, with wisdom, Paul doesn’t seek for words to explain it or express it beyond what it takes to point out the one moment in all eternity where everything comes into focus, and things maybe don’t have to make sense in the organized, philosophical way that insulates us from the inexplicability of his love that we call “grace”.

“When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling.  My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.” [I Corinthians 2:1-5]

Where we see the power of love is in the moments of shared weakness.  Where we see the ultimate power of the ultimate love is when God not only watches our troubles and feels the pain that arises from our sin and suffers for the victimized but goes to the furthest limit and truly shares our human weakness and our human death:

“Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” [I Corinthians 2:2] 

The love of God is mysterious but real.  The forgiveness of God is inexplicable but true.  Thankfully, it isn’t up to us to unravel the mystery or to explain the Lord’s ways.  Our part is simply to accept his infinite love for what it is, and to love him with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves. 

Just like he does.

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[1] Edith Bunker - Wikipedia

"Seek and Find"

 

John 1:29-42

January 18, 2026

 

The next day he saw Jesus coming towards him and declared, ‘Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! ³⁰This is he of whom I said, “After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.” ³¹I myself did not know him; but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel.’ ³²And John testified, ‘I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. ³³I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, “He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.” ³⁴And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.’

³⁵The next day John again was standing with two of his disciples, ³⁶and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, ‘Look, here is the Lamb of God!’ ³⁷The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. ³⁸When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, ‘What are you looking for?’ They said to him, ‘Rabbi’ (which translated means Teacher), ‘where are you staying?’ ³⁹He said to them, ‘Come and see.’ They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day. It was about four o'clock in the afternoon. ⁴⁰One of the two who heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter's brother. ⁴¹He first found his brother Simon and said to him, ‘We have found the Messiah’ (which is translated Anointed). ⁴²He brought Simon to Jesus, who looked at him and said, ‘You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas’ (which is translated Peter).

 

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            John’s gospel tells us that as Jesus walked by, two disciples of John the Baptist, Andrew and another whom he doesn’t name, heard him say,

“‘Look, here is the Lamb of God!’ The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, ‘What are you looking for?’ They said to him, ‘Rabbi’ (which translated means Teacher), ‘where are you staying?’ He said to them, ‘Come and see.’ They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day.” [John 1:36-39]

What were they looking for?  They didn’t tell Jesus, or if they did, the gospel doesn’t tell us.  The closest we get to an answer is what happened the next day when Andrew went and found his brother and announced,

“We have found the Messiah!” [John 1:41]

That discovery would and did change the lives of those two disciples, and Andrew’s brother (whom Jesus nicknamed Peter, Greek for “the Rock”).  In the long run, maybe what matters most isn’t really what we’re looking for, but whom we find.

            C.S. Lewis, one of the great Christian writers of the twentieth century, wrote a spiritual autobiography he called “Surprised by Joy”.  He wrote it for himself as much as for anybody else, trying to figure out why he even believed in God, let alone the God of Christianity, when he had spent so much of his life as an atheist and someone who had seen the horrors of World War I from the trenches in France.  He spends chapters outlining his reasoning for belief or non-belief, but in the end he traces everything back to one moment in his childhood when he was about six and his older brother showed him a little nature diorama that he had built out of a cookie tin with some moss and stones and twigs.  That awoke a strange kind of admiration and happiness and wonder in him for some reason, but that flash of pure joy was so strong that when it disappeared it left behind a desire for its return, and then a desire for the desire, like an echo of an echo, and so on.  The term he eventually gave it was “an inconsolable longing”.  It would lead him to become a student and teacher of literature, which is how he met one of his best friends, J.R.R. Tolkien, who was forward enough to suggest that what he was feeling was what St. Augustine said to God: “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

            Jesus’ question to Andrew and his friend:”What are you looking for?” is one that is worth posing over and over again, because there may be steps and stages before people can fully answer that for themselves, as they must.  They met Jesus, the Messiah, but if they understood his mission, as most of their neighbors would have understood the role of the Messiah at the time, as a political or military leader who would establish Israel as the premier power in all the earth (or at least push the Romans out of the country), then they would be totally disappointed.  Many were.

            If they understood Jesus’ mission simply as one of supplying bread and changing water into wine and healing the sick – all of which he did – then they must have been disappointed when there were times he turned the crowds away or slipped off in the night so that he could pray for awhile instead.  And there were also times when the Bible tells us that he couldn’t perform a miracle because the person asking it had no faith, no real trust.

            Their first teacher, John, had spoken true words when he spoke of Jesus,

“and declared, ‘Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” [John 1:29]

but that is hard to hear when a lamb is a sacrificial animal that is slaughtered, and a Messiah is a national savior who conquers and triumphs over his enemies, the nation’s enemies, the enemies of God.  Try putting that kind of Messiah together with what Jesus would tell them:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’  But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” [Matthew 5:43-45]

Jesus might even say that is what his followers are supposed to do for somebody who directly repudiates Jesus’ own words.  That is not such a simple thing to do.  Just try it.

Yet now, as then, people go looking to find whatever kind of savior they think they need or think they understand, and find Jesus waiting for them, challenging the false Messiahs and the false paths that they point to, saying instead,

         “Come and see,” [John 1:39]

or as he would say to others,

                     “Follow me,”  [John 1:43]

and in the following there is the finding.

There’s a poem by George MacDonald called “What Christ Said”:

I said, “Let me walk in the fields.”
He said, “No; walk in the town.”
I said, “There are no flowers there.”
He said, “No flowers, but a crown.”

I said, “But the skies are black,
There is nothing but noise and din;”
And he wept as he sent me back;
“There is more,” he said, “there is sin.”

I said, “But the air is thick,
And fogs are veiling the sun.”
He answered, “Yet souls are sick,
And souls in the dark undone.”

I said, “I shall miss the light,
And friends will miss me, they say.”
He answered, “Choose tonight
If I am to miss you, or they.”

I pleaded for time to be given.
He said, “Is it hard to decide?
It will not seem hard in Heaven
To have followed the steps of your Guide.”

I cast one look at the fields,
Then set my face to the town;
He said, “My child, do you yield?
Will you leave the flowers for the crown?”

Then into his hand went mine;
And into my heart came he;
And I walk in a light divine,
The path I had feared to see.