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.
*************************************************
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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