God’s Folly
A sermon by Jamie Howison on 1 Corinthians 1:18-31 and Matthew 5:1-12
An opening note: The 1966 film King of Hearts figures prominently in this sermon, so if you’d like to watch it you can access it at Kanopy. Anyone who holds a City of Winnipeg Library card can get a free membership in Kanopy allowing for five movies per month. You can also rent the film at Apple, Amazon Video, Google Play or YouTube for a small fee.
Once again we hear from Paul’s 1st Letter to the Corinthian church, picking right up where we left off last Sunday. And what’s he driving at again this Sunday? Foolishness. Or more specifically, God’s foolishness. We began that reading by repeating the final verse from last Sunday:
For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
To which Paul then cites from the prophet Isaiah in the Greek version, saying,
For it is written,
‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’ (Is 29:14 Septuagint)
Paul is winding up here to pitch one of the most elegant and in some ways off-kilter pieces of prose in his whole canon of letters. He’s writing to the church community in Corinth which he himself had planted, but he is now recognizing that Corinth is a tough town for a gospel preacher. If you heard last Sunday’s sermon, you may recall how I described Corinth as being a Roman city on Greek soil, which meant that even though the empire controlled Greece and pretty much every country and territory around the Mediterranean, Corinth was not so much an occupied Greek city as it was a Roman city on Greek land. With that came an
intellectual life very much indebted to the Roman way, and one in which various visiting teachers would be able to voice their particular views and perhaps build something of a following. As I said last week, this produced a smorgasbord of views, and no matter how a teacher like Paul might have appealed to a higher call, it was all too easy for his teaching to get tangled in with other views and even set into a kind of competition, one with another.
Not only is Paul’s teaching then followed by that of Apollos and Peter in Corinth, creating some real tension in the community as to who is following which teacher, but Paul is afraid that ultimately those educated erudite Corinthians so accustomed to hearing all manner of new thought and ideas had rather missed the point he had most wanted to make. So here as he writes back to them from Ephesus, he takes a good hard crack at it.
For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
God’s foolishness, God’s weakness; these terms are truly without precedent in the Hebrew scriptures which the early Christians had carried forward from their Jewish roots. This is all “far-fetched” writes the biblical scholar Mary Hinkle Shore, continuing,
This would be especially true for people like the Corinthians… some of whom at least were impressed with their own knowledge. Paul knows he cannot win an argument based on who has the more reasonable position, so he speaks of God’s wisdom as only really making sense in an entirely different realm. Paul contrasts “the wisdom of the world” with “the foolishness of our proclamation,” with the advantage going to God’s foolishness.
“[W]ith the advantage going to God’s foolishness,” she writes, and isn’t that quite a statement! And then comes this from Paul:
God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.’
Don’t boast in your own learning and intellectual adaptability, he’s saying. If you must boast, then boast in the One who is the very source of your life, and whose foolishness and weakness and lowliness hold a kind of upside-down authority in the world. Because held up against what some—and here it is most clearly some of the Corinthians—call wisdom and strength, God’s folly and weakness are precisely the key.
When I was an undergraduate at the University of Winnipeg, my older sister told me that I simply had to go to see a screening of the 1966 film King of Hearts which was playing that weekend in the Art Gallery auditorium. A French production with subtitles and some sections in English, the film is set in the First World War. Alan Bates plays a British private from a Scottish regiment—he wears a kilt!—who is sent ahead to a French town to scout for enemy presence. What he doesn’t know is that German forces have only recently retreated, leaving behind a timed bomb that will destroy the town, hopefully once the British forces have entered. The townsfolk have discovered this bomb plant, and have fled so quickly that they neglect to do anything about the residents of the local asylum, and it is to this asylum that the young soldier goes, finding there the only remaining residents of the town.
Alan Bates in King of Hearts
Now I should say that the film is something of a parable, drawn in big bold lines. The residents of the asylum are delusional, often child-like, and very vulnerable, but there are not the struggles with depression or schizophrenia that actually characterize true to life mental health hospitals. It isn’t a particularly realistic portrayal of the real challenges of mental health, but is instead a comment on folly and wisdom; when watching the film, the viewer simply has to accept that fact. When the soldier realizes that he has stumbled across an asylum, he quickly leaves, but now the gates have been opened and the patients disperse into the town to take on all of the roles usually filled by others in the town. There is one fellow who heads straight for the church, to clothe himself in the vestments of the bishop…but as the film goes forward, you wonder if perhaps he hadn’t once been a bishop. All the while the young soldier is in search of the bomb that will destroy the town, which seems an increasingly impossible task. And throughout it all, he is accompanied by these new companions—increasingly his friends—in that town.
Well, as the film moves toward its conclusion the bomb is found, the full British regiment arrives, the citizens come back to the town, and the residents of that hospital slowly return home to the asylum. The war will continue to rage, and as that young soldier prepares to rejoin his regiment, the question that hangs over it all is this: who in fact is wise, and who is foolish? In the midst of the madness of the war, those abandoned residents had played and laughed and embraced new roles and cared for one another, while just miles away the war had raged.
My sister’s insistence that I go to see this film was informed by her own immersion in Paul’s 1st Letter to the Corinthians, and her hope that I would be able see the hidden power of a film that was ostensibly a comic farce, but which ultimately offered a deep commentary on God’s foolishness being wiser than human wisdom, God’s weakness stronger than human strength.
And so when I hear Paul asking, “Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” I can’t help but think about that now 57 year old film, complete with a remarkable closing scene that I won’t tell you about here tonight—you might just want to watch it—but which hammers home what Paul is trying to convey in an offbeat, absurd and yet utterly compelling way.
In reading the beatitudes this evening, I was again struck by just how upside down was Jesus’s view of the world. Blessings for the poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek, the merciful, or in short for all those who find themselves in spaces that the Roman Empire most definitely would not have blessed them… and maybe not so much our society either. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” Jesus proclaimed, “for they will be called children of God.” And sometimes it is only God who fully realizes the wisdom and the promise of something like peacemaking.
Our call as Christ’s people, his disciples, is to have imaginations that are enlarged in ways that allow us to glimpse something of how Jesus saw the world, and then with Paul to embrace the glory of God’s folly.
And at the heart of that glory is this: We matter. Humans matter. We do. And we are God’s beloved.
