NOTES for Co1 1:18-31

Thus the crucified Christ is “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks”... Could the Almighty Lord really not have found some option that would neither cause offense nor seem foolish? He could have. But He did not look for one. For He did not and never does set Himself the goal of being convenient and comfortable... Yes, He loves humankind, but that does not mean that He ceases to be Himself. He acts within His own laws. And even if it seems that He “is not behaving like God,” in reality He is simply not trying to conform to our notions of what God should be like.

"We venerate Your Cross, O Christ..." What do these words mean for us? Boundless compassion for the innocent, beaten, naked righteous one hanging on this wood. Love for Him, limitless gratitude. And also the understanding of how infinitely lighter our own cross is. All the problems that seem impossible to carry are nothing compared with the measure of suffering He took upon Himself for our sake. "You, who so loved Your world..."

And there are other words: "Then He says to the disciple, 'Behold your mother.'" On these words the Church is built, the strongest of strongholds. We have all been made sons and daughters, and therefore we can never be orphans. Orphanhood is a word from some other life. We often enter prayerfully into the Passion of Christ, but it is much harder to enter into the passion of Mary. His inconceivable physical pain and her inconceivable pain of soul. The whole world is embraced by this pain.

The image of the two ways of which the apostle speaks, the way of salvation and the way of destruction, has roots that go deep into the Yahwist and then Jewish tradition. The way of righteousness, both in the Torah and in other biblical books, is regarded as the way of salvation, and the way of sin as the way of ruin. And yet the picture turns out not to be so simple.

Already in the pre-Christian and even pre-biblical period, many wondered why the righteous person suffers from the evil in which the world lies, and why his righteousness is not rewarded according to its merits. This theme sounds especially sharply in the biblical books, which is not surprising: the God of the Bible is a good God, who gave His people the Torah and calls them to the path of righteousness. Why then does He so often leave His people at the mercy of the evil with which the world is full?

The Savior's death on the Cross is the answer to this question. Of course, for fallen man with the best intentions it would be simpler to imagine an ideal world where righteousness would be immediately rewarded and evil just as immediately punished. But in such a world no one would have any chance of salvation, for there are no sinless people on earth. Jesus could have entered the world as a triumphant victor, but then He would have had to remain alone in the Kingdom. And His Father's will was not for this. Such a triumph of the Kingdom would not have left the slightest chance to any human being. The will of the Father, expressed through one of the prophets several centuries before Christ's coming into the world, is that the sinner should not die, but turn and remain alive.

That is precisely why the Kingdom enters the world as if unnoticed, not imposing itself on anyone by force and not hanging over anyone as a threat of immediate punishment for the slightest sin. That is why all attempts to create on earth a kingdom of universal justice, whether on a religious or anti-religious basis, have always ended in grand bloodshed having nothing to do with any justice. And Paul points to the way of the Kingdom as the only way on which the triumph of righteousness is possible. A triumph leading not to destruction, but to salvation.

The apostle Paul starts from an anthropomorphic view of God that was common in antiquity and is still common now. It cannot be said that nothing worthwhile can be found along this path: some sound judgments are still possible here. Thus, starting from our own small strength, we think of God's omnipotence; comparing Him with our reason, we imagine His wisdom and omniscience. Comparing Him with our limitations helps us touch the truth of His boundlessness and transcendence.

But this way of thinking about God conceals a serious danger: we think that God is like us and imagine Him as a human being, only a very "big" one. Instinctively it seems to us that where a weak little human can accomplish nothing, God will accomplish everything. Where we suffer and die, God will come out victorious. That is indeed what happens, but not at all as we imagine.

By ordinary logic, it would have been natural for Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane to "mobilize" the very twelve legions of angels He spoke about to Peter, and for the angels to scatter the guards and expose the chief priests. But something completely different happens, something absurd, in the words of the apostle Paul ("foolishness" in the Synodal and Slavonic translations is moria in the Greek text, meaning "folly, absurdity, madness"). Either the power of God does not consist in what we think it does, or His victory is not won by power at all, as the prophet Zechariah says. And the Lord accepts death on the Cross.

The Greeks and the Jews, the apostle Paul's listeners, turned away from him as soon as they heard that God suffered on the Cross. God cannot suffer - this was the common conviction of the entire ancient world, the source of all theological reasoning about the impassibility of the deity. From this point of view, the absurdity of the Gospel events produced a whole series of conflicts and heresies in the New Testament era: Christians could not manage to join the Greek-Jewish certainty about God's impassibility with faith in the crucified Jesus. Not years, as one might expect, but centuries upon centuries were spent on this... Because behind the word of the Cross stands the greatest mystery of God's love, the incomprehensible foundation of biblical Revelation.

Human nature is contradictory. And the point here is not only the features of human thinking or human feelings. The point is above all the weakness of the human will. What is a human being? God's "breath of life," giving life to nature and turning it into that flow of human existence which the Bible calls a "living soul." The "breath of life," God's presence in us, makes us human beings, possessing will and self-awareness.

But God is unobtrusive; He will let us forget His presence altogether if that is what we want. And then He will cease to be the master of our life. We ourselves become the masters of our life, and the flow of life overwhelms us. Nature becomes self-sufficient, beginning to determine our life, if not completely, then predominantly. That is what happened at the fall into sin, and now we, fallen human beings, submit to our nature. Our will has grown weak; it is no longer able to stand against that natural flow which was given to us by God as the environment and building material for our life, but which for us after the fall became an irresistible force, often dragging us where we do not want to go at all. This weak will became the main obstacle to full spiritual life.

That is why, when making decisions vital for us and making a decisive spiritual choice, we make it with reservations. Our "yes" is always accompanied by one "but" or another. And there is an objective reason for this: in our present state we really cannot vouch for ourselves, more precisely, for our human nature, which can fail us at the most unsuitable moment. Nature in the fallen world is often not subject to the spirit, not because of the properties God placed in it, but because of the abnormal position in which it found itself after the fall. In the fall, the human being freed both his own nature and, at least in part, nature as a whole from the authority of the One who alone can govern it, and he himself took hold of controls that he proved unable to manage.

In the Kingdom of God it is not so. There everything is in order with governance. Normal human nature, unspoiled by sin, is completely subject to the spirit; therefore the Savior has only "yes" for His Heavenly Father. And in everyone who has shared in the life of the Kingdom, human nature becomes obedient to the human spirit to the extent that the person's life becomes part of the life of the Kingdom. Therefore such a person also has nothing for God except "yes." For "no" to God in any case means a break in relations with Him. And therefore this "no" becomes at the same time "no" to Christ and to the Kingdom.

It is interesting: why did God not allow the world to know Him through the wisdom that He Himself had given to the world? Why must the witnesses resort to what the apostle calls "foolish preaching" or, in the language of the Synodal translation, "the foolishness of preaching"? And does human wisdom always and inevitably degenerate into empty disputes in which the desire for self-assertion prevails? What is so bad about knowledge that it always leads to such a sad result?

If the wisdom of which the apostle speaks were only knowledge, we would not be able to answer this question. But in the Jewish tradition wisdom was never only knowledge for the sake of knowledge. The corresponding Hebrew word, and Paul, even when writing in Greek, still remains a Jew thinking within the framework of his own cultural and religious tradition, originally denoted not so much knowledge as ability or skill. At first this was skill in practical work, the work of a craftsman or artist; then it was the ability to build relationships with people, the skill of judgment and governance, whether governing one's own household or governing a state. And in the post-exilic period, wisdom came to be associated first of all with the art of righteousness, the skill of righteous living.

It would seem that not very much depends on the human being here, since righteousness comes from God, not from man. And yet the path of righteousness is a divine-human path; in a certain sense it depends on the human being no less than on God. And in order to walk this path, a person needs precisely experience and skill connected with the practice of keeping the commandments. And all the intellectual tools possessed, for example, by a "scribe" or teacher of the Torah are ultimately needed precisely to help the one walking the path of righteousness not to stray from that path. But fallen human nature often turns a useful tool into an obstacle and a burden on the path of righteousness. Instead of making an unambiguous choice in favor of following the commandments, a person begins to look for ways to evade this, either by observing nothing at all or by seeking easy paths that would allow him, so to speak, to fulfill the Torah without fulfilling it. And then the intellect becomes a tool serving not the observance of the Torah, but its violation, and wisdom becomes not so much the art of following the Torah as the art of imitating such following.

In such a situation, the preaching of the Kingdom can no longer rest on the traditional human experience of righteous life, not because it is forgotten, but because it has in fact been devalued. Then there remains only that very "foolish preaching" of which the apostle speaks. Preaching against commonly accepted opinions, contrary to the obvious, preaching that will indeed seem complete madness to any "normal" person. The preaching of the Kingdom that truly, according to the Savior's word, is "not of this world."

In every age of Christian history, missionaries and preachers have tried to answer the question: what prevents people from accepting the message of Christ and the Kingdom? Paul, meanwhile, answers this question briefly but quite concisely and, perhaps, exhaustively. As always, he divides all people into the religious ("Jews") and the secular ("Greeks"), and both have their own reasons for rejecting the witness to Christ and the Kingdom. These reasons are easiest to see if we analyze the attitude of the two named categories of people toward the fact of the Savior's death on the cross. Without speaking of that death, of course, no witness to His resurrection is possible, and therefore no witness to the Kingdom or to Christianity at all is possible.

As we can see, the apostle considers the expectation of signs, "miracles," that would confirm for religious people the truth of the witness they hear to be a distinguishing feature of religious consciousness. In fact, they demanded this kind of sign from the Savior Himself during His earthly ministry. But the signs they expected had to fit the ideas and concepts characteristic of the religious views of those listening. This is exactly the kind of proof many of the Pharisees who listened to Jesus expected from Him: He had to do something that corresponded to their ideas about what the Messiah should be like and how He should behave. Death on a cross, however, in no way corresponded to such ideas, even if one allowed that resurrection followed it. According to the traditional Jewish ideas of that time, and not only that time, the Messiah was supposed to be not a crucified Righteous One, but a triumphant Victor, and moreover a Victor triumphing in our untransformed world, not in some Kingdom "not of this world." Therefore, for the Jews of Gospel times, the messianism of the early Christian Church was something completely unacceptable.

But the Kingdom in general does not fit into any religious framework, and therefore Christianity does not fit into one either. And every religious consciousness, including a "Christian" one, resists the revelation of the Kingdom when it goes beyond that framework, destroying both the framework and religiosity itself. It would seem that secular people should be free from this problem. And they are; but here problems of another kind arise. Every pagan, and "secularity" is nothing other than practical paganism, lives exclusively or primarily according to the laws of the untransformed world. All his psychological and behavioral models, which determine his everyday existence, what is usually called "practical life," and in the Bible the ability to organize everyday practical life is called wisdom, are oriented toward the laws of the untransformed world, not toward the laws of the Kingdom.

This is what usually stops a secular person who hears the witness and begins to think about what he has heard. For him, trying to live according to the laws of the Kingdom is true madness: it is a radical breaking, the destruction of all established and commonly accepted models and ideas, in fact a rejection of the whole former life, and a voluntary rejection at that.

An adventure, an utterly insane adventure. And many pagans, "secular people," refuse any attempt to share in the life of the Kingdom because they are frightened precisely by this seeming madness. As we can see, the reasons religious people and secular people reject the witness are different and unlike one another. But the result is the same: rejection of the Kingdom. And of one's own salvation.

It is hardly possible to give Christ's death on the Cross any more or less coherent and deep rational explanation, because in it we touch the unfathomable mystery of God's mercy. That is why, in the letter to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul stresses that the efforts of abstract reasoning, however consistent and noncontradictory it may be, cannot explain the Cross.

A rational explanation of this event would make it something that necessarily follows from definite causes, something regular and lawful. But such an explanation is possible only if one looks at the Cross abstractly, from a distance, without discerning the full reality of the sufferings of the Crucified One. For the apostle, however, something else matters: in the Savior's death on the Cross we see the Living God, who surpasses every lawlike necessity.

The Creator of the world does not remain in impassibility beyond the law, as we would say, "beyond good and evil," but comes to suffering humanity. Without changing the course of history, without remaking humanity by mass hypnosis, He tears apart the bonds of logic and necessity. On the Cross we meet not a Lawgiver with whom one can communicate in legal terms of rights, duties, and retribution, but a living Person. The Cross defeats death not because it frees us from its inevitability. But now we are with Jesus, and for that reason alone there is no longer anything to fear.

Why does God need weakness and foolishness so much in order, according to the apostle's word, to shame wisdom and strength? Can weakness and foolishness really handle the tasks He has set better? Or is it important to Him that every unbiased observer understand: the point is not human strength or wisdom; neither the strength nor the wisdom of this world has anything to do with it; this is God's strength and God's wisdom?

But does it not become obvious to any unbiased observer at first glance that there are things that cannot be explained within the framework of the untransformed world and its nature, and that the greatest number of such inexplicable things are found precisely in Christian life? Or is that not the point at all? Then what is it? Perhaps it is the double nature of every human wisdom and the ambiguity of every human strength. Indeed, after the fall, human nature itself became a rather unreliable instrument, especially for serious spiritual work.

Both the psyche and the physiology of even a completely healthy person can fail him at any moment. And if physical health, even in the event of a failure, is not fundamentally capable of spoiling or distorting a person's mission (in the worst case, he may simply fail to finish on earth what was entrusted to him, and then God will have to find Himself another servant), mental health, which can also fail, and not always in ways noticeable to its possessor, can fail much more seriously. But the matter is not only in human nature damaged by sin. The matter is above all in the spiritual core of the human person, which the fall affected first of all because it began there. The author of the Prologue to Genesis described the problem briefly and powerfully when he said that "every intention of the human heart is evil from his youth." The point here, of course, is not that fallen human beings are in principle incapable of anything good.

The point is that evil is inevitably mixed into this good, becoming like a spoonful of tar in a barrel of honey. And the only way to avoid that spoonful is to minimize specifically human efforts, to make the heart of the servant, ideally, spiritually completely transparent to the action of God. Only then will it be possible to avoid the influence of fallen human nature that shows itself in every human action and intention. Or, at least, to minimize this influence so much that the quality of the intentions, thoughts, and deeds of God's servant becomes acceptable for the Kingdom.

Paul describes Christian life as the fullness of righteousness in its traditional understanding. In Yahwism, and later in Judaism, righteousness became firmly connected with the image of poverty and of the poor person, which first appeared in the preaching of Isaiah of Jerusalem. And the Savior Himself connects the blessedness of the poor, the destitute, with Himself and with the coming of the Kingdom. This connection is not accidental. The issue, of course, is not material poverty, since the same Isaiah, for example, who considered himself poor, was by no means poor, but poverty as a spiritual state that was inseparable from traditional ideas of righteousness.

Indeed, righteousness is not inherent in a person by nature; it cannot belong to him as an inborn or acquired quality or property of his nature. Righteousness is a state in which a person may abide, but which he may just as easily lose. God brings a person into the state of righteousness, and the person himself can do nothing in order to acquire it. What depends on the person is only readiness to enter this state and remain in it. But such readiness by itself changes nothing in essence: whatever it may be, if God does not intervene, it is useless. A person turns out to be destitute, having nothing and able to do nothing in what concerns his spiritual life, his relationships with God.

He can do much in order to become righteous and not come one iota closer to the goal without God's direct intervention in his life. And everything a person can do and has in this world means and is worth nothing when the main task is being resolved. A person feels himself destitute, poor, while being in this world a rich man and court aristocrat, as that same Isaiah was, for example. This is what Paul speaks about when he mentions wisdom, strength, and noble birth as things having no significance for the spiritual path of a Christian.

The Christian's path is still the same path of righteousness, but the path of righteousness with Christ, who from the point of view of this world was a complete and absolute failure, whose mission ended with the cross, and therefore with complete collapse. But for the apostle the Savior's "failure" is akin to the same "failures" of those seeking righteous life, who refuse to rely on everything the world can offer them in order to let God into their life. So too Christians are ready to let the "failure" Christ into their life and follow Him in spite of all the arguments this world can bring them. Because the "failure" whom they are ready to follow has one argument, but the most weighty one: the Kingdom that He brought into the world.