1 Corinthians 1.18–25
A Good Friday sermon from Kalbarri Anglican Church 31st March 2024
In 1978, Quinton Hogg, aka Lord Hailsham, Lord Chancellor of England visited Sydney with his wife Mary. She was an excellent horse-rider and asked if she could ride sometime during their trip. The NSW Police arranged a suitable horse for her at Centennial Park. She was thrown onto her head and died. Marcus Loane, the then Archbishop of Sydney ministered to her distraught husband, who blamed himself that he had not insisted she wear a helmet. Lord Hailsham in his biography speaks warmly of the Archbishop. Marcus Loane was a great man of God, and if his writing are anything to go by, he would have spoken to Lord Hailsham of Jesus’ cross and resurrection. Hailsham’s autobiography was given to me by a lawyer-neighbour in South Africa. I read it more to please him, than out of any interest, but it caught my interest. On the last page, Hailsham looks back on his life, and forward to what lay ahead of him. There was nothing in the body of the book which gave me any indication of Christian faith, but in reflecting on his death, he speaks movingly of “the Crucified One.” I guessed he must have become a believer in the Lord Jesus late in life. The title of his autobiography I could make nothing of: “A Sparrow’s Flight.” It was another indication of his faith, though I only realized this years later.
“The Crucified One”: it is of him I wish to speak this Good Friday of 2024.
For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God …
21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. 22 For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, 24 but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
1 Corinthians 1.18—25
Paul says God has decreed that humans will never find him by clever argument—not through philosophy, nor religion, nor science, nor logic, nor research. I love philosophy, I love science, I love a good argument, so this is a slap in the face for me. I will never find God where I should most think to find him.
How can God be known? Paul says he has decided to be known only through the message of the cross. Jesus’ shameful death will be the way God shows himself; that is where you will find him, nowhere else.
I want us to see first, what an extraordinary thing it is to say such a thing. Crucifixion was not something people spoke of at dinner parties. People did not wear crosses in those days. “The utterly vile death of the cross,” said Origen. Witches came to places of execution looking for bits of crosses they could use for their evil spells.
Crucifixion was common. It was the Roman method of dealing with anti-government acts of treason on the part of foreigners, and also with runaway slaves. A Roman citizen could not be crucified, nor was it used for the normal crimes of foreigners, not even for murder. It was a way of inflicting the most pain, and the most humiliation, for the longest time, on anti-Romans before they died. It was Rome’s way of having the last laugh: “See what happens when you defy our rule; see what you get when you try to run away!”
Jesus was first given to the soldiers’ horseplay, then he was flogged. Next, he was forced to carry the horizonal beam to the place of execution where the upright posts stood waiting. People jeered him along the way. He broke down under the weight of the cross and a passer-by was pressed into service to help him. That man would later become a Christian, as would his two sons. At the place of execution Jesus was stripped naked, iron spikes were hammered through his wrists, and his feet nailed into a small wooden frame. The patibulum, as it was called, was then hoisted up and hooked to the upright beam. Finally, the box for his feet was also attached to the upright. There he hung before the mob, stripped of all modesty, a mess of blood, urine, faeces, and flies—an unspeakable horror.
And now Paul is saying this is the way God has made himself known—that only by coming to terms with this will any of us find him. Is this not an extraordinary thing to say? How can we understand it? Let me say three things.
The first is that this was where the Son of God ended up when he became a man. He came in answer to God’s promise to give his people a good king. He was good, and did what God would do: healed the sick, fed the hungry, spoke the truth, and it led him to rejection and death. That is the way of it with God in this world. The world does not want to know him as he is, only as they would like him to be; “men love darkness rather than light,” said St John.[1]
You can blame the Jews, the Romans, the authorities, or the mob for his death. For other crimes you can find fault with the Germans and Japanese, the Russians, the Chinese, the Israelis, Hamas, the colonialists, the imperialists, the Woke, the conservatives, the elite, the masses. The awful truth is that if you or I had been there, we would have turned away from him, and been found somewhere among the rejectors—perhaps a plotter, perhaps a public servant doing what you were told, perhaps a follower of the crowd, perhaps a cowardly denier. He was not our choice of God. God is not welcome in our world, or in our lives. Until we face up to that reality, for ourselves as well as the human race, we will forever be strangers to God.
But what about other religions? This is a question we are often asked. The people who ask it seem to agree, for the sake of the argument at least, that religion is good. The truth is some religion is good and some is bad, but religions have one thing in common: they do not bring us to God, and they do not lead to eternal life. I cannot exclude the religion of Christianity here. Because every religion tells you how you have to live to be approved. I can’t say “be accepted by God,” or speak about eternal life, because not all religions believe in God or eternity, but for whatever it is they see as blessedness, they have a formula. So, if you do as they say, you will feel good about yourself—you will feel you have qualified. But when you stand before the cross, all your good works will be as filthy rags. You will know that you are totally disqualified, that all you deserve is condemnation and destruction. This is a hard thing for most of us to feel, but we need to know it, and believe it. The Son of God came into my world, and I put him to death. This is true in the sense that I would have been part of it had I been alive in his day, but it is also true in the sense that here in my own time I have ignored him, opposed him, rejected him, turned my back on him over and over—as an unbeliever, but also at times as a believer. “There is no health in us,” says the old confession. Any religion that leaves us feeling good about ourselves is telling us a lie—and that goes for our modern feel-good religion of selfism. “Believe in yourself; be what you are; express what you are; banish negative thoughts; that is fulfilment.” But no, “There is no health in us,” and our end is destruction. And yet—God is full of mercy and forgiveness.
You would think that faced with such hostility God would once and for all have given up on the human race. “Come down from the cross and we will believe in you,” they cried. He should have done more than come down! Adam and Eve were warned, if they turned their backs on God, they would surely die. They listened to the Devil telling them God was not their friend. They turned away; they wouldn’t trust him; they disobeyed. God should have seen then what would follow: murder, cruelty, abuse, war, slavery, nuclear holocaust. He should have put the torch over them then, and started again with something new. But he continued to appeal to them—“What have you done?”—and hold out forgiving hands. The Crucified One still holds out forgiving hands. This is the second point. God calls us back: give up your rebelling, stop being suspicious, cease believing that I want to destroy your happiness. The opposite is the truth. That he allowed us—and allows us— to abuse him—without hitting back—is surely proof enough that he is not our enemy.
Especially is this so when we consider that his dying was purposeful; it not only shows us the truth about ourselves, it was to secure our salvation. This is the third point. “Christ died for our sins,” Paul tells us over and over.[2] “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree ..,” said St Peter.[3] He paid the price owed by us. He died that we might live. Yesterday Lorraine asked me if the ship-owners would have to pay for the bridge they destroyed. There must be people shaking in their shoes, because they will find negligence—somewhere—and whoever is responsible will face damages. Unimaginable! And yet the damage bill we are faced with is more than a bridge. And Jesus picked that up—the sins of the world—and paid the price—in full—for you and me.
Jesus paid it all—All to him I owe—Sin had left a crimson stain—He washed it white as snow.
As I said earlier, I love to read a good book and figure out how things work. I am especially interested in books about God and Science. Two recent books by scientists make it clear beyond doubt that God is real. Science has shown that nothing could exist without a Creator. And science has revealed that the information encoded in the world of life, could only have come from a mind, a mind beyond anything we can imagine. Science proves God is real. I love reading that sort of stuff. But even if I were not a Christian, and was convinced by their arguments, it would not help me to know God. Yes, I might come to believe that he is real, but that would not mean knowing him. Why? Because it would leave me thinking I was good enough, intelligent enough to understand and know him; it would leave me in command. It is only when I am confronted by the cross, knowing that is what I would do to God if he came near enough—became small enough—knowing that he let me do it without hitting back, knowing that he did it for me, and that it was to cancel a debt of guilt I could never pay that he suffered so. Only then would I bow before him and accept his word on my life. And his word is forgiveness, and restoration—like the prodigal son: “this my son was lost, and now is found, was dead, and is now alive.[4]
“Jews demand signs, and Greeks seek wisdom,” says Paul—this is where people seek God. Surely he should reveal himself in powerful miracles, or in brilliant philosophical arguments. Yes—but no, “What we preach is Christ crucified: to the religious an offence, to the thinker foolishness, but to us who are being saved, the crucified one—the power of God for the salvation of all who believe.”
“The salvation of all who believe”; let me make this one last point. Why faith? Because there is nothing else we can do. Before the cross we have nothing to say for ourselves; we are empty, bankrupt. All we can do is wait for the word of condemnation, but instead comes the word “forgiven!” All we can do is believe. Faith holds out empty hands, and receives the world—eternal life. If you have not done it before, do it this Good Friday.
A Sparrow’s Flight: I could make no sense of Lord Hailsham’s title; until years later I was reading an account of the conversion of the English. King Edwin of Northumbria had received the gift of a Christian princess from the king of Kent, and was eager to discover more about this new faith, that was formerly unknown to him. He asked his priest-advisors, and one of them addressed him like this:
O King, the life of a man is like a sparrow which comes from the winter storms. It flies in at one end of the house at which you sit at supper with your earls and thegns; it flutters about for a while in the warmth and light, and after a while flies out the other end—back into the darkness. And who knows. O King, where it comes from, and where it goes? So, if this faith can answer these questions, I say we accept it.[5]
Truly our life is as Edwin’s counsellor pictured it: like a sparrow’s flight. And who knows where it comes from and where it goes—if not the man who lived a life no one has ever matched, spoke truth that has never been seriously denied, did miracles such as have never been seen before or after, gave himself up to death—death on a cross, and was raised to life again by the power of his Everlasting Father? And he has left us promises and assurances of forgiveness and eternal life in this book, the Bible. Will we not read them, look to the Crucified One, and believe and live?
[1] John 3.19.
[2] 1 Corinthians 15.3.
[3] 1 Peter 2.24.
[4] Luke 15.24.
[5] I have paraphrased this from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History.