The three readings today are a really mixed bag in that there seems to be very little connection between them. The Gospel of Mathew quotes one of the parts of the passage from Isaiah but it is a happenstancial thing not particularly significant except in Mathew’s overall programme. So, it is a real challenge to try to figure out how these three things cohere in some way. But I would like to try to use Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth as a point of entrée into the three readings.

Corinth was a major seaport city, very sophisticated Greek city. The Corinthian community that Paul founded there was an extremely contentious and uneven group. I mean, you read the two letters to the church in Corinth where Paul is constantly telling them to cool it. And in this sense they are forever erecting some sort of superior/inferior status among themselves. And of course the thing that exasperates Paul more than anything else in all of these letters is precisely the break down, the granulation of the community. More than anything else he complains about that. And the particular issue in Corinth is an interesting one. As Greeks, the Corintheans were convinced that if you knew something you were virtuous. Knowledge is virtue. This great sense that to understand is to be good – something automatic. Understanding something made you tantamount to being in possession of that which you understand and therefore turning into a really decent human being. Well, Paul rejected that on two grounds.

First of all, back to this notion of wisdom, wisdom is always purveyed by people who were skilled speakers. That was a big, big deal in the ancient world. To speak grandly, to be a good orator, the art of rhetoric as Aristotle said was a major thing that humans should develop in themselves. So there were rhetoricians running around swaying people with their skill of the use of language. And that of course goes hand in hand with their pronouncing wisdom and all the problems that I just talked about. So Paul was upset with the following: if people come doing this grand job of talk, the question becomes, what are people going to be converted to? The power of someone’s rhetoric? The beauty of someone’s speech? That is the first problem.

But the second problem is even more acute. If you think that what you learn by listening to one of these great speakers is going to save you, humanize you, "then the cross of Christ is emptied of its power. For Christ did not send me to baptize you but to proclaim the Gospel and not with eloquent wisdom so that the Cross of Christ might not be emptied of his power".

So what is this Cross of Christ business all about? First of all, it’s not equivalent to wisdom which is just from the eyebrows up. The cross is either situated in the fullness of ones human existence. It is an existential reality, not theoretical or cerebral reality. And that is what Paul is enormously agitated about. And if you read the whole first chapter of the letters to the Corinthians he keeps playing out this notion of foolishness and wisdom. He will say that the cross is the foolishness of God which is greater than human wisdom. So what is there about the cross that is so crucial. Well, it is a very complex thing and I think that an awful lot of Christian preaching does not do justice to it. They make the cross some kind of magical thing like Jesus died on the cross for us and it is over and done with. We don’t have to think about this business any more. That is inadequate. What does it mean to say that Jesus died on the cross? Why did Jesus die on the cross? That is the issue.

Jusus died because of his own integrity, his own honesty. Jesus was killed for what he believed and what he said and what he upheld even under the threat of death. And what is that? That Caesar is not the king of the world, nor is Pharisaic Judaism the means to salvation, because many of the Jews had developed these exclusive tendencies themselves. But what God really wants of the Jews is to be the light of revelation to the Gentiles - the agency of salvation for everybody. As I said about the church last week, the Jews are supposed to be the great religion that is not in business for its own sake. Judaism and Christianity which is rooted in Judaism has the same form. They are not supposed to exist for our own sake, but for the sake of the world. We are supposed to de-tribalize the world, and that gets people into trouble.

Let me give you a little example that is going on right now in the northen part of Mexico is a diocese call Chiapas. In this diocese is a large indigenous population who have been simply by-passed by everything that is going on in the country. They are non-entities. Literally, they are non-entities. They are extraordinarily impoverished, economically they do not account for anything except that we can use all of their cheap labour. We can build the wealth of a nation on the backs of these people without even noticing where our wealth is founded. Chiapas is fortunate enough to have a Bishop who regularly espouses the cause of the Indians. He receives all kinds of death threats. And we know already that there are all kinds of people in South Central and Latin America who have been killed for standing with the poor. The Jesuit and their housekeepers in El Salvador and those nuns raped and murdered, Oscar Romero, the Guatemalan Bishop that was murdered last year. So there are all kinds of precedences for this. The apostolic delegate together with a number of the Bishops in Mexico wants the Bishop of Chiapas removed – he is obviously a Communist. You can still do this red baiting. Band with the poor and you are obviously a Communist or worse. So what do we see going on there? We see something that goes on all too often and all too unhappily in the history of this church – that money talks. Money talks in the Vatican, money talks in the church too. And conversely of course, the poor who do not have a voice are silent, are inaudible, and therefore do not exist. Very important personage in Mexico right now, it is the Bishop of Rome. What is he going to do with the Bishop of Chiapas? What is he going to do with the apostolic delegate? How is going to respond with all of the Bishops in Mexico? I have only heard one report about the Pope’s first speech there about anti-abortion and in vague and general terms about social justice. Here is a real situation that seems pretty clear. Is the church going to be the light of revelation to the Gentiles above all the poor? What is going to happen there? It will be very interesting to see. But if it is not at its highest official level, then we have betrayed Judaism that we are supposed to be the New Israel that is exemplified as Mathew has Jesus picking twelve apostles. Why twelve apostles? The old Israel was founded by the twelve tribes founded by the son of Jacob. Jesus apparently thought that he was going to be the agent to establish the New Israel. And He was going to pick twelve people and that were going to be the basis for the New Israel. And out of this what the old Israel had not done was going to get done – to be open to everybody. Well, at least one of the multiple values of these readings is that it will give us some sort of criterion to judge ourselves and the church. Which of course is enormously important. Are we faithful to this man who was put to death because he bugged all of the big wigs by taking the part of the people who were ignored. We shall see.

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Created: 30 Nov 1996
© Copyright: R. Trojcak, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002
London Ontario Canada
Last Update: September 05, 2005
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