On Tuesday night my brother came to stay & we ended up watching a TV programme on how people survive extreme situations, such as the sinking of the ferry Estonia when 800 out of 900 people drowned; or the Manchester Airport crash when over 50 people died. I was interested to hear that the experts say that there's a predictable set of responses to looming disaster. Up to 20% of people will become very focused on survival, and if they can they will make it; 60% or so will bumble around going with the crowd and wondering what to do; and up to 20% will be literally paralysed with fear and indecision and be unable to react. So for example with the Manchester airport plane crash, in theory most of the people who died could have got out: but some just didn't react, and others were unsure what to do, so started taking their luggage out of the overhead lockers as if they were disembarking normally, even as the flames were racing up behind them.
When faced with a major problem, there are times when our normal ways of seeing things just don't work, when we have to focus on something else and look at things differently.
That's where St Paul was when he wrote to the Corinthians, in our first reading. Paul has a problem to deal with among the Corinthian Christians: the fact that they're so divided, so intolerant of each other; they are competing for power, for the right to control the church.
The way of power is what human society understands. Who is the strongest? The person who gets you results, that's the person to follow; the one who will lead you out of the burning plane, the one who will be in control of the church or the country, that's the person with the answers. In the ancient world people looked for a patron, a person with power to protect them, as they do today.
In his autobiography, Barack Obama speaks about his Indonesian stepfather, who had been forcibly conscripted during the repressions of the late 1960s, telling him about the need to be careful, to forget awkward truths and instead get power. 'Better to be strong' he said to Obama; 'if you can't be strong, be clever and make peace with someone who's strong. But always better to be strong yourself. Always.'
And that was and is true in religious circles too. What is God but the ultimate patron, the most powerful being there is? With God on your side, anything is possible - for you. How do you know God is on your side? By the powerful things you can do - or rather, that you believe that God is doing through you. That's what Paul encountered in the faith of the Jewish people who opposed him: 1 Corinthians 1.22, Jews demand signs. They wanted to see God doing things - they wanted to know it worked.
In John's gospel reading (2.18), when Jesus throws the livestock and money out of the Temple, the Jews - that is, the religious authorities - ask him what sign he can give to validate what he's doing. It's a perfectly reasonable question: because the Jews were looking for a powerful saviour to come and rescue them from the Romans, waiting for an anointed one - Messiah in Hebrew, Christ in Greek. The Christ, the Messiah, would be powerful and triumphant. So, says Paul, Jews demand signs - but instead we proclaim a Messiah, a Christ, who is crucified - then as now, a contradiction in terms for Jewish theology, what Paul graphically describes as a stumbling-block. By definition, a crucified Messiah is no Christ at all for Jewish faith. No wonder Paul describes it as looking foolish: because if you're into the way of power & signs, a crucified Son of God is madness. That's why so much popular religion, even Christian faith, speaks the language of a powerful God, a God who overcomes: a God who will help me do better. A powerful God is what we human beings want for our God; but a crucified God is not.
Power however isn't just about signs: it's also about control. About the way of reason, of science and rationality, what St Paul calls the Greek way of wisdom. In this version of power, you can explain things logically, you decide on your own fate, and God is irrelevant. Science and the mind explain everything; science and technology deliver signs and wonders for today, so science is powerful and God is out of the picture. Conservative religion fights a rearguard action for its own form of power, but science will overcome, as we say - using as we do the language of power, of conquest. Talking about God coming in a crucified Christ for most people today is either the way of powerlessness or the way of foolishness.
What does Paul say? 'For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ a crucified Messiah, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles; but to those who are 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.'
The reality that Paul tells us to face is that the way of power ultimately fails. If you're a dictator then you'll end up ruining your country. If you're the cleverest climate scientist in the country and the most well-meaning politician, you still won't be able to change in time the 75% of people who, when faced with disaster, freeze or wait for someone else to go first, while the planet runs away with us. You won't be able to stop people fighting for control and power; and you'll never escape from the reality of your own death. It's a change of heart that we all need, says Paul, a change of heart in which God leads the way. For God goes ahead of us and shows us that in Christ the way of weakness and humility is paradoxically the only way to find the power that really matters: the power to change the human heart.
The revelation of God in Christ shows God doing things differently, thinking outside the box. There are hints and pictures in the Jewish scriptures of how God is to be found in the weak and vulnerable, but in Jesus Christ we see God's weakness and strength held together, so that we might let go of power and control and instead find the power of the love of God transforming us, and others, and all the world - a power in the face of conflict and death which for all their strength, miracles and science together cannot match.
When you read Barack Obama's biography, you realise that he could have ended up as a very different person, an angry and bitter person: but that by God's grace he found Christ and he found hope. He's now probably the most powerful man in the world: but he wants to walk in the way, not of power, but of service and self-giving.
Pray for him and for us all, that we may come to Christ and open our hearts to be broken and re-made in the wisdom of God's weakness and the strength of God's foolishness, as we follow the crucified Messiah.
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