(I Corinthians 2:1-10)

“Preach Christ and Him crucified,” a layman said to me not long ago, “that’s the business of the church. The trouble with so many of our ministers nowadays,” observed this conscientious church officer, “is that they get off the track in their preaching and deal with social and political and economic issues. You preachers have plenty to preach if you will just preach the gospel. Preach Christ and Him crucified.”

Now this sentiment of my companion in conversation is not confined to him alone. You have often heard it expressed. It boils down to just this: “The business of the church is to save souls. Its field of operations is the spiritual realm. As the shoemaker ought to stick to his last, so the minister should shepherd souls and leave social, political, and economic affairs to experts in those fields. Let the church teach and preach Christ and Him crucified.”

This layman’s firm conviction stirred my interest. “If it is the function of the church,” I said to myself, “to preach Christ and Him crucified, just what does this mean? Do I really know?” So I went to my Bible. I did a bit of study. I found the good layman was quoting scripture, and exactly, too. It was St. Paul himself who first used those words in his first Corinthian letter. I found Paul saying: “We preach Christ crucified.” Then on a little farther I found the apostle putting it a bit stronger: “I determined not to know anything among you save Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” And then I found by studying my Bible that when St. Paul spoke of the great business of the church to be the preaching of Christ and Him crucified, he meant three very definite things.

First of all, by preaching Christ and Him crucified, the great apostle had in mind the proclamation of the mighty acts of God rather than the wisdom of men. The context makes this clear. Just before coming to Corinth, Paul had visited Athens. You remember that striking story Luke tells in the 17^th chapter of Acts. Paul, the world traveler and learned Jew, arrives in ancient Athens, the heart and center of Old World learning and culture, resplendent in its architectural relics of a glorious past. Preaching his new gospel on the Athens street corners, Paul attracts the attention of some Stoic and Epicurean philosophers. “What is this new doctrine you teach?” they asked. Seizing the inspiration of the moment, Paul took his text from the inscription of a nearby monument and preached his famous Mars Hill sermon on “The Unknown God.” Luke’s summary of that message proves Paul the intellectual equal of his philosopher audience. He couched his language in excellent Greek diction. He adorned his address with quotations from the Greek poets and he logically argued his case for the existence of God.

Some folks say Paul’s Athenian sermon was a failure. I don’t know. Surely it brought various responses from the congregation: “Some mocked, some said we will hear you another day on this matter, but some believed.” But be that as it may, failure or success, coming directly from Athens to Corinth where he had met the philosophers on their own ground and talked their language, Paul says with feeling that his preaching at Corinth and henceforth, was not to be “with the wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ be made of no effect.” Henceforth he would proclaim the mighty acts of God — preach Christ and Him crucified — just state what God had actually done in history — tell how God had revealed Himself in the person of Jesus, a carpenter of Nazareth, who spoke the direct message of Almighty God to men — laid bare the heart of God in word and example, as humble, kind, and righteous altogether, and then willingly offered up His own life, a bloody, pain-racked execution on a cross by the hands of Roman soldiers and Jewish officials at Jerusalem — and died — to affect a reconciliation between God and sinful man. This same crucified, dead, and buried Jesus, God raised from the dead the third day, thus certifying in this unprecedented manner for all men to see, His pleasure in His own divine son.

Paul vowed he would never rely again upon the wisdom of words to convey the gospel message. He would proclaim the mighty acts of God — preach Christ and Him crucified. And so he did.

James Stewart of Edinburgh says: “Tis not the secularism without, but the reduced Christianity within, which is the greatest enemy of the church today. This easy Christianity, stripped of its miraculous elements, made accommodated to the modern mind, is not a faith equal to the times.” Yes, the church must preach Christ and Him crucified — the mighty saving acts of God in human history — this is the great business of the church.

But for Paul this “preach Christ and Him crucified” meant more — it also involved the proclamation of the whole gospel rather than an emasculated, truncated gospel, shorn of its unpleasant, distasteful, or illogical aspects. Preach Christ and Him crucified meant to declare the whole counsel of God.

“We preach Christ crucified; unto the Jews a stumbling block and unto the Greeks foolishness.” To the Greeks, Christ crucified for the salvation of lost sinners was silly foolishness. To their well-trained philosophical minds it just didn’t make sense that God should justify guilty men by paying the penalty himself in the person of His son and letting the criminals off. The storied, haughty tribe of Olympian deities never humbled themselves to die on a cross. They were the immortals. To the Jews, the preaching of Christ crucified was a stumbling block — a skandalon — a scandal. That message scandalized, outraged, their religious convictions. Why, God reconciled to man by means of the crucifixion of a Galilean peasant? Incredible! Had not the Rabbis always taught and believed that man was reconciled to God by keeping inviolate the moral and ceremonial law? If men were justified with God by faith in this crucified Christ, then what of their honored law?

At Athens Paul had not mentioned the crucifixion, this mighty act of God so crucial to the Christian gospel. He had glossed over what he knew to be foolishness to Greeks and a stumbling block to Jews. But coming to Corinth he determined to preach the whole gospel — even though men be scandalized and outraged by it.

There is always something in man which is offended when confronted by the living God in all His fullness. Especially is this true when God begins to deal realistically with sin in our presence. And of course that is just what the cross means.

“Eliza,” exclaimed the mother of Harvard’s President Elliot, when she heard her friend was joining the Episcopal church — “Eliza, do you kneel down in church and call yourself a miserable sinner? Neither I nor any member of our family will ever do that.”

There have been many striking attempts at imagining just what would happen if Jesus came back to our modern world — “if some of those who profess our holy religion and remain safe and snug behind a façade of second-hand dogma and devotion were suddenly confronted with the full, blazing reality of Christ.” (Stewart)

St. John Adcock’s poem, The Divine Tragedy, is such an imaginative work, and he says our being confronted with the living Christ would be something like —

When a blithe infant, lapt in careless joy,
Sports with a woolen lion — if the toy
Should come to life, the child, so directly crost,
Faced with this actuality were lost …

Leave us our toys, then; happier we shall stay
While they remain but toys, and we can play
With them and do with them as suits us best;
Reality would add to our unrest …

We want no living Christ, whose truth intense
Pretends to no belief in our pretense
And, flashing on all folly and deceit,
Would blast our world to ashes at our feet …

We do but ask to see
No more of Him below than is displayed
In the dread playthings our own hands have made
To lull our fears and comfort us in loss —
The wooden Christ upon a wooden cross!

Yes, “men have always been ready, in sheer self-defense, to erect some vague idealistic image of Jesus in the temple of their spirits.” (James Stewart) We do not want the whole gospel. We cannot bear it. Just look at all the people who want God’s forgiveness for themselves but refuse to be forgiving to others — as though it were possible to receive the one without granting the other. “There are still those who accept the doctrine of the divine Fatherhood and sun themselves in its warm and comforting glow, but resent being confronted with its disconcerting and inexorable implications in the realm of practical brotherhood and social ethics. ‘Give us the simple gospel,’ they cry.” (James Stewart) As though we could enjoy the Fatherhood of God without practicing the brotherhood of man!

It is the whole gospel in its saving entirety with its realistic dealing with sin at Calvary — not a softened, sweetened, and shortened story, with the tragic harsh elements left out, which Paul had in mind when he affirmed his determination to preach Christ and Him crucified.

Finally, the preaching of Christ and Him crucified, in Paul’s mind and in His life, meant the propagation of a religion of identification of the believer with that crucified and Risen Lord in contradistinction to a ritual of pious but distant adoration.

“I am crucified with Christ,” declared Paul. “Nevertheless, not I live, but Christ liveth in me … God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.”

Preaching Christ and Him crucified means not just telling and retelling that ancient and appealing story of the love of a merciful God for lost sinners, but also laying upon men the obligation to take up themselves the holy way of the cross.

The crucifixion was not an accident in the life of Jesus. It was not blind, unbending necessity that forced it on Him. It was by a deliberate choice of His own will that he was numbered with the transgressors. See Him there at the River Jordan coming to be baptized by John. Why? What had He done to need baptism for the remission of sins? Oh, He was coming to identify Himself with our sinful race. At the marriage feast the Pharisees criticized Jesus for associating with sinners. And when the perfect man died it was by a criminal execution between two thieves. In death He identified Himself with sinners. “I lay my life down that I may take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of my self.”

In that magnificent figure in the Colossian epistle Paul sees Christ at Calvary as Master there — Himself driving the nails — taking “that damning evidence of broken laws and commandments which always hung over our heads, and completely annulling it by nailing it over His own head on the cross.” (Phillips — Colossians 2:14)

Yes, His death, He chose it. His life, He did not lose it. He gave it. A kind lady was visiting in a hospital speaking to men wounded in the last war. She came to one lad whose right arm had been torn away by shrapnel and said, “Oh, you’ve lost your arm! I’m so sorry.” “Lost it?” asked the lad in puzzled tone, “Lost it? Why I gave it.”

For the church to preach Christ and Him crucified is to proclaim the valiant act of Christ’s self-will in choosing the way of the cross and urge the same choice on men. Livingstone dying on his knees in Africa, an X-ray specialist losing one limb after another in merciful service for the deliverance of sufferers, the headmaster of a British school leading all his boys to shelter during a bombing attack and then going back once more to see if all the lads were safe and being killed himself — that is the act of self-will — of choosing the way of the cross, which the preaching of Christ and Him crucified lays upon us all.

If the church is to preach Christ and Him crucified there must be this note in our proclamation of the faith — this fact in our formulation of that faith in life — identifying ourselves with that Christ and His way of dealing with our human loss and defeat and sin — realistically, personally.

Shall we look at the greed, the callous impersonalization of our economic order? Shall we open our eyes to the corruption, the graft of our political life, with its demagoguery, its lust for power, its playing upon the prejudices and the petty hates and fears of men to ride to power over them? Can we behold the spectacle of a holy segregated church in a holy segregated society?

But if we see them shall we talk of such things in church, especially if they are enshrined in the sacrosanct capitalistic system; if they have become a part of the holy democratic American way of life; if they are the popularly accepted mode of church faith and order? If we are to preach Christ and Him crucified we must. But we must not only talk of them — we must deal with them realistically, decisively. We must take those sins and by the power of His spirit nail them to the cross.

PASTORAL PRAYER

Almighty God, who takest away the sins of the world, and whose salvation is ever nigh to the contrite heart; we grieve that we so often wander from Thy ways and forget Thy laws, and that we stand in constant need of Thy forgiveness. The secret sins of our hearts; the evil thoughts of our minds; the transgressions of our lips: forgive us, O God.

Merciful Father, whose life is love, whose will is right, not for ease we pray, but for strength to cease to do evil, to learn to do well; for grace to keep clean and simple our hearts, and to live dutiful and blameless lives.

From all our sin, and the fear that is born of sin; from every evil thought and purpose, and from wishing anything by which another may be harmed: Good Lord, deliver us.

From the conquest of our hearts by outward things; from the undue love of pleasure or of gain; from self-indulgence and self-deception; from self-seeking and self-sufficiency, and from all hardness of heart: Dear Lord, deliver us.

Eternal God, in whom do live the spirits of those who depart hence; we remember with quiet and grateful hearts our brethren and sisters who from the beginning of the world have pleased Thee in their several generations and have now found their everlasting rest and home in Thee; mercifully grant that their example and memory may stir us to a better life; that when for us the night cometh, when no man can work, we may be counted worthy to join their fellowship in that world where peace and love are perfect and immortal.