1 Corinthians 2:1-12 (13-16) Commentary

In last week’s Epistolary Lesson commentary I suggested that preachers who feel called to proclaim 1 Corinthians 1:10-18 might consider entitling their message “Good News for Ordinary Christians.” This week I’d offer that preachers who proclaim 1 Corinthians 2 might consider entitling their message “Good News for Ordinary Gospel Proclaimers.”

The faithful proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ has never been a particularly easy task. The Holy Spirit always guides our preparations for as well as our actual preaching and witnessing. However, almost countless things continue to make them challenging.

The gap between the world and culture of the Scriptures and the world in which we live is both enormous and growing. Many preachers seek to proclaim the gospel to groups of people who are diverse in at least some ways. Preparations for faithful proclamation require a sometimes-sacrificial amount of prayer, time, and study.

But I sense that faithful preaching is only becoming more demanding. Many preachers are no longer the most educated people in our congregations. The hearers of the Word often have diverse expectations of preachers and preaching. Demands on many preachers’ time are growing.

However, not long before I retired from parish ministry, I found the greatest challenge to preaching sometimes arose out of the deep political and theological polarization of the American context. It seemed that people often heard my messages at least in part through the filters of their own often strongly held positions on controversial matters. At times I failed to meet the expectations of my hearers on all sides of political and theological issues – sometimes on the same Sunday.

Even people who aren’t preachers but seek to share the gospel in both word and deed face enormous challenges in doing so. 21^st century culture is one in which religious belief no longer has any privilege. Faith is now considered to be only one option among many. What’s more, any faith that makes claims about Truth seem increasingly unpopular. Add to that the fact that sharers of the gospel don’t always feel like we’re capable of answering hard questions about it, and you have a recipe for Christian silence.

Yet it’s always tempting for preachers to assume that if we become better preachers, these challenges will shrink. So preachers and other Christians who wish to share the gospel attend conferences and read books about how to become better preachers and witnesses. Some of us pay close attention to the latest preaching and evangelizing trends in hopes that they will help us be more effective in sharing the gospel.

This Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson offers hope for proclaimers of the gospel of all sorts. However, it doesn’t imply that preachers should become more eloquent or persuasive in order to claim that hope. After all, throughout 1 Corinthians 2 Paul repeatedly insists that he was far from an eloquent preacher.

“When I came to you,” he reminds Jesus’ Corinthian followers in verse 1, “I did not come with eloquence [hyperon logou*] or human wisdom [sophia] as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God.” In verse 3-4 the apostle continues, “I came to you in weakness [astheneia] with great fear [phobo] and trembling [tromo]. My message and preaching were not with wise [sophia] and persuasive [pethois] words.”

A couple of things about these professions may be noteworthy for Jesus’ friends. They carry forward 1 Corinthians 1’s emphasis on the foolishness and wisdom of people, God and the gospel. To people who have not yet faithfully received God’s grace, the notion of God saving the world through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ seems utterly “unwise.” People who have adopted conventional wisdom about any kind of rescue plan think of the gospel as nonsensical and absurd.

So when Paul insists he didn’t approach the Corinthians with “wisdom,” with what we might call conventional preaching, he’s saying he didn’t try to use conventional wisdom to convince people of God’s saving grace. He didn’t even try to display the kinds of signs and wisdom his Jewish and gentile hearers expected.

In fact, Paul professes that his preaching was not what the world views as “wise,” but as ineloquent. It was not marked by superior arguments and logic. The apostle’s messages were not what The Message paraphrases as “polished speeches.”

Nor, Paul admits, was his preaching particularly powerful. It was, instead, perhaps literally “feeble.” Nor, as the apostle goes on to note, was his preaching especially bold. He, instead, characterized it as “fearful.” The Message paraphrases Paul as admitting that preaching “scared [him] to death.”

Here is gospel for all who wish to share the greatest news the world will ever hear. The proper handling and proclamation of that great news remains an immense challenge. Yet the greatest missionary in the history of the world wasn’t a particularly eloquent or powerful proclaimer of that gospel.

So I Corinthians 2 at least suggests that a world dying to hear the gospel doesn’t need more eloquent or polished preachers and other witnesses. It, instead, needs people who know both our frailties and God’s power to use them anyway for God’s glory and people’s transformation.

In fact, it’s as if Paul almost implies that God prefers to use ineloquent and weak proclaimers of the gospel in order to effectively point our hearers away from ourselves and toward God. In verses 4-5 he tells Corinth’s Christians, “My message and my preaching were … a demonstration [apodeixei] of the Spirit’s power [dynameos], so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom [sophia anthropoi], but on God’s power [dynamei].”

Here again the apostle returns to themes prominent in both 1 Corinthians 1 and earlier in chapter 2. He professes his preaching’s ineloquence and weakness pointed away from himself and toward God. Paul insists its impact on people displayed not his power, but the Holy Spirit’s. Corinthians received God’s grace with their faith not because of Paul’s rhetorical brilliance, but because of the Spirit’s amazing power to both implant and animate faith in Jesus Christ.

Without the Spirit’s power, the gospel would go nowhere. It wouldn’t even touch the smartest and mightiest people. After all, as Paul notes in verse 6, the message he speaks is “not the wisdom of this age [aionos], or the rulers [archonton] of this age, who are coming to nothing [katargoumenon].” In verse 8 he adds, “None of the rulers of this age understood [egnoken] it.” What’s more, in verse 14 the apostle continues, “The person without the Spirit [psychikos anthropos] does not accept [dechetai] the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness and cannot understand them [ou dynatai gnonai] because they are discerned [anakrenetai] only through the Spirit.”

Paul reminds Corinth’s Christians the gospel and the apostle’s proclamation of it seem like spiritual nonsense to people who rely on their own and conventional wisdom to discern the way out of the messes we create for ourselves. Those who proclaim the gospel in any way do well to remember that, to use a modern cliché, our culture and its rulers naturally “just don’t get it.” They may understand part of the problem. But they have no clue as to its solution.

Paul summarizes part of the solution to the world’s messes and the people who create them in verses 9-10. There he writes, “What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived – the things God has prepared for those who love him – these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.”

What God has arranged for God’s adopted children is so naturally unfathomable that it remains naturally unimaginable and inaccessible to us. People can neither understand nor faithfully assent to the gospel unless God reveals it to us. Jesus’ friends have seen, heard and imagined it only because God’s Spirit has shown it to us.

Here is both great grace and a summons. God could have chosen to allow us to flounder in the rebellion against God that we naturally choose for ourselves and our world. God could have withheld from a dying world the Spirit who alone can give us life. But God graciously refused to abandon us to our sin, sins and sinfulness. God instead sent us God’s Spirit to show us the ”wisdom” of receiving God’s amazing grace with our faith.

So preachers and other gospel witnesses do what we can to carefully prepare our messages of the greatest story ever told. We soak our proclamation of it in prayer, study, preparation and more prayer. Proclaimers of the gospel do all we can to present that gospel in accessible and compelling ways.

But we always remember that none of that will bear any fruit for God’s kingdom unless the Spirit empowers our hearers to receive, understand and believe the gospel of God’s saving grace to us in Jesus Christ. It is not about us. While preachers try to stay out of the Spirit’s way and try to let the Spirit use us to make the gospel attractive, it’s all about the Spirit. It is, indeed, all grace.

*I have here and elsewhere added in brackets the Greek words for the English words the NIV translation uses.

Illustration

It isn’t just that preaching needs the Holy Spirit’s power in order to touch people’s hearts and lives. It’s also that we sometimes preach to people who aren’t much interested in hearing us proclaim the gospel.

John Updike’s Roger’s Version’s Roger Lambert is a middle-aged divinity professor. He reflects, “I was much admired, actually, in my pulpit days. Raise the doubts, then do the assurances. People have no idea what they’re hearing. They just want a certain kind of verbal music. The major, the minor, and back to the major, then Bless you and Keep you, and out the door to the luncheon party.”