Bill Countryman Good Shepherd Berkeley

Third Sunday of Lent, Year B 3/3/2024

Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm19; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22

THE FOOLISHNESS OF LOVE

God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

Today, Paul gives us this riddle to work with. What can it possibly mean? I suppose we could try to paraphrase it in more obviously pious terms: God’s worst moment is better than our best. But that’s pretty prosaic—no to mention insipid—and I don’t see how it could inspire all the excitement in Paul’s voice here. What Paul’s getting at, I think, is that God sometimes operates in ways that look idiotic to us and sometimes chooses a course of action that looks futile to us. God doesn’t do what we expect—sometimes does the exact opposite of it. 

We also read this morning about the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai. Here, at least, God looks both powerful and sensible. The event itself abides by the rules of its time: archaeologists have found other ancient documents similar to the one God gives to Moses here. Their purpose was to create a kind of alliance between a powerful partner (a king, perhaps, or a deity) and a weaker one. The superiority of the stronger party is firmly underlined. And clear demands are made on the weaker one. But then you have to wonder. If God wanted an alliance like this with a human community, why choose a shapeless mass of runaway slaves—still looking over their shoulders to see if the Egyptians are about to catch up—plus some assorted riffraff that have fallen in with them because they had nothing better to do. Still, God gives them an alliance, tells them what the rules are and warns them that if they don’t obey they’ll be toast. God is exercising his full powers here, and the people are really intimidated. Indeed, the people wind up saying to Moses, “You speak to us, and we’ll listen; but don’t let God speak to us, or we’ll die.” 

So lay down the law, assign penalties, put it all in writing. Let them know you mean business! Sounds like a smart way to do things by human standards. But, in fact, as the ongoing narrative of the Bible will show, God isn’t really all that serious about the retribution part. The people keep going astray, they may suffer for it for a while, but God is always ready and willing to welcome them back. God never gets to the point of saying, “No, forget it. I’m really and truly over this.” God behaves more like a lover than a tyrant—grieved when the beloved acts badly, but still in love.

Now, Paul himself was a wise and a powerful person. His wisdom was that he really knew the scriptures and what God wants from human beings. He was also powerful—a commanding rhetorician and an up-and-coming member of the religious establishment in Jerusalem. He laid heavy demands on himself. And he even decided to help God out by punishing those weird followers of Jesus who seemed, to him, awfully lax about the rules and who must therefore be making God very angry. What a terrible shock for poor Paul, then, when he had that experience of meeting the risen Jesus as he traveled to Damascus to spread more violent mayhem. Hs world got turned upside down for him, when he discovered that these people were actually doing something in this world that God prized and wanted more of. And—worse yet—God then redeployed Paul to be one of them—indeed, one of their leaders.

Then, in Paul’s years of mission work things got still more awkward. He found that God wasn’t just calling Jews into God’s community, but Gentiles, too. It caused problems and strains in the Christian community; but it also brought new life and strength. Paul had had one shock when God turned out to like those early Jewish followers of Jesus with their casual ways. Now he had a second shock, as he realized that God liked these Gentiles, too. From Paul’s earlier perspective, this must have looked like God was simply going off the rails. But, however slowly, he began to recognize that God’s apparent act of folly was really an act of creating the world anew.

God was doing things that were too foolish, too flaky, too scary, too unhinged for human wisdom. And yet they were turning out to be the beginning of something new and wonderful. 

But, still, something was wrong. Perhaps the wisdom of God was active among us, but where was the power? God in Jesus had put himself at risk and even suffered rejection and execution on the cross—the worst human assault on God imaginable. And yet, God had exacted no revenge, no punishment, not even a little rap on the knuckles of the offenders. Jesus’ followers now found themselves in a similar spot. Some of them got killed. Paul got roughed up a time or two, had to flee for his life on occasion—and would eventually be martyred in Rome. Was God too weak to intervene on behalf of God’s beloved Son and all these other people God loved? Wouldn’t it be a good idea for God to scare some of these persecutors the way he scared the people at Mt. Sinai?

Why does God choose foolishness and powerlessness when violent assertion and retribution might seem perfectly just and reasonable? The answer, of course, is that these things can never accomplish what God really wants, which is love. Paul doesn’t use the word in this reading today, but he celebrates it elsewhere. And we know from 1 Corinthians 13 that he considered it the central and enduring issue for all of human life. God holds back on the thunder and lightning not because we human beings are good, but because God is. God is a lover who only wants to love us—and to offer us the chance to become lovers, too. 

Love is the only power that can achieve what God so deeply wants: God’s communion with us, our communion with God, our communion with one another. But you can’t be tricked into love or frightened into love. God just frees us to love and invites us to love. It may seem weak and foolish, but it can achieve things that nothing else—no other wisdom or power—can do. 

And that love had come looking for Paul, too. Paul encountered the love that comes looking for people who don’t know what they’re missing, people who haven’t even thought about loving and being loved by God. Paul’s own plan was to be so righteous that God couldn’t help but love him; the awful surprise was that it was all too late—he was already loved. 

What seems like foolishness on God’s part is actually wisdom. And what seems like weakness is actually strength. God’s love never gets tired, never gives up, never goes away. Jesus said it, too—in that riddle he told to his detractors in the Temple: “Tear this temple down, and I will raise it again in three days.” Such foolishness! Yes. But still true—even if it comes about in the very unexpected form of his resurrection.

God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. God, it seems, does know what God is doing.