Lent III - Peter Tierney

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

I’m not sure what place wisdom has in the world we live in today. I don’t see many signs that our society values wisdom very highly. You certainly don’t hear the word mentioned very often—I rarely hear public figures described as wise in a serious way. At best, it’s used as a compliment--“Thank you for your wise words--without much serious consideration given to what actually qualifies as wisdom. And when was the last time you turned on the news and heard the anchor say, “And now, to help shed some light on this subject, we’ve invited Dr. So-and-So, a very wise person, to join us.” No—who do we hear from on the news? Experts! We live in a world that values expertise over wisdom, and woe to the expert who makes a mistake or turns out to be wrong! Is there anyone more readily condemned and ridiculed than the mistaken expert? After all, the expert isn’t supposed to make mistakes, they are supposed to have complete mastery of their field—that’s what makes them an expert! And I think this is the chief difference between wisdom and expertise: what makes somebody wise is knowing what they do not know; what makes somebody an expert is knowing everything about something. The wise person doesn’t expect to know everything, but the expert has to, because the moment you slip up, you cease to be an expert.

Now if I am right, and our world does value expertise more than wisdom, then that means that we have a particularly low tolerance for failure. The expert is not allowed to fail, and if they do, then we’d better find a better expert to solve our problems or answer our questions! Failure is not an option in the world of experts. There is no mercy for the expert, there is only the relentless demand for accuracy and success. We see this manifested in so many ways—in the demand for excellence in education, in the unforgiving expectations we have for healthcare; in the standards that govern workplaces.

Now, this situation should strike all of us who have come here to a Christian church this morning as very peculiar, for a couple of reasons. First, if you search through the Bible, you will find it chock-full of references to wisdom—praising wisdom, talking about the wisdom of God, holding up wisdom as a great virtue—but the only experts you will find are experts in war, and the attitude toward them is ambivalent. The Bible doesn’t have much use for experts, and it doesn’t ever suggest that expertise in anything is a virtue more valuable than wisdom. Second, and more importantly, we are gathered here to remember and celebrate a colossal failure. Jesus, the reason we are here today, ends his life on a cross. Jesus’ death on the cross is the central fact of his life—he doesn’t establish a school to preserve his teachings as many teachers do; he doesn’t lead a social revolution that successfully installs lasting justice and peace; he doesn’t successfully expel the Roman soldiers from the Jewish homeland, as many of his followers wanted him to do. Jesus doesn’t do any of the things one might reasonably expect a savior to accomplish; instead, he dies a criminal’s death on a cross.

There are some people who would like to make Jesus into some kind of expert. Some want him to be a religious expert: if we could just get into the same kind of groove as Jesus, then we can find our way to God. Others want to think of him as a moral expert: if we could only follow Jesus’ teachings, we could make the world a better place. These approaches fly in the face of what St. Paul says, “The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.” The approaches to Jesus that turn him into an expert have no place for the cross, because they forget that Jesus’ relationship with God and his teachings led him into a confrontation with the religious and political powers of the world—the experts of his time—and that confrontation ended in his death. Following Jesus doesn’t mean that the world is going to snap into focus and resolve all of its problems. We follow Jesus because we see in his death and resurrection the clearest instance of God’s overwhelming love for the world despite its cruelty, its failures, and its weakness, and we cannot help but dedicate ourselves to telling people about that love.

No wonder Paul calls this proclamation foolishness. When someone comes to the Church asking what we have to offer them that they cannot find anywhere else, we are compelled to point to a 33 year old man nailed to a cross and say, that’s what we have. To a world of experts, this is indeed foolishness. But to those who value wisdom, who understand that they do not already have all the answers, they may see that the foolishness of the cross has something to offer them, that the message of Christ’s death and resurrection contains the power and wisdom of God, that God’s foolishness, written large on the cross, is wiser than what human wisdom can devise for itself.

The message of the cross is that God does not despise the weak, or the foolish; the sick or the helpless; God does not have contempt for failure or for the people who fall short in life. Instead, God chooses to become one of those people; God chooses failure, by the world’s standards, and makes it into the way of salvation for the world that rejected him.

The world of experts has no place for foolishness and weakness. Every problem must be solved, every ignorance banished, every sickness cured. The world of experts is a world that will settle for nothing less than perfection right now. But in the Gospel of Jesus Christ we have been given a message of hope that runs counter to the message of the experts; and we have a duty to proclaim that message. Through the cross, God tells us that the world is not first a problem to be fixed, but a place filled with people who need to be loved—and if we love the world despite its weakness and its failings, then that love will do more than our expertise and our human wisdom can ever hope to accomplish.

There is a place for experts in the world; they make valuable contributions to our society, and their work is necessary for advancement and achievement. But we must not allow the principles of expertise to be the only way we view our world, and the people in it. We need the foolishness of the cross—the foolishness of God’s merciful and compassionate love—which is wise than human wisdom, and stronger than human strength.