Lectionary Reflection for Epiphany 4A on 1 Corinthians 1:18–31
[The cross] was, and is, the craziest message anybody could imagine. This wasn’t a smart new philosophy; it was madness. It wasn’t an appeal to high culture. It was news of an executed criminal from a despised race.
—Tom Wright
A DIFFERENT WORLD
The world has changed in the last year. Of course, it’s always changing, but the last twelve months have seen a dismantling of global relationships and institutions, unprecedented disregard for international law, and the rise of a blatant “might is right” ethic—not just unapologetically, but proudly. As Cameron Trimble writes:
The world does not feel steady right now. Institutions we were taught to trust are unraveling. Power is being abused without accountability. Fear is being used as a governing strategy. Many of us wake each day bracing ourselves for what new harm will be revealed.
We need to be honest about this. Naming the danger is not despair; it is sanity.1
This great disruption can be traced directly back to the Trump administration. It’s not that there weren’t already disruptive forces at work. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza are just two of the disruptive events of the last few years, but there are many others, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of AI, the climate crisis, global economic challenges, and the ever-growing gap between the ultra-wealthy and the poorest of the poor. But perhaps what makes the actions of Trump and his followers so deeply disturbing is the way they unashamedly claim to be doing God’s bidding.
Brian Kaylor writes about the first Christian worship service that was held in the Pentagon on January 21, 2026, in which Secretary of War Pete Hegseth framed the US abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as a godly mission. Hegseth shared that during the mission, he had been using Psalm 144 as a guide for prayer, and then went on to say, “And may our God be the Lord in the conduct of our activities in this department, wherever they may be or around the world.”2 And before leaving for the World Economic Forum in Davos, when asked by a reporter whether God would be happy with his first year in office, Trump confidently replied, “God is very proud of the job I’ve done.”3
Our world has always been filled with conflict, injustice, and oppression. I am not saying things are worse than before. The Christian Church has a history of bloodshed, dominance, and abuse in God’s name. But the global population has grown significantly, technology has developed faster than our ethics can keep up with, and we have entered a new era of religious fanaticism. All of this means that we are now in a world where the leaders of a superpower feel justified—or even divinely commanded—to coerce, victimise, villainise, abuse, deport, arrest, and even kill in God’s name. Racism, toxic patriarchy, gender-based violence, and criminalising immigrants and LGBTQIA+ people are now perpetrated not just with impunity, but with a staggering sense of self-righteousness. Little did we realise how prescient Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale would turn out to be.
In the face of this onslaught, we can be forgiven for asking where God is, and how God could allow people to use his name for beliefs and actions that so completely defy the message, mission, and model of Christ. Of course, part of the answer to that question is that God is not sitting on a cloud ready to intervene. God is not outside of the universe, and God is not a superhuman “sky God” who can intervene and put a stop to evil at any time.4 But the other answer to that question is that God (however we may choose to understand God) does not wield power the way human empires do.
THE CENTRALITY OF THE CRUCIFIED GOD
After addressing the power struggles and divisions in the church at Corinth, the Apostle Paul shifted his message to the foundational cause of their problems. Essentially, the Corinthian believers had not yet learned to release the ideas and practices of power and wisdom they had learned from their society. While declaring faith in Christ, they were still caught up in hierarchies of importance, intelligence, eloquence, and status, and they were bringing those values into the Christian community. As Tom Wright describes it:
Corinth, as a proud Roman city, was exactly the sort of place where people would look up to the ‘somebodies’, and do their best to join them. Then, as now, there were the obvious routes to fame: political power, and royal or noble birth. And…Corinth paid special attention to people who could speak well, public rhetoricians, lawyers and the like. The wise, the powerful, the noble: these were the ‘somebodies’ in Corinth.5
Paul identified this need to be, or to follow, a ‘somebody’ as a primary cause of the dissension in the church. And so, in 1:18, he transitions from his call for unity to challenging the values of Corinthian society by stating simply, “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are being destroyed. But it is the power of God for those of us who are being saved.” (CEB). The believers were so enamoured with the power and wisdom of the Roman Empire that they had failed to grasp how countercultural God’s wisdom and power were, and how much the values and priorities of God’s reign contradicted the world around them. And for Paul, the cross was the ultimate reflection of God’s power and wisdom. In his crucifixion, Jesus publicly embodied what God’s reign was about.
For Paul, the cross was not just a symbol of Jesus’ sacrifice that would cleanse us from sin and guarantee us a place in heaven after we die. It was much more than that. In Paul’s thinking, the cross is the defining act that moves the cosmos toward becoming one and whole in Christ. But it is also the fundamental sign that reveals the truth about how the universe works. When human beings grasp the meaning of the cross, says Paul, then everything changes. As Richard Hays puts it, “The cross becomes the starting point for an epistemological revolution…For anyone who grasps the paradoxical logic of this text, the world can never look the same again.”6
The cross, then, is at the centre not just of the Christian faith, but of reality. We cannot believe in Jesus and then use power to harm and exclude others. We cannot follow Jesus’ way and live by the divisive, self-interested, status-worshipping “wisdom” of our society. But more than this, the entire universe is built on the fundamental truth that is expressed in the cross. As Bruce Sanguin puts it, “Evolution proceeds—cosmologically, biologically, psychologically, culturally, and spiritually—in and through vulnerability and death, whether we’re talking about a supernova, an extinction of massive proportions, or, in humans, a conscious purging of all that is not love, a dying to ego-driven motivations.”7
