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The Catholic Telegraph
February 1, 2002In last Sunday’s reading we heard Paul admonishing the Corinthians because of their factionalism, because some considered themselves better than others on account of their dedication to one or the other leader of the local church. He concluded that passage (in verse 17) by reminding them that the real kernel of the gospel is the unadorned proclamation of Christ’s death on the cross.
In the verses that come between that reading and this Sunday’s reading (i.e., vv. 18-25), he reminds his readers that their fascination with power and wisdom is not a sign of a healthy faith. All that Christians have to rely on is a dead criminal, Christ crucified. Christ constitutes a power and a wisdom that surpasses human categories of strength and understanding.
Now, in this Sunday’s reading, Paul suggests that they consider their own experience if they want to know about how God’s wisdom and power work. They have been called to faith by Christ through the preaching of Paul, but it wasn’t because they were well-educated, or influential, or members of the upper class. On the contrary, the vast majority of them were uncultured, powerless, common people according to the world’s criteria. But it was precisely for that reason that God paid attention to them. By calling people like them to membership in His Church, God shows how insignificant are the wisdom, the power, and the nobility of the world. God chooses "nobodies" to show what He thinks of the "somebodies."
Paul continues with a general principle: none of us can claim personal importance or independent worth in relation to God. Nobody can pretend that salvation is his or her individual achievement. Whatever we are in relation to God is God’s gift to us, given through Christ who has become our wisdom and who has conferred His salvation ("righteousness, sanctification, redemption") on us. To conclude our passage, Paul cites the prophet Jeremiah (9.23) to the effect that if we want to brag about something, it should be about God’s care for us and not about our own worth.
What Paul tells the Corinthians in this passage is a central principle, a basic insight of his preaching and, indeed, of all Christian doctrine: salvation (being in touch with God, sharing His life through Christ and the Spirit) is a gift, not an achievement.
That lesson is not just relevant to the Corinthians, those fractious folks who were so captivated with their own insights and their own spiritual accomplishments. It’s also something that we need to hear.
We twenty-first century Americans, just like our forefathers, prize independence and self-sufficiency. We like to think that, given a little bit of luck, we can make our own way through life, that the biography of each of us can be a success story. If we get a fair shake, we will all be able to feel good about ourselves. We are at our proudest and best when we have overcome the challenges that face us with our own resources, without anybody having to bail us out. The qualities that we tend to prize most are those associated with personal initiative and individual autonomy. "I did it for myself, and I did it my way."
The trouble is that, while that may be the way things work in the world of human affairs (although even that is questionable), it certainly isn’t the way things work in God’s affairs.
For one thing, what God gives us when He saves us is so far above our natural abilities that we can’t even understand it adequately, much less provide it or earn it for ourselves.
For another, we are sinful people. We start with a negative balance, a balance of selfishness and pride that we can never pay off on our own. The harder we try to pay off the negative balance with our own resources, the deeper into debt we fall because the idea that we can redeem ourselves from sin by our own efforts is itself sinful.
The fact of the matter is that the only source of salvation, the only entrance to eternal life with God is through the wisdom and power of God. It is God’s strange, paradoxical, astonishing initiative that gives us final worth. By human standards, it doesn’t make much sense for God to be interested in us at all. We’re just not worth His trouble. By human standards, God’s outreach to us, foolish and weak and sinful as we are, just doesn’t compute. Yet God reaches out to us anyhow and all He asks in return is that we be aware of what’s really going on. He asks that we be willing to give credit to where credit is due: to the love and self-sacrifice of the dead criminal, Jesus, who died for our salvation.
People like to be remembered after they die. That’s why we have tombstones on which we record the dead person’s birth date and death date. Sometimes people arrange to have their achievements recorded there, too (war veteran, parent, author). For the Christian believer, there is only one really important fact that is worth remembering: that we were and are loved by God.
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Conversation Questions.
How has God’s initiative played out in my life?
What can I take credit for in my personal salvation history?
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