Wise Guy

In a sense this could have remained for us just a nice piece of poetry. But the New Testament adds something extraordinary to this idea of God's wisdom - by claiming that Jesus Christ, a human being, embodied this wisdom of God that was with him before everything began.

He is, as John says, the Word who was with God in the beginning; and, as Paul says, he is the one through whom, and by whom, and for whom all things were made. In him is summed up the purpose of the whole cosmos - he is the bottom line of the whole lot. He is both its beginning and its end.

It seems like an impossibly grand vision is boiled down to one figure, one person, one individual, who becomes the hinge around which it all turns. But what does this mean?

It means that in his life and death - in all his work - Jesus was living out that same wisdom that called things into being and ordered them and rules them. And that's what Paul wants to say in 1 Corinthians. Now the Corinthians were in the sway of some know-it-all fancy preachers, self-proclaimed experts, who boasted in their possession of a secret knowledge of divine things. Either they were puffed up with superior knowledge, or they were feeling dumb. Certainly they were claiming that Paul's message was neither clever or powerful. At least, that is how it seemed:

1 Corinthians 1 21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. 22 Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

The cross is great subversive surprise for the world, whose wisdom is a self-serving powergrab. As it turns out, God has enough power in his little finger to expose it for what it is. The wisdom of God, it turns out, means the sacrifice of the Son, for sin, on the cross. It exposes the pride of human wisdom by overturning it.