Sympathy for the Corinthians

I’ve been searching for an easy way

To escape this cold light of day

I’ve been high and I’ve been low

But I’ve got nowhere else to go

Going through the opening chapters of 1 Corinthians again, now that I’m part of a Greek reading group, has evoked a certain sympathy in me for these Corinthians.  Their stance is pretty much equivalent to the disciples in the beginning of the book of Acts, who ask the risen Jesus: “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?”  They can’t quite cope with the fact that the one they’ve been searching and longing for has finally come, and he’s not all he was cracked up to be.  It’s like they’ve stumbled on the holy grail, only to discover that it’s just an ordinary cup.

The Corinthians expect something more – after all, the religious people at nearby Eleusis (50km East) have ecstatic experiences and secret mysteries; those loyal to Caesar have a strong and visible Lord; those loyal to the Greek gods have an impressive temple to Apollo nearby; the travelling sophists have impressive rhetoric… surely Jesus, the Lord of the world, can compete with all that??…

All the locals scattered, they were hiding in the snow
We were so far away from home, so how were we to know
There’d be nothing left to plunder
When we stumbled on the holy grail

Paul’s response is basically that, indeed, Jesus can do more than compete - he can surpass the others: In HIM the Corinthians have ‘been made rich in every way’; in HIM is found the ‘power of God’; in HIM is found the ‘wisdom of God’ – that is, ‘our righteousness, holiness, and redemption’.

The Corinthians’ problem is not that they want too much; in fact, they really are willing to settle for far too little – but they want it NOW, visibly in the present (this is what I call ‘over-manifest spirituality’); whereas in Christ they have everything in a way that is presently HIDDEN until Christ himself appears….

Israel in Pictures

I’m back from Israel. It’s a place of great contrasts. I’ll try to capture them with a few pictures I took along the way…

Old and New
In the foreground of the first picture is Herod’s Palace in Caesarea, complete with his own private swimming pool – which now melts into the sea. The second picture, of course, shows Herod’s Temple wall.

Promise and Menace
It’s a place where the best and worst elements of humanity are on display – hopes and visions, alongside prejudice and fear. The first picture is from coastal Caesarea, the second from the Palestinian side of the wall that emphatically divides Israeli territory from Palestinian territory.

Achievement and Failure
The first picture includes part of Herod’s Temple foundation – an astonishing achievement, being easily the size of a couple of football fields side by side. The second picture was taken in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Glory and Hiddenness
The Dome of the Rock is surely the most impressive building in Jerusalem, with its famous gold-topped roof. The second picture shows a little-known room hiding in the back of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre – a dark, tiny, largely empty room in which a couple of empty tombs dating from the Second Temple period can be found, just metres away from the location which is widely agreed to be Golgotha…

“We have seen his glory…” John 1:14

blessed are those who do not see

Why was Thomas in a less favourable position to ourselves? Why is it a blessing to believe without seeing? Again, this is related to the opening questions in this blog…
I think it all has something to do with this: God wants us to know him as the one who gives sight to the blind, and life to the dead – and so he withdraws the risen Jesus from our sight, offering us only the testimony of the cross and resurrection, delivered by followers of the hidden Lord.

So is our positive reception of this message effectively a nullification of all of our previous contemplations and searchings and ponderings? Does grace, in this sense, destroy nature – or does it come as the corrective perfecting of our previous groping for God? Of course, there is a long and heated theological debate. Luther and Barth are often thought of as being the key representatives of the idea that grace destroys nature, in opposition to Aquinas, who represents the idea that grace perfects nature.

I wonder if it would be fruitful to think about it like this: Grace resurrects nature… that is, the grace of God is not continuous with any human foundations – it crucifies human pride… on the other hand, the grace of God does enliven and bring to fullness the genuine personhood that had been crudely existent before the coming of salvific grace. In this sense, grace genuinely destroys and perfects.

crypto-theology

Here is a crucial question: Why did the ascension happen? Why was it “better” (John 14-16) for Jesus to leave the disciples with only his indirect presence – via Spirit, Word, and Sacrament?
And why did he picture the Kingdom of God as something which is hidden until the climactic harvest?
Here is a parallel question: Why was Saul of Tarsus struck with blindness as his fundamental experience of the risen Jesus?
And one more related question: Why were the Corinthians so emphatically wrong to act as though they could see clearly in the present (1 Cor 13)?

Perhaps one way to express the Corinthians’ problem is “over-manifest spirituality” – an error at home in the pre-parousia age, in which Jesus can only genuinely be known and celebrated as the Crypto-Kurios… the Lord who is hidden from the world’s esteem by the disgraceful curse of the cross. Consequently the cruciform hiddenness of the Crypto-Kurios is witnessed to by the cruciform mission of Paul, the original Crypto-Theologian.