CHAPTER 1

Foolishnessto the Greeks

For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom,but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling blockto Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to thosewho are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christthe power of God and the wisdom of God,

(1 Corinthians 1:22–24)

STRANGE MEMORY

Thousands of people were crucified during the sixty-fiveyears from the time that Judea became a Romanprovince until the end of the Jewish War. Almost all ofthem are now forgotten: they have become part of theimmense historical mass of the anonymous dead. Sucha loss of identity is hardly surprising in the aftermathof this most degrading and dehumanising form of punishmentin which, according to Cicero, even the nameof the victim should be removed. The rotting corpseswere often left for vultures and animals to devour. It isthis form of punishment, reserved mainly for the lowerclasses, particularly for slaves, violent criminals andinstigators of revolt, which provides the location forthese reflections on the work of our salvation.

Among the crucified people, Jesus of Nazarath aloneis remembered. But he is not only remembered, he isremembered by his followers as the crucified God. Theaccounts of his death in the gospels are the longest andmost detailed accounts of crucifixion in the whole ofancient literature, and the event itself is supported byevidence which is better than that for any similar eventin the ancient world. Within the gospels themselvesthe accounts of the passion (suffering) and death ofJesus take up the largest single sections: indeed thegospels have been described as passion narratives withextended introductions. Clearly this crucifixion is seenas being exceptionally important, at least by somepeople.

Within the community of his followers, Jesus isremembered – in the most literal sense, re-membered.Week by week, day by day, in the eucharistic offering,in the exposition of the word and in other ways, thereis a ritual re-enactment, an anamnesis, of the dyingand rising of Jesus. It is the Eucharist or Mass – thatregular act in which Christians claim to 'eat the flesh'and 'drink the blood' of Christ – which most dramaticallymanifests and makes present the mystery of thecross and resurrection. This ritual or liturgy is centralto Christian consciousness and to the nurturing andsustaining of Christian identity. 'Do this in remembranceof me' stands at the heart of Christian worship.Yet it is a strange act and seems to the outsider to bea foolish one. For here Christians not only retell theancient stories, they claim to re-enact the Last Supper,relive the sacrifice of Calvary and of heaven, andremember their own broken body through solidaritywith the broken and glorious body of Jesus Christ. This'unbloody sacrifice' of the Mass is strange, mysterious,fascinating and impenetrable, and, for all the attemptsto dispense with its mystery and reduce it to a crudeone-dimensional fellowship meal, the complexity of themystery keeps returning. In the mystery of the Masswe are, as it were, present at Calvary and at the resurrection.It is a strange event rooted in a strangememory.

While most Anglican eucharistic prayers use 'remembrance',the English versions of the Roman Mass usethe weaker word 'memory'. However, while memory isoften seen as a looking back to past and finished events,in recent years there has been a renewed emphasis oncorporate memory, the memory which recovers losttraditions and suppressed histories, the memory whichnourishes and strengthens movements and struggles.Memory is of the greatest importance in the lives ofChristians. Without memory there can be no forgiveness,no healing of the hurts and pain of the past.And forgiveness and healing are central to Christianexistence. The trouble is that our memory is oftenblocked. Past hurts and sufferings are too painful toremember, so we blot them out of consciousness. Weoften justify this organised amnesia by saying that we'live for the present'. But living for the present caneasily be an evasion of the reality of our past. It isthis evasion which must be undermined, lovingly yetdeliberately, by the Christian community. For to livewithin a community of faith is to live within a communityof memory, and the Christian community isshaped by what J. B. Metz calls 'the dangerous memoryof the passion of Christ'. It is a community with ahistory. T. S. Eliot in 'Little Gidding' tells us thata people without history is not redeemed from time,and, in Christian thought, redemption takes place bothwithin time and from the captivity of time.

However, the word 'remember* brings out the presentdynamic in the past events. To re-member is to puttogether again. And this is what happens among thedisciples of Jesus. Week by week, day by day, the Christiancommunity celebrates the mystery of his dying,breaking bread in his memory, and in that fragmentation,that brokenriess, celebrates its own unity as 'onebody in Christ'. The term 'body of Christ' is used inPaul to mean both the Eucharist and the people. Thiscontinual memorial or anamnesis is more than an actof nostalgia. It is a putting together again of the body ofChrist which was broken and given for the life of theworld. There is something immensely powerful andenergising about this movement, and yet we mustadmit that it is very odd, very strange – indeed, on thesurface, utterly absurd. For one would have thoughtthat the event of Calvary would have marked the endof what we call 'Christology', thinking about Jesus asthe Christ, the Messiah: it would seem to mark thedisastrous failure of a project. Yet this seems not to beso. Christ was broken and crushed, and yet it is whenwe are broken and crushed that we know him. Christwas a failure and it is in the midst of our failure thatwe know him, not as another failure but as a source oflife and power.

In fact the original Calvary experience was, for thedisciples, one of failure. It was later, on the road toEmmaus, and on similar subsequent encounters, thatthe reality of the cross and of the crucified one becamea living reality. It was on the first Pentecost after thedeath of Jesus that, as a result of Peter's preaching,they were 'cut to the heart' (Acts 2:37). It was as aresult of the preaching of the gospel of the crucifiedChrist that people were brought to faith and discipleship.

And so it has been through all the succeeding centuries.Although evidence suggests that friendship andthe witness and examples of friends is the most importantsingle factor in leading people to Christian faith,there is a power in preaching which is not dependenton the preacher's own ability or personal strength. Wemay be chained in various ways but the word of God isnot chained (2 Timothy 2:3). There is liberating andhealing power in the word. So the Letter to the Hebrewssays that the word of God 'is living and active, sharperthan any two-edged sword, piercing until it dividessoul from spirit, joints from marrow' (Hebrews 4:12).Similarly the Baptist preacher C. H. Spurgeon, whenhe was asked 'Why do you defend the Bible?', replied,'I do not defend the Bible. The Bible is a lion. Set itfree and it defends itself.' In preaching, we are seekingnot so much to draw attention to ourselves or ourrhetorical and dramatic ability as to set free, to liberate,the word so that it does its own (or rather God's)strange work (Isaiah 28:21, King James Version).

GOD'S STRANGE WORK:LIFE THROUGH THE CROSS

For his followers Jesus is the exact opposite of HumptyDumpty. Not only is his broken life put togetheragain in the resurrection, but each celebration of theChristian community is a re-membering of Christ, aputting together of the Christ who was broken andsmashed. But in this re-membering, we become hismembers, his body, the extension of his incarnationand passion into human history. It is in this socialexperience that salvation is found. For salvationinvolves a participation in a new history, becomingmembers of a new community. We are not redeemedin isolation but as part of a redeemed community, acommunity brought into being by God's strange work.When Christians meet together to break bread andshare wine in his memory, they are taking part in anact which helps them to live. Through this act thedistant figure from first-century Galilee and Jerusalembecomes a living presence and source of life.

The re-membering of Christ, the movement of hispassion into human history, is one of the most striking,most baffling and yet most clear features of the humanstory. For when people contemplate this crucifiedfigure, they do so not as a solitary and tragic martyrbut as a source of strength and grace, and as a way ofdeepening solidarity in pain and struggle. To rememberChrist in his dying is to become his members,his limbs and organs, to be his body crucified and risen.It is to reawaken his memory as a contemporary sourceof strength and illumination. Or so Christians claim.

So in contemplating the passion, we look back to theevent of Christ's death, not only as a historical memory,but as a source of life, of freedom, of nourishment, ofrenewal. In that crushed and broken victim, we see ourhope, our only hope, in a world which continues tocrush and break the children of God.

GOOD FRIDAY: THE FEAST OF FOOLS

Christians commemorate Christ's death on that paradoxicalday called Good, a paradox which has beenreinforced twice in recent years by its coincidence withApril Fools' Day. It is a coincidence with deep meaning.On Good Friday we celebrate the fact that 'God letshimself be pushed out of the world on to the cross'(Dietrich Bonhoeffer). It is the feast of the divine folly.Indeed in the New Testament the cross is seen, and itsproclamation is seen, as an act of folly. St Paul puts itlike this:

For the message about the cross is foolishness tothose who are perishing, but to us who are beingsaved it is the power of God. For it is written, I willdestroy the wisdom of the wise and the discernmentof the discerning I will thwart ... Has not Godmade foolish the wisdom of the world? For since,in the wisdom of God, the world did not knowGod through wisdom, God decided, through thefoolishness of our proclamation, to save those whobelieve. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desirewisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified ... ForGod's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom,and God's weakness is stronger than humanstrength. (1 Corinthians 1:18–25)

Paul goes on to say that God has chosen what is foolishin the world to confound the wise (1:27). And so ifanyone claims to be wise in this age, that person mustbecome a fool in order to become wise (3:18). The crossis described as moria, insanity (1 Corinthians l:18f.)and as 'God's foolishness' (1:25). We need to becomefools in order to become wise because the wisdom ofthis world is foolishness with God (3:18).

It is essential to grasp the importance of this idea offolly in sharing the mystery of the cross and in followingthe way of the cross. One of the earliest crucifixesshows Jesus with the head of an ass, an image whichno doubt was derived from Paul's portrayal of the crossas folly. But we could say that the entire life of Jesuswas an act of folly. There is no sense in it by worldlyconventional standards: his solidarity with outcasts, hisextreme demands, his polemic against the rich and devout,all culminating in his death as a rebel and criminal. Itis quite unreasonable. Christ is a fool, a symbol ofcontradiction, of the foolishness of God. And those whofollow his way become sharers in his folly. They become'fools for the sake of Christ' (1 Corinthians 4:10).

Sadly it is only in the Eastern Orthodox tradition(and particularly in the Russian tradition) that thestatus of the holy fool is recognised liturgically andthat folly for Christ's sake is seen as an integral part ofspirituality, consciously celebrated and revered. Thefirst saint to be recognised as a fool was St SimeonSalos, a Palestinian monk who died at the end of thesixth century. He threw nuts at the candles duringthe liturgy and ate sausages publicly on Good Friday.St Andrew the Fool walked naked through the streetsof Constantinople and behaved as a beggar. The foolsreappeared in thirteenth- and fourteenth-centuryRussia. The most famous of the fools of Russia, StBasil the Blessed who lived during the sixteenthcentury, made Tsar Ivan the Terrible eat raw meat,consorted with prostitutes, threw stones at the housesof respectable people and stole from dishonest traders.He too ate sausages on Good Friday and walked nakedthrough the streets of Moscow. The fools were oftennomads and pilgrims, always figures of the absurd. Theyappeared particularly during periods of complacency inChurch and society. Essentially the holy fools kept alivethe scandal of the naked, accursed saviour who waskilled outside the camp.

In the west, the Cistercians maintained the traditionof folly for Christ's sake. William of St Thierry(1085–1148), in his book The Mirror of Faith, says thatChrist's wisdom is mad and that Christians are calledto 'holy madness' (sancta ... amoris insania). Francisof Assisi was called to be a 'new fool' in the world,while Irish tradition is filled with accounts of wild andstrange men who were possessed of deep perceptionand insight. Nor are the holy fools extinct. On GoodFriday 1994 – also April Fools' Day – Father Carl Rabat,dressed as a clown, hammered on a Minuteman IIImissile in North Dakota, for which he was sentencedto five years in prison.

John Saward, whose work Perfect Fools is the authoritativestudy of folly for Christ's sake in east and west,argues that the holiness of the fools shows itself mostin their solidarity with the outcasts of society. They arenot content with 'social work' but identify completelywith the wretched of the earth. They see Christ presentin beggars, lepers and prisoners, and particularly inmoral and mental outcasts, whose behaviour makesthem intolerable in conventional society and amongthe comfortably devout and pious. But the fool belongsalso to the tradition of prophecy, and points to themadness and evil of a world system organised apartfrom Christ, apart from love and mercy. So the foolstands in all ages as a scandal and an offence to respectablereligion, stands as a constant and disturbingreminder of the Christ who was crucified outside thegate (Hebrews 13:12).

I believe that in some way we are all called to befools for Christ's sake, and that the word of the crosswill not make sense apart from this willingness to takethe form of a fool. We come always before the cross asfools, as disciples of that messianic fool who enteredJerusalem on an ass and died in apparent failure as anact of supreme folly. Religion goes disastrously astraywhen it ceases to be a sign of contradiction andbecomes the cement for social conformity. The foolishnessof God is then replaced by capitulation to thevalues of the world. A Church which owes its originsto the cross cannot, if it is to be true to its nature, bethe slave of worldly norms and stereotypes. Conformityto the world is the betrayal of its foundation in follyand contradiction, and of its necessary role as a communityof contrast and of dissent.

So we are urged to be transformed, not conformed(Romans 12:2), an injunction which the Church seemsconstantly to be in danger of reading in reverse! Thetemptation to conformity and to 'rationality' recurs inevery generation in different forms. The Church isurged to adjust, to 'come to terms with', the valuesand assumptions of the dominant culture instead ofchallenging and critiquing them in the name of theJesus who came to bring a krisis to the world and itssystems (John 12:31). The temptation to conformitymust be resisted if the scandal of the Church under thecross is to be sustained.

THE SCANDAL OF INCARNATIONAND PASSION

There are many theories about how the saving work ofChrist takes effect but none of them is quite satisfactory.None approaches the heart of the mystery whichis best embodied in symbol and sacrament. The symbolof the dying Christ is both tragic and comic, terribleand, by conventional standards, ridiculous. It representsfailure and foolishness. Yet out of this foolishnesscomes a strength and a source of wisdom which isbeyond secular reason to comprehend. I do not meanby this that Christianity is fundamentally irrational.Clearly in order to take the step of faith in Christ at allone must believe that it is, in some sense, a 'reasonable*step to take. But as one moves closer to that whichdraws us and transforms us, it is mystery, not rationality,which takes over. In the end, it is faith and love,not thought, which attracts us to this strange figureon the cross.