Please Take the Poll: How Often Do You Read The Daily Word?

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I have a friend in the California state prison system. I met him when he was still in county jail, awaiting transfer to prison, where he will serve a term of several years. After our last meeting, and just before his transfer occurred, he mailed me a handmade metal cross to wear around my neck in remembrance of him.

The cross is the universally recognized symbol of the Christian faith. It is also a strange choice for a universal symbol. Would you put an electric chair atop your church steeple? Would you plate a noose in 14-karat gold and wear it as a lapel pin? Would you bedizen a guillotine with tiny diamonds and wear it as a pendant on a necklace? Of course not! We don’t glamorize an executioner’s tools.

That’s precisely what the cross is, however—a particularly tortuous method of execution. We glamorize it anyway. On the one hand, the glamorization of the cross may be evidence of how deeply rooted Christ’s death is in our Christian conscience. No cross-less Christ, no cross-less Christianity! On the other hand, glamorization may be evidence of our continuing discomfort with the cross, a whitewash of its gruesome reality, lipstick on a pig.

Discomfort with the cross is not new. First-century Corinthian Christians were uncomfortable with it too. Notice what Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 1:17-18:

For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel — not with words of human wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

In Greek, these verses contrast two words: “wisdom of words” (sophia logou) and “the word of the cross” (ho logos ho tou staurou).

The contrast between these two words lies at the heart of Corinth’s problems. The Corinthians loved wisdom. They were, literally, philosophers, which derives from the Greek words for love and wisdom. Out of this love of wisdom, the Corinthians evaluated Christian leaders according to how well they spoke about wisdom. Greeks believed that wisdom was best communicated through words, so the Corinthians prized rhetorical excellence in their leaders. Differing evaluations of the respective rhetorical skill of Paul, Apollos, and Peter led to divisions in the Corinthian church.

In this quest for wisdom of words, the Corinthians forgot the word of the cross. Or, if not actually forgetting it, they bedizened it with words to cover its gruesome reality. Paul unbedizened it.

The cross is ugly for a reason. It has power to save the perishing. It beautifies ugly sinners. Paul forced the Corinthians to chose which ugly they would live with: their ugly problem or God’s ugly solution. “The word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing.” But the real fool rejects a solution simply because it makes him look bad.

I wear my prisoner’s unbedizened cross because I don’t mind looking bad. You?

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Book Review: The Me I Want to Be by John Ortberg

I am not the me I want to be. You are not either. Both of us desire to become better people. But what does better mean? And how do we become better? In his latest book, John Ortberg answers both questions with gentle wit and spiritual insight…

For the complete review, click here.