Lent Reflection: Foolishness of the Cross

1 Corinthians 1:18-19

18 For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
19 and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

 In Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, Boromir expresses dismay about a plan that requires a small band of nine travelers to journey into Mordor, home of the dark lord Sauron and his murderous army of orcs, for the purpose of destroying the one ring of power. Going into Mordor, even with an army of thousands of soldiers, would be folly.  Many lives would be destroyed by such a trek. Boromir slowly loses hope that the fellowship can accomplish its goal.  Its failure would surely lead to the doom of Middle-Earth.

As a young man, Paul rejected the gospel of Jesus Christ. God's Messiah, put to death on the cross as a common criminal?  Folly.  That was not the expectation of first century Jews.  They expected a Messiah who would deliver them from the hands of the Romans. Jesus did not defeat the Romans, he was himself defeated. But when his eyes were opened to the truth of Jesus' resurrection, Paul became a new man.  He proclaimed the gospel of Jesus' crucifixion, and heard a familiar refrain from both Jews and Gentiles:  It is folly. Where is the wisdom in worshiping a God who cannot save His only Son from execution?

As we journey towards the cross this Lent, we hear the echoes of rejection and folly that have reverberated down through the centuries. According to the world, the gospel is folly.  But for those of us who are experiencing the life changing power of the cross, it is a gift of God.

In death we see divine wisdom, which upsets human reason. Reason suggests that the way to defeat Sauron is by force of army.  But a higher wisdom was at work in The Lord of the Rings. Two small hobbits, operating clandestinely, smuggled the ring into enemy territory so that it could be destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom. Boromir was right:  not with 10,000 men could this be accomplished.  It was folly.  Yet, evil was overcome, in the most unlikely of ways.