The Only Thing Worth Knowing

1 Corinthians 2:1-5

May 3, 2026 • Mount Pleasant UMC

Well, let’s just get this out of the way right off the bat: “Star Wars Day” is tomorrow so let me be the first to tell you, “May the Fourth Be With You.” I’m sure you will be celebrating by watching your favorite Star Wars movie or TV show. Like any franchise or fandom, especially one that has lasted for almost 50 years now, opinions vary widely on which movie or set of movies is the best, and there are endless online arguments about this movie or that series, which ones are good and which ones aren’t. And there are people who make arguments that this movie or that movie should be erased or remade, that it shouldn’t really be part of the story. We like this part of the story, but not that part of the story. It shouldn’t have happened that way. But, like it or not, those films and series actually are part of the story.

The same thing is true in our faith and in particular of the writings that define our faith. There are parts of the Bible that people wish were not in there; there are parts of the story of Jesus that people would like to see go away. We like the teacher Jesus. We like the healer Jesus. We like the Jesus who loves everyone, who holds children on his lap and who tells sinners they are forgiven. Those are nice, comforting stories to tell kids at bedtime. What we don’t like is all the violence and brutality that comes with the cross. Can’t we just skip that part of the story? There are already people who are saying they won’t watch this next season of The Chosen because it’s going to be all about the crucifixion. We want to go from happy to happy—from Palm Sunday to Easter and skip all the ugliness in between. But like it or not, the cross is part of the story, our story. In fact, according to Paul, it is the central part of our story. Paul says it’s the only thing worth knowing.

This morning we are in week 4 of our sprint through the New Testament, and the last couple of weeks we’ve sped up our pace here on Sunday morning. Don’t worry, you will catch up in the readings pretty soon. So far, we’ve talked about three “Words of Life,” what are considered to be load-bearing ideas for our faith: righteousness, gospel and forgiveness. All important ideas and concepts for who we are as Christians. But today we come to a central beam in the house we are building because our word for today is “cross.” And not “cross” like in someone is angry with you. No, this is a cross that brings an entirely different vibe. This cross, rightly understood, will challenge everything we think we know about how the world works.

At least that’s what Paul told the Corinthians. Paul writes this: “I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (2:2). Why was Paul so insistent on emphasizing the cross with these folks? To answer that question, we need to know something about Corinth and these people Paul was writing to. Corinth was built on a narrow strip of land between two seas and, as such, was a center for trade. The city Paul knew had been founded about 70 years earlier by Julius Caesar and was first populated by military veterans and freed slaves—so mostly people who were loyal to Rome and the Roman way of life (deSilva, Archaeology and the Ministry of Paul, pgs. 127-128). It became a large and wealthy city and the inhabitants largely saw themselves as Romanitas—“little Romans,” people who tried to live, act and achieve status and honor like the people in Rome did. New Testament scholar Scot McKnight calls them “Rome wannabes” (1 Corinthians, pg. 32). And so there was a distinct division of the people by Paul’s day, a division which showed up even in the church. There were the wealthy, the “jet set,” the important people, and then there were the poor, the enslaved and the used to be enslaved people. Who you were and how much you were valued depended on your heritage, your military accomplishments, your abilities in public speaking and how much money you gave for the public good (cf. McKnight 33). In his letter to the Romans, Paul mentions an official from Corinth named Erastus, who apparently was part of the church and also the “director of public works” in Corinth (Romans 16:23). Today, there is still a stone with an inscription bearing his name that recognized his personal financial gift for the paving of an area by the theater. His personal gifts increased his status in the community (cf. deSilva 151-152; McKnight 33). Life in Corinth was all about power, status and achievements. They were Roman wannabes.

And into that setting comes Paul, bringing a message about Jesus and the cross. Paul says, “I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling” (2:3). Paul was a Roman citizen, but he was not a wealthy or important person like the “great and mighty” people in Corinth. It had to be intimidating for him to stand in front of these people, most of whom had all the good things that their modern life had to offer, and tell them about “a strange thing that happened a few years ago” which he knew sounded crazy (Wright, Paul for Everyone: 1 Corinthians, pg. 21). Fear and trembling are understandable. And yet, Paul believed—no, Paul knew that what he has to tell the Corinthians was the only thing worth knowing. He knew what he had to proclaim contained the secret of everything. Paul had come to tell them about the cross.

We have turned the cross into something acceptable. We decorate our churches and homes with nice, smooth, pretty crosses. We wear them around our necks as jewelry. We carry them around in our pockets along with our change. People in the first century would never have thought of doing that, not in a million years. The cross was a means of execution—a brutal, ugly, horrible method of execution. Romans weren’t the first ones to nail people to crosses but they perfected the practice. There were other means Rome could use to kill someone, but crucifixion was considered the most violent form of punishment, reserved for the worst of criminals, or slaves or traitors. You did not speak of crucifixion in polite company. New Testament scholar N. T. Wright puts it this way: “Imagine somebody at a fashionable dinner-party going on in a loud voice about how he’d seen rats eating the body of a dead dog in the street” (22). That would possibly be an equivalent of a Corinthians bringing up crucifixion at a social event in the first century. Crucifixion was so gruesome that it became sort of a curse word; insulting graffiti was found in Pompeii that said, “Go crucify yourself!” (Gupta 58). As brutal and horrific as Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ was, some scholars think it was still tame compared to an actual Roman crucifixion.

So Paul comes to this city where power and status are so important, a city where they want to be Romans, a city where everyone wants to achieve and advance themselves and he says, “The hope for this world is found on a cross.” Paul says, basically, he preached nothing in Corinth but the cross. Why would he focus so intently on the cross when in other letters to other places he’s handing out advice on how to live the Christian life? Why the cross at Corinth? It’s exactly because of their obsession with power and status. The cross upends all of that and shows us what is really important. When our focus is on the cross, Paul says, our faith will rest on God’s power and not on our own human wisdom (2:5).

The cross brings two types of power, according to the Scripture. The first is the power of the Holy Spirit. On the night before the cross, Jesus told his disciples that unless he went away, the Holy Spirit would not come. He said, “Unless I go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16:7). Earlier he had promised not to leave the disciples as orphans (cf. John 14:18), and the arrival of the Holy Spirit was the fulfillment of that promise. The Spirit would be the presence of Jesus among them, teaching them all things, reminding them of everything Jesus said (cf. John 14:26) and empowering them to do the works he wanted them to do. And when the Spirit came on Pentecost, he came with fire and power. No longer were God’s people left on their own; the Spirit would be with them always. Paul came to the Corinthians with fear and trembling, “not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power” (2:4). It wasn’t his power that allowed him to preach the cross; it was the Holy Spirit’s power. Scholars debate what he means by that “demonstration of the Spirit’s power.” Were there signs and wonders? Healings and people speaking in tongues? Or does he mean that the Spirit brought a conviction to the hearts of the listeners that the message was true regardless of how “weak” the presentation or preaching was? Either way, Paul asserts it was because of the Spirit’s work that the people were convinced that following this crucified man was not foolishness. Rather, it was the way to life. Whatever power they experienced, it brought them to Jesus (cf. Johnson, 1 Corinthians [IVPNTC], pg. 63).

So why don’t we see that happening today? Why, instead, are people openly mocking the message of the cross? Why do we have people saying, “I don’t need someone to die for me”? Maybe it’s because the church has gotten far too comfortable doing what we do on our own strength. We’ve forgotten that our message will only move forward in the power of the Holy Spirit. We’ve given up the idea that God can still work miracles and that the greatest miracle is still a life changed by the power of the cross. If Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever (cf. Hebrews 13:8), then what he did back then he can still do today. We recognize the power of the Spirit on Pentecost, once a year, and then we go back to our leadership seminars and our business practices and putting our hope in the structure of the church. And I’m not knocking strategy and long-term planning and organizing. I’m just suggesting that maybe the reason the church struggles in America is that we’ve forgotten that those things, useful as they are, aren’t where the power of the church comes from. It doesn’t make logical sense to the world that we follow a crucified man. It never has. It only makes sense when the Spirit comes and changes hearts. And maybe we’ve forgotten because we’ve become prayerless. I remember Bishop Trimble telling us often, “Little prayer, little power. More prayer, more power.” It’s simple but it’s true. We need to listen again to Paul’s word that the message of the cross is foolishness (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:18) unless it is accompanied by the power of the Spirit.

But the message of the cross is incomplete unless it is placed alongside the power of the resurrection. “Hundreds of people, after all, were crucified in Paul’s day; what made Jesus different was that God raised him from the dead” (Wright 22). The cross is central but the story doesn’t stop there. Jesus is not still in a tomb somewhere; he is alive and well and, as I said a couple of weeks ago, loose in the world. I believe wholeheartedly we need to stand at and marvel at and worship at the cross, but if we stay there, we miss the hope. There is only hope at the cross because of what happened next. If Jesus had just died on the cross, been buried in a tomb and stayed there, the Christian faith would have amounted to nothing. It is the resurrection that gives the cross its true power. Jesus can forgive sin because he’s alive. Jesus can bring the dead back to life because he’s alive. Jesus can change your life because he’s alive.

The power of the Spirit and the power of the resurrection upends the Corinthians’ focus on power and status because those things mean nothing in the shadow of the cross. Instead of pursuing wealth and honor and all things “me,” the cross instead leads me to a life of “cruciformity.” Yeah, I know that’s a strange word—cruciformity. Basically, it means living a “cross-shaped life.” So what does that mean? Paul had already told the Corinthians he was focused on preaching “Christ crucified” (1:23). When he is writing to the Philippians, he describes what I think cruciformity is: “I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead” (Philippians 3:10-11). Becoming like him in his death. So what was Jesus doing in his death? He was loving humanity, for one thing, so cruciformity is about love. He was being faithful to the Father, living out “not my will but yours be done,” so cruciformity is also about faithfulness. Here’s a definition to try on: “Cruciformity means believers are Spirit-led and Spirit-enabled to give of self to the needy other for the sake of love” (Gupta 61). This is not what the Corinthians were doing, which is why Paul goes to great lengths to emphasize the cross and the ways the cross would change everything they thought to be true.

For one thing, status was (and is) no longer a thing. Later on in this letter, Paul brings up his rights as a preacher of the gospel. He asks them a lot of questions whose answers are an implied, “Yes, you deserve that and that and that, Paul.” And they can’t argue with Paul’s points. He has worked on their behalf. He has shown them the way to eternal life. He has done many things for their benefit. Doesn’t he deserve rank, privilege, rights? In the Roman/Corinthian way of thinking, he absolutely does. But in the cruciform way of thinking, in the shadow of the cross, Paul gives up his rights and privileges so that he can serve them. What is owed to him doesn’t matter (cf. Gupta 61-62). He doesn’t go on social media to complain that they haven’t supported him. Rather, embracing the cross-shaped life “leads to both humility (before God and with one another) as well as unity with one another” (McKnight 36). Rights, status and privilege are part of the old life, not the cruciform one.

That leads to a second way the cross upends the Corinthian life, and it involves a phrase Jess is fond of: all are welcome at the table. In their culture, social standing determined who you ate with because a meal was more than just a meal. “In the Roman world meals were often social events where status was contested, displayed, and reinforced. It mattered greatly who was invited to meals, where they sat, and what they ate” (Gupta 62). So then they come to the church, gathered in someone’s home, and there are people from all social levels who are coming to know Jesus—just like today, by the way. But those who were wealthy and didn’t have to work were getting there early and eating all the food while those who were poor didn’t get there until late and there was nothing left. Basically, Paul tells them to remember that there are people behind you in line—something we still sometimes forget when we’re at a church meal! He is direct with these Corinthians: “Your meetings do more harm than good” (11:17). I wonder what he might say to us? Do we truly set a “table” in our gatherings where everyone is welcome? Or do we only associate with those who are like us, who are in the same social standing as we are? The church must be shaped by the cross, and Christ died for all—as Pastor Rick says often, “none excluded.” The cruciform life asks who is welcome at your table. “Cruciformity means thinking of the other, especially of those who have little or nothing” (Gupta 63).

And because of all that, Paul wants them to understand love. 1 Corinthians is the letter with that famous “love” passage that we’ve all heard read at many, many, many weddings. You know how hard it is to come up with something new to say about that passage at each wedding? Well, that’s a preacher problem and not one Paul had to deal with because, let me tell you something that shouldn’t be a secret: Paul wasn’t writing about weddings and he wasn’t writing about marital love. That famous passage comes right in the middle of a discussion about spiritual gifts; he’s meaning to talk about the ways the Corinthians (and us) treat each other. In other words, 1 Corinthians 13 isn’t about husbands and wives alone; it’s about all of us. If we are shaped by the cross, we never live with our own rights, status or privilege foremost in our minds. Cruciform people seek “to bless the other, to be gentle, to forgive” and all the rest (cf. Gupta 63). The quality God’s people should demonstrate more than anything else is generous love. That’s what the cross shows us. That’s what Christ crucified teaches us.

“I resolved know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (2:2). “To know nothing but Christ and him crucified is to know everything significant” (qtd. in Johnson 63). It is, truly, the only thing worth knowing. And because of that, Jesus himself gave us a practice and told us to do it often, in part so that the cross would always be in our minds, in our memories, in our heart. Sometimes we call it “holy communion,” or “the Lord’s Supper,” or in more liturgical settings it might be called “eucharist,” which means “thanksgiving.” But no matter what we call it, the purpose is to remind us of the cross and what Jesus did there. You can’t get more load bearing in the Christian faith than the cross, and so we do this monthly at least. The bread, his body. The cup, his blood. The sacrifice, his love, calling us to cruciformity.

Will you pray with me as we prepare our hearts for this cross-shaped meal that forms us into cross-shaped people?