“For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing,
but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” (1. Cor. 1:10-18)

At the heart of Paul’s mission is the paradoxical “message about the cross”: the claim that even though the kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed did not come about in any visible way, even though Jesus was subject to the most painful and humiliating death the Roman Empire could devise, he was nevertheless the Messiah, the Anointed One who would set God’s people free. The message about the cross is the claim that this man, who appeared to the world to be just another failed revolutionary, was in fact the incarnate Son of God; and the moment that looked like his ultimate defeat was in fact his greatest victory. This certainly sounds like “foolishness.” It’s the opposite of what any reasonable person would expect, including most of Jesus’ disciples. But nevertheless, “it is the power of God.”

Paul continues to develop the paradox in the verses that follow, which we’ll read next week: “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom,” Paul writes, “and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” (1 Cor. 1:25) “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise,” he says; “God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.” (1 Cor. 1:27)

And while our Gospel reading today comes from the near the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel—while Jesus’ death on the cross is still far away—this contrast between strength and weakness is already there. On the face of things, Jesus appears to be gaining in strength. He’s traveling around from place to place proclaiming his message: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” (Matthew 4:17) He’s recruiting the disciples who will become the inner circle of his movement: James and John, who will dream of sitting at his right hand and his left in power; Simon who is called “Peter,” the “Rock” on whom Christ will build his Church. He moves to Capernaum in fulfillment of an ancient text that proclaims that God has broken the yoke of the people’s burden and the rod of their oppressor. (Isa. 9:2-4)

These were dangerous political acts. You didn’t get to proclaim the arrival of a new kingdom within the borders of the Roman Empire without the permission of Rome. You couldn’t even criticize a local ruler for his personal moral failings; that’s what got John the Baptist thrown in jail.

There’s a profound weakness below the surface of what appears to be a strong launch for Jesus’ ministry. “Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested,” Matthew tells us, “he withdrew.” (4:12) Jesus cares deeply about John, but there’s nothing he can do. There is no band of merry men who can help set John the Baptist free. There are no favors Jesus can call in with influential friends. There is no protest movement he can organize. John the Baptist has been arrested, and Jesus is powerless to help, and so he withdraws back to his home base in Galilee, where he begins to recruit. Not among the fighting men, the bandits and desperadoes who could help him launch a war. Not among the leading rabbis of his day, the scholars and teachers who could move a nation with their words. Not among the aristocrats who could pull some strings to get John out of jail.

No, he gets four fishermen, and goes off to change the world.

Now, we know how the story goes. We know that the band of Jesus’ followers will grow into a crowd: the four will become twelve, then hundreds; then thousands. But they’ll all fall away, before the end. Even James and John will disappear. Even Peter will deny him. Jesus will end his ministry as he began it: alone, with no followers, completely vulnerable to the power of Rome. And while Jesus would die and rise again, his followers would still be weak in the face of Roman strength. They would be arrested and exiled, put on trial and put to death: and so it was that “Young John, who trimmed the flapping sail, Homeless in Patmos died. Peter, who hauled the teeming net, Head down was crucified.”

But as Paul says, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.” And somehow, the weakness of Christ on the cross was the method God chose to overthrow the strongest powers of the world: not only Rome, but death itself; and the weakness of his followers began to inspire a great change in the world.

If you want to see what weakness and strength look like in our time, I commend to you the pages of the Minnesota Star Tribune, whose journalists have been documenting the enormity of what is going on in the Twin Cities right now. A few photos and videos from this week: A man lies pinned to the ground by three federal agents with his arms behind his back, when a fourth walks up and pepper sprays him directly in the face. A loose gaggle of protestors stand in the snow along the side of the road, observing a group of agents in the street, when a Customs and Border Patrol commander steps onto the sidewalk and calmly throws a tear gas canister into the crowd, shoving a young woman as he walks away. A US citizen, a grandfather, is taken from his home into the cold of a Minnesota January, wearing nothing but shorts and Crocs, after agents break down his door with a battering ram. He’s released an hour later; they had the wrong guy.

All that had already happened this week before the shooting yesterday by federal agents of yet another US citizen. And while his memory has already been insulted by the claim that he was there to kill ICE agents, I’ve watched the videos. (I would recommend you not watch them, for your own sake.) He stands in the middle of the street, calmly directing traffic and filming while ICE detains someone. If he had come to do violence, as some say, he had his chance. But that wasn’t why he was there. He was there because he loved his neighbors. He was an ICU nurse at the VA hospital. And in the last minute of his life, he saw a young woman thrown to the ground by ICE, and he tried to help her up, while they pepper sprayed him in the face. He was tackled to the ground and then shot again and again. His last words, spoken to the woman he was trying to help: “Are you okay?”

In the face of such overwhelming force, what can ordinary, weak people do?

I was reminded this week, as we celebrated the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., of the title of one of his books: Strength to Love. In this book of sermons, he picks up on the ideas of Jesus and of Paul. He argues for the thesis that “the strong man holds in a living blend strongly marked opposites.” The paradox of strength is like the paradox of the cross. The strongest man in the world isn’t actually Caesar; it’s Christ. To be like Christ, King says, mean to hold in ourselves the same marked opposites he held. “We must combine the toughness of the serpent with the softness of the dove,” he says. We must have the courage to practice nonviolence. We must have the strength to love.

King’s method of nonviolent resistance had a specific goal: to awaken a sense of “moral shame” in those who perpetrated violence and in those who witnessed it, to evoke not humiliation but repentance. The insight that King shared with Gandhi, and Jesus, and Paul, was that every violent act contains within itself the seed of its own undoing. It’s a profoundly hopeful idea: Human hearts can be moved, and human minds can be changed. The sight of the courage of the weak when enduring the full force of the strong can soften even the most hardened hearts.

This doesn’t always look like it’s “working,” in the short term. Dr. King had the courage to practice nonviolence; he still died a violent death. Jesus had the strength to choose weakness; they still nailed him to the cross. And their witness to the message of the cross—to the power of God’s weakness and the strength of God’s love—has moved hundreds of millions of people toward their vision of justice, peace, and love. And although we live in a world that is full of injustice, violence, and hate, there is always hope for change. God is always reaching out to us with mercy and with grace. And there is always a chance to answer Jesus’ call to “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

An acquaintance of mine who lives in Minnesota went down to the scene of the shooting yesterday as people gathered afterwards. He described speaking to one of the young agents there. “Matthew 25 is what got him,” he wrote. (“Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”) He said to him: “You can walk away. You can choose justice. You can use your skills and training for good. You can be a protector. But right now, you’re not.” Minutes after the shooting, he went down to the scene, and invited the officers to repent of violence. And he says, “two of them were shook up. One of them cried, and walked away.”

This may have been a foolish thing to do. But this was a brave thing to do. And this was a strong thing to do. And this was a powerful thing to do. “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”