"19:30" by THEMACGIRL* on flickr

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. For it is written, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart." Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength. (1 Corinthians 1:18-25, which is the New Testament reading from Sunday)

On Nassau Street in downtown Princeton, New Jersey, inside a corner store that looks like a vaguely purple gingerbread house, you will find a magical place called “Thomas Sweet” where it’s worth it to stand in whatever length of line has formed to get a scoop or two of their delicious homemade ice cream. Chocolate chip cookie is the best flavor by far: chocolate chips folded into a brown-sugar ice cream base. Yum.

As you are standing in line, you can look at pictures on the wall of Albert Einstein from when he lived in Princeton, and you can look at murals painted on the walls of parents and kids enjoying ice cream…and then, as you get near the front of the line, you can look at yourself in a crazy funhouse mirror.

It is a wavy mirror salvaged from the old Palisades Amusement Park in northern New Jersey. When you look into it, your body shrinks and your head stretches and you look like a cross between a toddler and an alien. And every time – EVERY TIME – you look in that mirror expecting to get a clear, reasonable look at yourself, because that’s what you expect from mirrors. And every time, you’re so surprised by your distorted form that you can’t help but giggle. Because that mirror gives you anything BUT a clear picture of yourself.

We spend a lot of our lives trying to get clear pictures of ourselves and of our world. We use mirrors to get clear pictures of ourselves. We use newspapers and radios to try to get clear pictures of the state of the world. We use textbooks and even Wikipedia to get a clearer picture of topics that we are trying to grasp. And we look to the Bible and to our worship and fellowship at church to try to get a clear picture of who God is.

No matter where else we find pictures of who God is in our world, Paul reminds us that our clearest picture of God is the picture of Christ on the cross. “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,” Paul says, “For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength.”

Luther, in his Heidelberg Disputation says:

He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross....God can be found only in suffering and the cross, as has already been said Therefore the friends of the cross say that the cross is good and works are evil, for through the cross works are dethroned and the old Adam, who is especially edified by works, is crucified.

When all is stripped away, in our moments of sincerest simplicity or deepest despair, we have clear sight lines to the cross, and it is through this cross that we see and know God.

Where is God in the midst of our struggles? God is on the cross.
Where is God in the midst of our grief? God is on the cross.
Where is God in the midst of our brokenness? God is on the cross.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not trying to glamorize the cross or write off the depth of Christ’s suffering. The cross is always a tragedy for us, and a place where it looked, for at least a few days, like death had the final word.

But the cross is also, for us, a clear picture of divine uninhibited love. It is the place where God entered most fully into the human experience, even unto death, and the cross has become for us the assurance that the God who suffers with us is also the God who gives us redemption, reconciliation, and new life.