Sermon Tone Analysis

Isn’t it Ironic?

Can you hear the sarcasm in today’s reading 1 Corinthians 2:1-12?

New Testament scholar Richard Hays has argued, that in the second chapter of 1 Corinthians Paul really is being ironic....Paul is saying one thing but meaning something altogether different.

Hays suggests that Paul is adopting some of the Corinthians’ own religious vocabulary to beat them at their own game and in the process to prove how silly the game really is.

So he uses their own vocabulary: words like “wisdom,” “mature,” “spiritual” in order to teach about God’s power, suggesting that Paul knows of a double-secret hidden wisdom, maturity, spirituality.

Now isn’t that ironic?!!

If Hays is right, this poses an extraordinary challenge…try reading this passage out loud without sounding sarcastic!

It is hard enough to read Paul with his long run-on sentences, and to read this text in a way that allows the irony to be shared may well be almost impossible.

Sometimes the Scripture reading for the day is quite funny, but the humor is missed because we are too distant from the world of the Bible to get the joke.

We have been raised to think that the Bible is strictly a serious book.

While the truths we gather to proclaim and consider are no doubt matters of life and death, we lose the “lightness” of the good news when we are excessively literal—or excessively systematic in our approaches to biblical texts.

And Paul’s writings tend to complicate things…he always seems to be arguing a point doesn’t he!

This about this: what if, in using the word “wisdom” to refer both to ways of knowing in the world and to the ways of God, Paul is in fact being ironic?

Would it not be ironic if the point Paul is making is that God’s wisdom is always at odds with the wisdom of this world—and that we create a genuine inner circle of those with the knowledge of God’s truth, leaving everyone else on the outside, those with double-secret wisdom and those not yet initiated?

The great temptation that the church faces in Corinth is a desire for security and a reliance on their own ingenuity and knowledge.

It goes without saying that these challenges continue to for us in the 21st century.

We have these strange habit of grasping on to the latest fades in order to find some sort of enlightenment.

“Jesus is the answer,” we say, but what is the question?

We stay focused in our own inner circles, finding comfort in our surroundings, and don’t venture further into the truth that scripture offers us.

We see politicians, scientists, teachers, social-influencers of our day attempting to fix perceived problems with some sort of human-made solutions.

(and such individuals tend to be well compensated for their “expertise”).

Yet how often do we hear such individuals simply say “Jesus is the answer”?

How often do you simply say “Jesus is the answer?

This has everything to do with the larger argument that Paul is having with the church in Corinth, a society composed of urbane and sophisticated people who are certain that knowledge will lead them to the truth, a truth that they can control and manage.

It is in truth, however, a way of masking their fear.

The mystery of God about which Paul speaks cannot be proclaimed in “lofty words or wisdom”—not because the gospel is irrational or anti-intellectual, but because it is revealed in weakness and vulnerability and the self-emptying love of God on the cross.

This week’s insight inspired by the writing of RICHARD M. SIMPSON

Prayer:

O God of light,

your searching Spirit reveals and illumines

your presence in creation.

Shine your radiant holiness into our lives,

that we may offer our hands and hearts to your work:

to heal and shelter,

to feed and clothe,

to break every yoke and silence evil tongues.

Amen.

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