by Father Jean-Pierre Ruiz
“We preach Christ crucified.” That’s what St. Paul has to say to the Corinthians in the second reading for the third Sunday of Lent. As we know, St. Paul wrote letters to the young Christian communities where he had preached the Good News in person. By means of these letters, he kept in touch with them and continued to nurture their faith, helping them to work their way through growing pains, and tackling the tough questions that came up as they sought to make sense of their daily lives on the basis of what they had learned from Paul.
During the first century, travel was difficult and dangerous: Paul himself barely survived a shipwreck on his way to Rome (Acts 27). As for letters, in Paul’s time there was no such thing as guaranteed overnight delivery. Even under the best of circumstances, written messages could take weeks or even months to arrive at their destinations. From our vantage point in the 21st century, there’s something quaint about letter writing. When was the last time you actually sat down to write out a letter with pen and paper? I honestly can’t remember the last time I did. Some schools aren’t even teaching children cursive handwriting any more. They spend that precious classroom time teaching them keyboard skills instead — and I mean computer keyboard skills, not piano lessons!
As low-tech as St. Paul’s letters might seem to us today, they were in fact the social networking medium of his time, and the truth is that Christians have historically been at the cutting edge of communication technologies. Early Christians pioneered the implementation of the codex. These handwritten predecessors of today’s printed books were much more portable and manageable than the scrolls they replaced. Then there’s Gutenberg and his Bible, and in 1931 the inventor Guglielmo Marconi himself set up Vatican Radio. Did you know that the Vatican has its own YouTube channel? Our own Diocese of Brooklyn has NET — New Evangelization Television — broadcasting on cable television and live streaming on the Internet. With all those resources at the service of the new evangelization in our own time, imagine what St. Paul would have done with a smartphone? “We preach Christ crucified” is just 23 characters, an easy tweet! No matter the medium, though, Paul’s message was awfully hard to sell.
On the face of it, “Christ crucified” doesn’t sound like good news at all, and Paul knew that such a message sounded like foolishness for some and that it represented a stumbling block for others. That’s not surprising, since death by crucifixion was among the most gruesome means by which the Roman authorities kept subject peoples obedient to imperial domination. The Roman writer Cicero spoke of crucifixion as “the cruelest and most disgusting of penalties,” adding, “To bind a Roman citizen is a crime, to flog him is an abomination, to kill him is almost an act of murder; but to crucify him is what? There is no fitting word that can possibly describe so horrible a deed.”
Death by crucifixion was literally excruciating, slow and agonizing, with its victims often lingering for days before breathing their last. Once dead, their bodies were left exposed as a deterrent to passers-by, their crime often identified by a sign that was attached to the cross. Christ crucified? Nothing could be more shameful, and yet the crucifixion of Jesus was a matter of public record. For His followers, though, the story does not end at the cross. For them, the Good News is that Jesus conquered death itself and that He was raised to life. His disciples knew this because the risen Jesus Himself appeared to them, spoke with them, and even ate with them. Even so, the risen Jesus didn’t appear to His foes. That made matters more challenging for His friends, because Jesus made it clear that it would be up to His disciples to “proclaim the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15), to bear convincing testimony that the Crucified One has been raised from the dead.
As they figured out how to move forward with their mission the disciples also looked back to make sense of all that had happened, and the Gospels testify to this ongoing process of reflection on the meaning of their journey with Jesus. Put in writing decades later, the Gospels re-read what Jesus said and did in the shadow of the cross and in the light of the resurrection. It was this mature reflection that made it possible for the disciples to put the pieces together and to hand on the Good News, so that those who had not seen could also come to believe in Christ, who is the power of God and the wisdom of God. In the reading from John’s Gospel for the third Sunday of Lent, we learn how the disciples figured out what Jesus meant when He said, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). Those who heard Him couldn’t make sense of it: “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and you will raise it up in three days?” (John 2:20).
As the evangelist explains, “he was speaking about the temple of his body. Therefore, when he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they came to believe the Scripture and the word Jesus had spoken” (John 2:21-22). St. Paul got it right: “the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength” (1 Corinthians 1:25). That’s a message our world still sorely needs to hear. Tweet it, text it, post it on FaceBook, but above all, live it! As St. Francis of Assisi is alleged to have said, “Preach the Gospel always, and if necessary, use words.”[hr] Readings for the Third Sunday of Lent:
Exodus 20: 1-17 or
Exodus 20:1-3, 7-8, 12-17
Psalm 19: 8, 9, 10, 11
1 Corinthians 22-25
John 2: 13-25[hr] Father Jean-Pierre Ruiz, a priest of the Diocese of Brooklyn, is professor of theology at St. John’s University.