what a good boy am I.” Listen to some words of Francis Xavier (we shall have more of them later), who apparently did not get much out of his religion. “My God, I love thee, not because I hope for heaven thereby, nor because those who love thee not are lost eternally.” But we are jumping ahead too quickly. The question still is—Why not? Why not do this, that, and the other for the happiness it brings? Shall I surprise you? I don’t know the answer to that question. At least I don’t know a purely negative answer. I cannot prove that this is not a logical attitude to life. I cannot break it down by the weapons of dialectic. It is perfectly true that many who have pursued pleasure have found it turned into something different in their hands, like Proteus in the grip of Hercules. But that is not universally true.
I think for example of Epicurus, founder of the Epicureans, the most thorough-going of all hedonists. He wrote this in a letter on the day of his death—“I write to you on the blissful day which is the last of my life. The obstruction of my bladder and internal pains have reached the extreme point, but there is marshalled against them the delight of my mind in thinking over our talks together.” You may brand this Epicurean doctrine as escapism, but you cannot deny the man’s achievement.
Why should strong people (to go back to Paul’s argument) bear the infirmities of the weak? Why should free people constantly be stooping under the chains of the feeble? Why not live for pleasure? I am not aware that St. Paul ever tried to break down that position by argument. There is no negative answer, there is only a positive answer. That is often so in law. One party puts up what looks like a good prima facie case, on circumstantial evidence, and just because the evidence is circumstantial the opposing counsel cannot break it down. What he can do is to set over against it a different case, that also fits the facts and fits more of the facts better than the other case. That is what Paul does here. He says, the test of life is Christ.
THE TEST OF LIFE IS CHRIST
Your hedonist makes out his case, and mind, it is a better case than preachers commonly allow it to be. To reply, “Selfish creature with your selfish happiness. What about the rest of humankind?” is quite wide of the mark. For your modern hedonist says quite readily, the highest form of happiness is social happiness, and I cannot be perfectly happy unless all human beings are happy too. Where is the selfishness in that? It is a good case, but St. Paul will help us to beat it. “You have a good case, we will admit it. But you left out a fundamental fact. Call the witnesses. Yes there is Epicurus. Yes he retired from Athens to his garden (what about the poor devils who have not gardens) and lived a tranquil happy life.”
But now we call another witness—Jesus Christ and you dare not neglect him. And even Christ pleased not himself. St. Paul never tells us much about the earthly life of Jesus, but such a phrase would be meaningless if the writer could not presuppose a knowledge of how Jesus lived.
Inured to poverty and pain, A suffering life my Master led;The Son of God, the Son of Man,He had not where to lay His head (C. Wesley).
Now if the Maker lived like that, how then should we live? But there is far more here than an example to counter-balance Epicurus. I don’t think it conceivable that any of us would have written vs. 3 as Paul does. We should have said, “Christ pleased not himself, he died on the Cross.” Or “Christ pleased not himself, he went about doing good to others.” Or “Christ pleased not himself, for he left home and family and friends in obedience to his call.” St. Paul says none of these things. He says, “Christ pleased not himself, for . . .” and then an obscure text from the Old Testament.
I have no time to go into the doctrine of the Old Testament involved. Only, notice this. It means that the actions of Jesus are thought of not as a living example and a precept of a great philosopher. They are the realization of what was always in the mind of God, the fulfillment in the world of God’s purposes. I have time to draw only three brief conclusions.
Here is the key for our treatment of others. It is simply that through this Christ we are related to them, and we must live to them as he lived to them. What made aristocratic Francis of Assisi give himself to poverty and service? That which gave him the strange habit of calling everybody and everything brother and sister? A new relationship to life in Christ. And here is the real reason for being a Christian. Hear Francis Xavier again:
Not with the hope of gaining ought,Not seeking a reward,But as thou hast loved me, O ever-loving Lord.
It is because he loved us. Because there is no other decent response. I am not offering you a bed of roses, only his own way of being—sacrifice. Is it your way? Or will you please yourself?
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“CHRIST AS FOOLISHNESS AND OFFENSE”—1 Corinthians 1.23–24
[Preached eight times from 2/16/58 at Elvet to 3/17/74 at Croft]
In the series of sermons on Jesus Christ which is being preached this term we come today to “the Verdict of his Enemies.” But we are going to come at his enemies by an indirect route, for we are beginning a generation later with Paul, and his experiences in preaching the Gospel about Christ. Paul learned what the life of a Christian preacher is the hard way. By the time he wrote this letter he was well aware that, however slow-witted people may be in other respects, they are never at a loss for a reason for not believing the Gospel if they don’t want to believe it. It is always possible to find some justification for doing so. There is perhaps a longer list of less reputable reasons available today. We may object to the preacher—his voice, his appearance, his political opinions, or the length of his sermons. We may object to the social environment or the social relations of the Church. The objections Paul knew were more fundamental and forthright. They were in fact better objections than are often made today. Believers in the Christian faith have much to learn from the Bible, so have its enemies.
The real objections to Christianity do not focus on the alleged hypocrisy of the Church members, or even upon the intolerable tedium and irrelevance of preachers; they focus upon Jesus Christ. And so the people that Paul failed to convert did not say, “your sermons are a bore, and your Christians are an idle frowzy company.” They said, according to their background and taste, Christ is foolishness or Christ is an offense. When he tells us this, Paul is of course summarizing, crystallizing in a lucid and brilliant epigram, what people were saying in his immediate environment. At the same time, intentionally or unintentionally, he is reproducing the attitude which people had taken to Jesus during the time of his earthly ministry. He is not telling the story of how people treated Jesus, he is intellectualizing, universalizing, theologizing what they did. But it is more our task to go back and translate Paul’s summary into the terms of the Gospel narratives. We shall start with the Gospels, but each time we shall work on until we get back to the point Paul had reached. First, then the objection of the irreligious: Christ as foolishness.
CHRIST AS FOOLISHNESS
When I say this I am thinking of people who adopt a radically different view of life and the world from his, who consider that in the account he gives of human life and experience he is following the wrong line altogether. There is not, I think, in the Gospels, a great deal of material that comes under this heading because on the whole Jesus shared a common intellectual attitude to life with his Jewish contemporaries. On this score, the real challenge comes from one side—that of the Sadducees.
There is not much detailed information about them in the Gospels, but there is at least one story about them that is familiar to everyone. Is there life after death? The Sadducees raise the question in terms of a story about seven men and one woman. The first of the seven brothers married the woman. There were no children and the man died. In the circumstances, the normal thing, which would be recognized by Jesus and his adversaries, was for the dead man’s brother to marry the widow in the hope of providing descendants for him. This duty happened with no result except the death of brother No. 2. No. 3 took up the task with similarly fatal consequences. Then 4, and 5, and 6, and 7. “Now,” say the Sadducees (and remember that this story is quite possible, even if somewhat unlikely), “suppose there is a resurrection. Will the woman, who was tough enough to outlast them all, be the wife of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7?”
I am not for the moment interested in the answer to the question. I am more concerned