The Lens of the Cross

When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified [1 Corinthians 2:1-2, a portion of the Epistle reading for the Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany, RCL, Year A].

In 1986, when I entered Duke Divinity School at thirty-five, I arrived with expectations shaped by a decade of professional life. I wanted depth. I wanted to understand the theological architecture beneath what I’d learned in Sunday school and church. I wanted access to the tradition’s wisdom—systematic theology, biblical interpretation, church history. The kind of knowledge that takes years to acquire, that separates the serious student from the casual believer.

During the next three years, I found much of what I was looking for. The education mattered. It shaped how I read Scripture, how I think about God, how I understand the church’s two-thousand-year conversation with itself.

But somewhere along the way, I had to reckon with an uncomfortable truth: the most profound wisdom the tradition offers is also the most elementary. The “mystery hidden for ages” that Paul promises the Corinthians turns out to be the story I learned as a child. God saves through a carpenter’s son who dies as a criminal on a Roman cross. The scandal of the cross refuses to be transcended. It won’t stay in the “basics” category where we can master it and then move on to more refined theological territory.

The Corinthians wanted advanced teaching. Paul was about to give them some.

Paul opens chapter 2 by reminding the Corinthians how he first came to them: “not with lofty words or wisdom” but “in weakness and fear and trembling” (vv. 1, 3). He resolved to know nothing among them “except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (v. 2). This sounds like deliberate simplicity—Paul stripping his message down to the bare essentials for people who weren’t ready for anything more complex.

But then Paul shifts. “Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom” (v. 6). The Corinthians, who’d been quarreling over which teacher is most impressive, over who has access to the deepest insights, must have leaned in at this point. Finally. The advanced course. The secret knowledge reserved for those spiritually sophisticated enough to handle it.

Paul springs the trap. The secret wisdom, the mystery “hidden for ages in God” (v. 7)? It’s Christ crucified. The same message he preached when he first arrived. Paul adds that the rulers of his age didn’t understand this wisdom—that’s why they “crucified the Lord of glory” (v. 8).

Paul’s grammar is important here. When Paul writes “Christ crucified,” he uses a perfect passive participle—a verb form describing action completed in the past whose effects continue into the present. He isn’t saying “Christ who was once crucified but has now moved beyond that.” Rather, he’s identifying Jesus as the one whose identity remains permanently stamped by the cross. Even risen, even glorified, Jesus Christ is the crucified one. Any other account of his identity is not the gospel.

The Corinthians wanted wisdom beyond the cross. Paul tells them there is no wisdom beyond the cross. The cross is the wisdom. Their persistent quarreling over teachers and rhetoric proves they haven’t grasped this yet. They’re still thinking like the world thinks—measuring spiritual maturity by sophistication, eloquence, intellectual achievement. Paul will make this explicit in the next chapter: “You are still of the flesh. For as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not of the flesh?” (3:3). In other words: You think you’re ready for advanced teaching? You’re still infants.

The cross functions less as the content of Paul’s message and more as the lens through which he sees everything else. It’s not what Paul perceives but how he perceives. Once one looks through this lens, the entire world comes into different focus.

Through the lens of the cross, power looks like weakness. Wisdom looks like foolishness. Glory looks like humiliation. Life comes through death. God’s great salvific act looks like a state execution of a provincial troublemaker.

The “rulers of this age” couldn’t see through this lens. They looked at Jesus and saw a threat to be eliminated, a blasphemer to be silenced, a problem to be solved through the usual mechanisms of power. They thought they were exercising wisdom and authority. They were actually revealing their complete blindness to what God was doing. They crucified the Lord of glory because they literally could not perceive what was happening in front of them.

We make the same mistake whenever we revert to the world’s evaluative categories. We measure the church’s vitality by metrics of success—attendance figures, budget growth, cultural influence. We assess theological sophistication by eloquence and credentials. We compete over whose interpretation is most defensible. We think spiritual maturity means accumulating knowledge, refining arguments, moving beyond simple faith to complex understanding.

Paul suggests something different. Spiritual maturity means understanding that we never move beyond the cross. The cross refuses to be a stage we pass through on our way to something more advanced. It remains the permanent center, the lens we keep learning to see through more clearly. The Corinthians’ problem wasn’t that they lacked information. Their problem was that they were still trying to assess everything—including Paul’s preaching, including each other, including their own spiritual status—using the world’s wisdom rather than the wisdom revealed in the cross.

This is why Paul insists that only the Spirit can teach us to see through this lens. “These things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God” (v. 10).

The Spirit’s work isn’t about granting access to hidden information or esoteric knowledge. The Spirit teaches us to perceive what the cross actually reveals about God. Without the Spirit, the cross remains opaque—or worse, it appears to be exactly what it looked like to the rulers: weakness, failure, defeat. Paul’s point is not that some people lack intelligence or education, but that the wisdom of the cross cannot be perceived through the world’s usual categories; it must be spiritually discerned (v. 14).

The Corinthians weren’t lacking in intelligence or education. Some of them were quite sophisticated by the world’s standards. The issue was perceptual. They were trying to understand God’s wisdom using categories and measurements that can’t contain it. It would be like trying to see color through a lens that only registers light and shadow. The problem isn’t the quality of the lens—it’s that we’re using the wrong kind of lens entirely.

“We have the mind of Christ” (v. 16), Paul concludes. Not “we have information about Christ” or “we have correct doctrines concerning Christ.” We have Christ’s way of perceiving, Christ’s mode of understanding, Christ’s framework for making sense of the world. And Christ’s mind—the mind that shapes how we see everything—is cruciform. It thinks through the cross. It interprets power, wisdom, glory, and life through the lens of a crucified and risen Lord whose identity remains stamped by self-giving love.

The cross won’t be domesticated. It won’t stay where we try to contain it—in the opening chapters of systematic theology, in the elementary lessons we teach children, in the simplified gospel presentations we use for evangelism. It keeps insisting on its own centrality, its own sufficiency, its own scandal.

Paul came to Corinth in weakness and fear, proclaiming Christ crucified. Years later, when the Corinthians thought they’d outgrown that message and were ready for deeper wisdom, Paul wrote them a letter. The letter said: You already have the deeper wisdom. You just haven’t recognized it yet.

What if the deeper wisdom we keep reaching for is the one we have been circling all along?

The wisdom is Christ crucified.

The mystery hidden for ages is Christ crucified.

The mind of Christ is the mind of the crucified one.

We spend our lives learning to see through that lens. We never move beyond it.