1 Corinthians 1:18

Paul — a former Jewish scholar who became a follower of Jesus and spent his life planting churches across the ancient Mediterranean world — is writing to the church he founded in Corinth, a major Greek city famous for its wealth, sophistication, and love of philosophical debate. In Greek culture, wisdom, eloquent argument, and refined reasoning were prized above nearly everything else. Paul is making a deliberately provocative point: the central message of Christian faith — that a man named Jesus, executed on a Roman cross like a condemned criminal, is the savior of humanity — sounds completely absurd by those standards. Crucifixion was the most humiliating form of execution Rome used, reserved for slaves and political rebels. The idea of worshipping a crucified god was scandalous and laughable to educated people of that world. But Paul says that this same message, which looks like weakness and foolishness, is actually the power of God.

God, the cross still doesn't make sense by the world's logic — and maybe that's entirely the point. Help me stop trying to make faith respectable and let it be what it actually is: strange, costly, and more powerful than anything I could reason my way into. Amen.

Imagine pitching the gospel to a first-century Greek philosopher. "God became human, was arrested by the authorities, publicly tortured, and died naked on a Roman execution device — and that is how he rescues the world." The philosopher would laugh you out of the room. This wasn't hypothetical — Paul was literally laughed out of actual rooms. The cross made no sense by any framework available to the ancient mind. Power didn't look like that. Gods didn't die like that. Winners didn't lose like that. And yet Paul walks straight into that absurdity and says: this is exactly where the power lives. The scandal hasn't disappeared — we've just domesticated it. Crosses hang on walls and dangle from necklaces until they stop looking strange. But sit with it honestly for a moment: the thing at the center of Christian faith is a brutal execution followed by an empty tomb. Not a philosophy. Not a self-improvement system. A death and a resurrection. If that offends your logic, you're in good historical company. But the invitation isn't to understand it fully before you trust it. It's to let it interrupt you first — and discover that understanding tends to show up somewhere on the other side.