your works won't work!
thinking about theology in April 2020
I wrote this in April 2020, amidst divinity school deadlines and a brand-new pandemic.
“Foolishness,” “power,” “wisdom,” “strength”: I underlined these words in the passage, and now the page is patterned up and down with stripes of blue pen.
These words’ frequent appearances make a quick skimming of this passage—1 Corinthians 1, to be exact—into a recipe for disaster. “Foolish” and “foolishness” appear six times altogether; the different iterations of “wise” appear a whopping 13 times. If I’m not careful, reading this passage can start to feel like the times when I’ve stared at a word for so long that it starts to look strange, unfamiliar, just a jumbling of letters. By the time I’m done reading these verses, what does “wisdom” even mean? What is “strength,” this combination of eight letters I am seeing so often?
Maybe this kind of confusion, this mind-scrambling, is not too far from the point of this passage.
After all, Paul is writing to folks he knows well, brothers and sisters he’s willing to correct and critique. Shortly before these verses, he offers what my New Testament professor calls the “thesis” of the whole letter: “Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose” (1:10). Paul then outlines how it sounds like that is not the case in the Corinthian church. Instead, people are vying for influence and identity boosts, living life in their church in the same way they’ve been living in Corinth.
So Paul starts to upend the definitions of influence and identity, of power and wisdom. “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” he asks in 1:20. What the Corinthians profess to believe is counter to the values of the society they swim in.
In the margins above verse 27—“But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong”—are a couple short sentences I’d scribbled a while back: “Your works won’t work! They won’t save you!” When I first wrote those words, I thought of them as a kind of casual paraphrase of Paul’s message to his audience. Accomplishments and image and social standing were not the Corinthians’ salvation; only Jesus could be.
As I look at my margin note now, four weeks into the “new world order” caused by coronavirus, I wonder if I was writing to my future self, too. Accomplishments, image, and social standing have never been my own particular points of pride. But my routines, my work ethic, and my schedule have been. I take great comfort and care in crafting each day’s tasks: attending class, going to the gym, reading a book, and all at their proper times. Of course, in the time of COVID-19, that’s all upended—and I haven’t dealt with it very well, at times.
“Your routines won’t save you,” my husband told me recently. I was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, considering how Everything Is Changing.
“I know,” I said, annoyed.
But I’m not sure I really knew.
It sure felt like my routines could save me, like my day-to-day rhythms were rooting me in a ground of peace. I could never truly knew what each day held, of course—but my planner told a different story.
As that planner sits more idly these days, as I listen to the news and watch folks with face masks walk by, maybe I need to start staring at some words—“peace,” “joy,” “save”—until they look strange.