From today's reading: For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 1 Cor. 1:21-24
There is a quote, I don't have a clue who said it, "God so loved the world that he didn't send a committee." The ages old debate between Christians asks if we know God through the intellect or through experience. I even got into that argument with a collegue in the teacher's lounge one day years ago. It's an arguement that can't be won because we are all different and we "experience God" in different ways. In the days of Jesus, the Greeks loved to stand around and argue the merits of one philosophy or another. The gods were simply another philosophy to debate. Their beliefs were tempered by the intellectual merits of that belief. The Jews on the other hand experienced their God in a different way - they told the stories of their ancestors and talked about how they experienced their God and the signs that were understood to be from God.
By the time this letter was written to the Corinthians, the story of Jesus' death (and resurrection) were being told in many places. What kind of God or leader chooses to die for those who follow and believe in him? It didn't make sense to either side. The sign was a symbol of death/defeat to the Jews. It wasn't worth the merit of debate to the Greeks. But to those who were looking for new meaning to life, to those who needed something to hold on to; a God who cared enough to come down from heaven and to experience the human condition, who walked among us and cared for us and healed us, that God was worth knowing.
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