One of the most remarkable things about the first Christians is that they didn’t try to hide, downplay, or gloss over the fact that the One they worshiped as King of Kings had been crucified. Paul says “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.”

The early Christian hymn that Paul quotes in his letter to the Philippian church doesn’t merely say Jesus died, but that he was crucified. The earliest Christian creed doesn’t flinch from confessing that Jesus suffered under Pontius Pilate and was crucified.

For Christians living at such a far remove from the first century, the depth of this scandal may be hard to grasp, but your hero being crucified would be the last thing a Jew or a Roman living in antiquity would boast about. And yet the early Christians *did* boast about it.

Paul readily admitted that this was foolishness to Romans and offensive to Jews. But Paul also said it was the power and wisdom of God, contending that “God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” Paul doesn’t mean that when God is weak, God is still stronger than humans.

That wouldn’t be scandalous, that would be just a typical boast about conventional power. Rather Paul is saying that God’s power *is* weakness! Think about that for a moment and you will realize that such an assertion is still scandalous today.

We are fascinated by conventional power—power to purchase, power to enforce our will, power to kill—and we are put off by any form of powerlessness. But it is precisely the powerlessness of God enacted by Jesus on the cross that saves the world.