Last week, I spoke to you about the need for us to be wise, even clever in our spiritual life. I said we need to be creatively engaged like an excellent athlete with his head in the game. Quoting from the Lord’s words in the Gospel, I reminded you that we are to be “wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” (Matthew 10:16)

This week, we are reminded that while we must be wise, this wisdom must come from God, and not from ourselves. After speaking of the disputes and the factions that exist in the church in Corinth, St. Paul says that Christ did not send him to baptize, meaning that He did not send him to make his own disciples. The Lord did not intend for St. Paul to form the “club of St. Paul’s followers.” Rather, He sent Him to preach the Gospel: to point the way to Christ and His life-giving Cross. Here he uses a very characteristic phrase. He says that Christ is calling him to preach, but “not with wisdom of words.”

What is this “wisdom of words” of which he speaks as something negative? Evidently, these “words,” are words that do not come from the Word. Remember, Jesus is the Word of God - in Greek, the Logos. We certainly do want to have the wisdom of the Word of God, Jesus Christ.

Going a little further in this passage, we see that St. Paul speaks about the “word of the Cross” (in Greek, “o logos… tou stavrou"), which is the word of the Word, the word of Christ. This is a word, a message, that is foolishness to the worldly-minded, because it appears to be weakness. Christ makes Himself weak, suffers and dies on purpose! He didn’t have to do it - He did it out of love for us. To the worldly way of thinking - which is all about making oneself the center of the world and dominating everyone else - to that way of thinking this word of the Cross is ridiculous.

The Lord takes the world’s idea about power, control, leadership and mastery, and turns it upside down! Bishop Anthony of the Diocese of Toledo, explained this while we were at the Antiochian Village recently, in a brief, simple way. After a service he was talking about why, when a Bishop is present, at the end of the service he says, “Through the prayers of our Holy Fathers, Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on us,” and then the priest says, “Through the prayers of our holy Master, O Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us.” He explained that this is in fact a reminder to the bishop that he had better be faithful to the teaching of the Fathers. He is to be a “Master of the Fathers.” In other words, he is not a “master” in the sense of being a tyrant hungry for power. He’s not somebody on a soapbox presenting his own opinions. Rather, he is a servant of the Holy Fathers, and of the whole Church. His job is to master the collective wisdom of the Church and to transmit that same living Faith passed down from the time of the Apostles until now. This is an act of service to each of us!

Thank God, the bishops I know are like that. We also are to be masters, though - not masters over others, not seeking to control anyone, but masters over our passions. And this becomes possible as we become masters of the wisdom of the Church, which means first being students, - disciples - who diligently study the wisdom of the Church, which is the wisdom of the Cross. We are to take that wisdom to heart by embracing the Cross of Christ, and when we do, we are transformed by it.

In contrast to the true Wisdom, we find the wisdom of the words of this world, which is all the philosophies and “isms”, in which there is no life at all. These worldly words of wisdom lead only to contentions, divisions, and chaos. They are all a matter of trying to solve life’s problems apart from God, by flawed human logic, which turns out to be impossible. The disciples are thinking this way when, after the Lord has fed the 5000 with the 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish, He speaks to them about needing to beware of the leaven of the pharisees. They actually think he’s talking about the fact that they forgot to bring any bread! At that point, they are thinking with worldly wisdom, and not God’s wisdom. So He has to remind them: remember when I fed the 5000? Don’t you see that I can do anything, and there’s nothing you need to be anxious about? So think about your soul, and don’t worry about feeding your stomach, which I will take care of.

The wisdom of the cross is the wisdom of God, which leads to the power of God. By humbly relying on Christ in everything, praying to Him in the midst of everything, and taking the teaching of Holy Scripture and all the wisdom handed down through the ages by the Church to heart, we discover this power of God. That is, the point is not to memorize, but to have our minds and hearts transformed by the Word of God. Elder Paisios puts it very nicely: We read holy writings, “not to learn them by heart, but to take them to heart.”

As we do take the Word to heart, the Lord is making us into masters of the Truth. But in the Church masters are also servants. And so, as we grow in the Wisdom of God, we become better and better servants of the Truth, Christ Jesus, and of all our brothers and sisters in His Body, the Church. This is something that has to be evident in our actions. As the saying goes, “preach the Gospel always, and when necessary use words.” The point is not to convince people we’re right by our brilliant words. Rather, we aim to preach the Gospel by demonstrating the power of the Cross: through acts of love, through real forgiveness, through jumping up to help someone in need and kneeling down to wash someone’s feet.

May we, by God’s grace, become masters of God’s wisdom by becoming true servants of one another, glorifying Christ and proclaiming the power of His Cross in our thoughts, our words, and our deeds. Amen.