I.
There is an old, little-known, tradition in the church: the tradition of the holy fool. Such “foolishness for Christ” is a form of asceticism where the practitioner feigns madness in order to provide the public with spiritual guidance.

Perhaps the most famous is St Simeon, also known as Simeon the Holy Fool, who was a sixth century Syrian monk. Listen to this description of St Simeon from the Christian satire website, Ship-of-Fools.com. Ship of Fools identifies Simeon as their patron saint.

Simeon's saintly career started out quite normally. It was the usual story: 29 years living on lentils in an isolated cave next to the Dead Sea, at first struggling against temptation and then advancing to an alarming degree of holiness.
But Simeon's story took a dramatic turn when he left his cave one day and set out for the city of Emesa in Syria. Arriving at the city gate, he found a dead dog on a dungheap, tied its leg to the rope around his waist, and entered the city dragging the comatose canine behind him.

This was the inauguration of Simeon’s urban ministry in Syria. Now why would he do such a thing?

There seem to have been two basic motivations for his holy foolishness:
firstly, playing the fool enabled Simeon to mock what he saw to be the idiocy of the world.
secondly, his antics concealed his own saintly actions.

Indeed, he was said to have prayed to God that he would be able to serve the people of the city without being acknowledged for his acts of mercy and kindness.

So, by playing the fool
— by blowing out the candles and throwing nuts at the clergy during church services, by developing a theatrical limp, by dragging himself around on his bum in public —
Simeon established a reputation for himself, not as a saint, but as a madman, as an unholy scandal.

This reputation, however, — as it came to be known after his death — was merely a cover that took the focus off of his acts of generosity to the inhabitants of the city, many of which were said to be miraculous.

St Simeon the Holy Fool, to quote the ship-of-fools website again,
was a secret saint, his story was a holy farce, and his life shows how God chooses "the foolish things of the world to shame the wise” (1 Corinthians 1:27).
This idea of foolishness shaming wisdom, of course, comes from today’s epistle, where Paul exhorts the Corinthian church to embrace the foolishness of the cross.

I believe that St Simeon’s vocation is an authentic one and that, even today, there is a place for holy fools. A calling for those few who have grasped the depth of the absurdity of our world and are willing and able to disclose that absurdity to the rest of us
— to those of us who tend to mistake seriousness for truth.

But I also think that Paul’s words have a wider relevance. I think they can summon more than just the peculiar vocation of the holy fool. I think they lay out a more general rationale for the mission of the church. We are not all called to be Holy Fools, but we are all called to fidelity to that strange, even absurd reality of the cross.

II.
Last week Fr Stephen made reference to the study the Jeremiah Community has been doing in the Gospel of Mark. Now, what’s becoming clearer and clearer to us about the Jesus portrayed in Mark’s text is that he has very little interest in knowledge for its own sake. Mark’s Jesus has very little patience for those who know the right answers, but are unwilling to follow through on the implications of that knowledge. One of the recurring obstacles to Jesus’ ministry, in fact, are those who know who Jesus is, but are not willing to follow him.
It’s one thing to be able to identify Jesus as the Messiah, the one who will bring about a reign of peace and justice. It’s another thing to be willing to follow this Messiah to the cross. This is Peter’s constant dilemma. He will regularly misunderstand and even attempt to thwart this messianic trajectory toward suffering and death. This is what will earn him that seemingly excessive rebuke from Jesus — get behind me, Satan!

It’s a rebuke that is not as harsh as it sounds, however. For if one is to follow Jesus, one of course needs to be behind Jesus. Jesus is telling Peter that what is at stake in becoming a disciple is not simply understanding what God is doing to redeem the world (for even the devil knows that), but following through on that knowledge, by risking, by wagering, by buying in. By following Jesus to Jerusalem, to a confrontation with the religious and political authorities, and finally to death by execution. These would be absurd expectations by most any standard.

In today’s epistle. St Paul is leading us to this very same confrontation when he says that
The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

Paul is not advocating foolishness as a good in itself.
— he is not giving Christian people an excuse for saying and doing stupid things.
He is calling the church to follow through on the knowledge it claims already to possess
— namely, that its worship is the worship of a crucified messiah.
— He is calling the church to own up to the implications of placing a cross at the centre of it’s existence.

III.
The cross, in Paul’s telling, is not something that “makes sense” according to any available schemes of knowledge, any worldview or way of understanding human existence. It could not be incorporated into or accommodated by what was already known.
And, for Paul, what already known was reducible to basically two options, and no more: signs on the one hand and wisdom, on the other.
For Jews demand signs [he says] and Greeks desire wisdom.

But the cross grated against both of these ways of understanding the world.
The cross called for an entirely new understanding, and ultimately for an entirely new form of existence.
we proclaim [Paul continues] Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.

The cross, Paul is saying, does not make sense to either Jewish religion or Greek philosophy — it was a bizarre notion according to either framework. To follow a crucified messiah was an absurd and even embarrassing idea,
and it remains just as absurd today.
If it does not seem absurd to us, this is only because we, in the modern West, are heirs to a very bizarre historical phenomenon — the phenomenon of Christendom. Beginning in about the 4th century, the cross came to be cleansed of its absurdity. It came symbolize, instead, the development of civilization itself.

One of the most hopeful aspects of Western secularization, I would suggest, is that the cross might gradually recover it’s strangeness.

But in the ancient Mediterranean world of St Paul, this strangeness was very apparent. It challenged both the religion of Judaism and the philosophy of the Greeks. And this meant that the cross was a challenge to the world itself. For the world as Paul understood it oscillated only between these two poles — Jewish and Greek.

***
Now it’s worth pausing for a moment to question this radically simplified perspective on the Corinthian situation.
— Paul’s reduction of the diverse, multicultural reality of ancient Corinth to only two options.

This simplification might strike us as suspicious, especially now, just a few days after the the 13th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Centre in the United States.

So, it’s also been thirteen years since, then president, George W. Bush laid out his ultimatum for the world in the wake of 9-11:
you’re either with us or your with the terrorists.
The emerging Neo-Conservative interpretation of the world was a radically simplified one: There were said to be two mutually exclusive options available to the world. One could sign on to the US-led “War against Terror,” or one could support terrorism. There was no middle ground.

Thoughtful liberals, of course, found this rhetoric inflammatory and overly simplistic.
Surely the situation was more complicated than that, they said.
Surely the world was not reducible to just those who love freedom and those who hate freedom.
So the liberals sought to advance a “third way.”
A better foreign policy, they argued, would have recourse first of all to dialogue and diplomacy, and, only where necessary, to military force. It was a kinder, a gentler war on terror.
The people, it seems, were persuaded, as one such liberal is currently sitting his second term in the Oval Office.
I will leave aside the question of whether this kinder, gentler, war on terror has actually proven to be less violent.
My point for now is that in the wake of September 11th, the conservatives simplified the world to an the either/or reality — it’s this or that.
The liberals, on the other hand, advanced a modified perspective that said it could be both/and — it’s not this or that, it’s a third option which takes what is good from both and follows a middle road between them.

Paul, however, is doing something else entirely.

His radical simplification of the world served another purpose. It served only to point out the utter novelty of the cross. And the total absurdity of following a crucified messiah.

Paul did not place before the Corinthian church an ultimatum: to choose this or that — Jewish signs or Greek wisdom.

But just as little was Paul a liberal who saw the truth somewhere between the two options. The cross was not a compromise.

For Paul it wasn’t this or that, or a third option in the middle.
For Paul the cross represented an absurdity — a novelty so new —that it required nothing less than the construction of a whole new form of existence.

This is how the absurdity of the cross was to be preserved from becoming a spectacle of silliness and irrelevance. If there were a people who, in the power of the Spirit, gathered around this absurdity and transformed it into a new way of being-together in the world — into a new form of existence.
This would not be a sect of holy fools,
but a gathering of all people
— Jew, Gentile, and otherwise — formed in the way of the crucified Messiah.

This would not be a “religious” group,
but an expression of the world itself;
the world in restored relation with the Creator.
— that world that God had inaugurated with the crucified Messiah.

We can call this new reality the church.
But only insofar as the church
attends to the cross that lies at the centre of its existence.
Only insofar as it, like Peter, has learned , not just to know, but also to follow the Messiah to Jerusalem, through suffering, and even to death.

And so, our task remains the same as that of the Corinthians
— that we be the church.
— that we preserve the absurdity of the cross;
— but that we also preserve that absurdity from becoming silly and irrelevant.
— by inhabiting that form of existence that the crucified Messiah calls us to. Amen.