Curate’s reflection. Tuesday of Holy Week 2025

1 Corinthians 1.18-31
I would like to start with a confession. I live my life under constant self-inflicted pressure to learn, to improve and to achieve. I am embarrassed not to know something or to be unable to answer a question. I am ashamed of even a possibility of getting something wrong. I am trapped by perfectionism and procrastination because it is difficult to start a task knowing the result will not be the best. This could be just my problem but I think we all have something we struggle to accept in ourselves; we may struggle to forgive or to shake off a sense of regret. There may be dreams that never came true or expectations of ourselves or others close to us that were never fulfilled. There is something not right that we want to fix or something we don’t have that we want to possess. Often things are not as good as we would like them to be. Depending on how strongly you feel about any of these things, living with them can be challenging or even debilitating.
Of course I want to change the things I don’t like. I also want to be wise, I want to be the scribe, the debater, I want it all – the signs, the recognition, the discernment, the acceptance and the belonging. I want to be a better human so God may also see how good and worthy I am. And the more I want it, the less attainable it becomes, the heavier the guilt, the stronger the shame, the longer the distance from God…
The passage from 1 Corinthians that we have heard, I think, is a recipe against this. It is one of those passages where the message is so true and so complete that the words feel like they cut right through the heart. The race for wisdom is for the world, says Paul, but those who know the meaning of the cross know to abandon the worldly business and to embrace their lack of wisdom and power. We may not have seen this before, but the cross Christ died on shows us just how futile our daily struggles are. Paul invites us not just to acknowledge the cross but to live our lives in its shadow. Once we know what the cross is, we can no longer be the same. We will know that the race we got ourselves into is meaningless.
Ironically, from what I have noticed in recent years, the race seems to be getting faster; we ought to be smarter and learn all the time, acquire new skills, improve our appearance, earn more money. More devices are invented to help us dedicate all our spare time to self-improvement. There was a saying after Covid (at least among the people of my generation) that if you hadn’t learned a new language or at least learned to bake a bunch of new things you had wasted the lockdowns. We rush and we cripple under the pressure to improve. That is, unless we notice and recognise the cross.
The cross, being so illogical and wrong and brutal, signifies the defeat of all wisdom and all desire as we understand them. It is a message of radical acceptance and radical humility. In the light of it, I don’t need to frantically chase wisdom or knowledge because I know that they are not mine to have. My perfectionism does not mean anything and my desire to do everything by the book is suddenly irrelevant. Paradoxically, the heavy, terrible, deadly cross gives me freedom.
Let go of the guilt – you are called as you are, says Paul, not wise, powerful or noble. We are also called as we are today, not as whatever we might become tomorrow if only we fix something or learn something new. The source of our life is in Christ, not in anything we do or achieve ourselves. The wisdom of man that we chase in different forms is something that comes from man, not from God; attaining it will never get us closer to God, because God does not seek our understanding but instead our conscience. And a step towards a good conscience that is capable of connecting with God and welcoming his wisdom and his love is to accept ourselves as we are, to let go of the race and to know, in all humility, that we are made by him and are ultimately in his hands. If you ever forget this and slip into the old habits, think of the cross and, as Paul says, boast in the Lord, not in yourself. Amen.