The Power and the Wisdom
Homily delivered the Third Sunday after Epiphany (Epiphany
3A RCL)
The
Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
25 January 2026; 11:00 a.m. Sung Eucharist
Mission Church of the Holy Spirit, Sutherlin (Oregon)
Readings: Isaiah 9:1-4; 1 Corinthians 1:10-18; Matthew 4:12-23; Psalm 27:1, 5-13
God, give us hearts to feel and love,
take
away our hearts of stone
and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
What a broken world we live in! How low our shared political life in this country has stooped! We once had a constitutional republic grounded in the consent and participation of the governed, with checks and balances and the rule of law to prevent the abuse of power and protect the dignity and rights of every person. I am not sure we still have it. We have let our sad and bitter divisions infect our hearts and divide us. Whether between white and black, male and female, rich and poor, citizen and foreigner, leftwing and rightwing, republican and democrat--our divisions have made us hunker down with only our own tribe. We vilify and dehumanize those not in the tribe. Some of us have stopped even having the pretense of following the rituals and legal niceties that once kept us from descending to the level of animals, predator vs. prey, nature red in tooth and claw. Where we once hoped that domestic security, the common good, and peace was what our 250-year old national experiment would bring us, we now hear more and more only about the need to coerce our enemies (and even our allies!), our need to attack, control, expel, or kill the people we consider threats. It’s pretty dark out there, and hard to find grounds for hope.
Today’s lessons, once again in this season of Epiphany, are all about light breaking into the darkness and the need to hope against hope for a better future.
Isaiah is writing in the 730s BCE. A new thing in history had appeared: the world’s first transnational military Empire, Assyria under its aggressive new leader, Tiglath-Pileser III, who was conquering all the Middle East. He sounds a lot like some leaders we know. Whole countries simply ceased to exist, their leaders slaughtered and populations deported far away in the name of national security and proper societal and political order. Among the first areas in Palestine lost were the regions Zebulun and Napthali, near the Sea of Galilee, turned into an Assyrian province early on. Eventually, all of the Northern Kingdom would simply be swallowed up by the Assyrians.
Isaiah says, however, there is cause for hope. “In past days, [God] brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the future, he will bring splendor to … Galilee, now ruled by gentiles. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shone.” This light will bring liberation: “For the yoke of their burden, and the bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor, you have broken as on the day of Midian.” Gideon’s defeat of the huge army of Midian with just 300 warriors was for these people an icon of victory against overwhelming odds. Like today’s Psalm, Isaiah affirms that God alone is the one who can give such victory and light against overwhelming odds. Isaiah’s message is this: no matter how dark and bad things get, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
Note that Isaiah sees this future liberation as merely a “God helped our side to win” moment: the joy the newly liberated will experience is like that of people who rejoice in dividing up plunder that have taken from their dead, defeated enemies. Nevertheless, Isaiah says have hope!
But is this hope a false one? Is the light at the end of the tunnel an on-coming train?
Zebulun and Naphthali, along with the rest of the North, were never reconstituted historically—they became part of the proverbial “lost ten tribes of Israel.” Isaiah’s hopeful prophecy simply didn’t pan out. This left a feeling of a promise not kept.
That’s why the Gospel writers make such a big deal over the fact that it was in Galilee, in this very region, that Jesus began and performed most of his ministry.
Matthew says that the light Isaiah saw at the end of the tunnel was not military victory over the Assyrians, who by his time had also ceased to be a nation, just like the kingdom of Israel before them. For Matthew, the light was Christ, who, like Gideon, was victorious against over-whelming odds. His resurrection undid his unjust death at the hands of Rome, an Empire like the Assyrians. It spells not just victory over death and sin, but also victory over the division, hatred of the other, and predatory brutality in our hearts. That’s why his coming brings us hope, despite this brutal world. He understands the great light seen by those who sat in darkness, the great victory against all odds, as Christ.
St. Paul in today’s reading from Corinthians reading also sees Christ’s rising from death and the grave as a victory against overwhelming odds.
But he also notes that even in the group that celebrates Christ’s victory, the church, there can be divisions, factionalism, and mutual hatred. He criticizes divisions and factions in the Church based in clever arguments, appeals to wisdom and one’s favorite church leaders, as petty concern for group identity, tribalism, and sectarianism. Christ and no one else is the source of unity, Paul says. That’s why using Christ as an identity group banner —“we are of Christ!” “We are the true Christians here!”—is so wrong.
Paul says true unity comes from the “power of Christ’s cross.” “For 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.” A few sentences later, he adds, “[W]e proclaim Christ on the cross, a stumbling block … and foolishness” to the two main identity groups of his world, Jewish people and pagan gentiles. But to those who follow Jesus, regardless of identity and background, he says “Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. (1 Cor 1:18, 23-25)
Jesus, dying on a public torture board of the Empire, is strong? Christ, abused and outcast, is wiser than the deepest tradition of the sages? Paul admits it: if you don’t trust in Jesus, the cross can appear only as nonsense and weakness. But if you do have faith in him, you realize that his dying on the cross is the starting point of our hope, his since resurrection soon follows it.
German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that Christianity was the religion of the weak, of victims, or losers. Its emphasis on compassion and pity, he said, simply put a guilt trip on the strong and victorious, who really had nothing to be ashamed of. The will to power was all that mattered, not artificial concepts of sin and noble suffering. God on the cross, for him, indeed was a god who was dead. Any other way of seeing the cross, he said, was self-deception and foolishness. This idea was taken up fully by objectivist writer Ayn Rand, who instead of Nietzsche’s supermen made free by the will to power conquering victim sub-humans, rather speaks of the “producers,” and “creators” of society and wealth on the one side, and “parasites” and the dregs on the other.
For Nietzsche and Rand, and their followers like Stephen Miller, Alex Jones, and our current President, it’s all about the strong overcoming the weak, the winners beating the losers. It's about "really great" people, "quality" people, casting aside and excluding "losers" with no concern for any morality that might constrain them.
For Christ, it’s all about welcoming, inclusion, service, and facing suffering with equanimity. It’s also about standing up abusers, specially when they clothe their abuse in the pious robes of religion and following what’s right. Most of all, it’s about the strength found in vulnerability. It’s about wisdom in marginalization. As Oscar Romero once taught, “only eyes that have cried can see certain things.” It is those who sit in darkness that see the Great Light.
Our confident hope is that in the end, right and justice, truth and love will prevail. If they have not yet prevailed, that is because it is not yet the end. The present darkness will be replaced by light. Nikos Kazantzakis, in his great novel The Last Temptation of Christ, says, “A prophet is one who, when everyone else despairs, hopes. And when everyone else hopes, despairs. You’ll ask me why. It is because he has mastered the Great Secret: that the Wheel turns.”
Living life as one great conflict and struggle for power is the shortest way for making life a hell on earth for everyone. Those who live by the sword die by the sword. A winner of the rat race is still a rat. Nietzsche and Rand’s argument for striving to be a winner, quality people, at all costs is the death of what makes us human. The bellicose, aggressive brutality of Emperors or emperor wanna-bes, be they Tiglath-Pileser III, Tiberius, Nero, Hitler, Putin, Xi Jingping, or Donald Trump, may try all they want to destroy whole peoples, nations, and systems of law. But what they really destroy is their own soul. Against all this, says Jesus, “those who care only for their own life end up losing it and those who willing to give up their own life will actually win it.”
Sisters and brothers: the cross is the way we follow Jesus: suffering for others, accepting shame, pain, and even death in pursuit of God’s reign and the justice it demands. But if we seek first of all God’s reign and the justice it demands, says Jesus, all of life’s good things--prosperity, freedom, fairness--will be added to it, heaped upon it. Christ on the cross is the power and wisdom of God. We may want an easier, softer, more ego-flattering path. But there is none. On the way of the cross, we experience death and sit in darkness. But don’t give in, and don’t give up. Embracing and accepting the way of the cross, and sharing it with others, is the way we can get out of the rat race, out of the constant division, conflict, and turmoil. Because on it, even as we sit in darkness, we see a great light.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
