Homilies
The God of Surprises
Holy Spirit take my words and speak to each of us according to our need.
Let me begin with an honest question:
Have any of us ever felt sure that God ought to act in a particular way and then later on found that God did not cooperate?
Perhaps we prayed for clarity and instead received confusion. We might have asked for strength and felt weakness. We might have hoped for resolution and found ourselves still waiting.
If so, its ok, we are in good company. Because the passage we’ve just heard from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians is, at heart, about how deeply uncomfortable God can feel when God seems to refuse to meet our expectations.
Paul tells us that “Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified.” And in that single sentence, he expresses something deeply human: we all come to God with lenses already in place. Lenses shaped by culture, experience, temperament, education, and pain. And often, without realising it, we make assumptions that God must fit within those frames.
For Paul, the cross is the place where those lenses fall away. It is where our assumptions about power, success, intelligence, holiness, and even faith itself are undone.
He begins bluntly: “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” Its important to notice that Paul does not say the cross is sometimes misunderstood. He says it actively divides perception. The same reality is seen in radically different ways depending on the lens through which it is viewed.
For many in the Jewish tradition of Paul’s time, God was known through signs, through mighty acts of deliverance, unmistakable interventions or visible demonstrations of divine authority. Scripture itself is full of such moments: the Red Sea parting, fire on Mount Carmel, thunder and lightning at Sinai. These signs told the story of a God who rescues, who acts decisively, who vindicates the faithful.
So it is not hard to understand why a crucified Messiah was a difficult stumbling block for them. Crucifixion was not a sign of God’s presence; it was a sign of God’s absence. It was shameful, public, degrading. Scripture even said that one who hangs on a tree is cursed. So how could God’s anointed possibly be found there?
From that lens, the cross does not just disappoint expectations, it contradicts them.
And then there were the Greeks, shaped by a different way of seeing. They prized wisdom: coherence, reason, elegance of thought, rhetorical beauty. For them, the divine was elevated, impassible, untouched by suffering. The idea that God would become vulnerable in human form, let alone be executed by the state, was not just offensive, it was incomprehensibly absurd.
A suffering God was not wise. A dying God was not divine. The cross was not profound; it was ridiculous.
And yet Paul does not soften the message. He doesn’t reframe it to make it more acceptable. He does not say, “Let me explain this in a way you’ll find more convincing.” Instead, he drives home the point, bluntly: “We proclaim Christ crucified.” That is to say; not Christ explained away. not Christ polished up. not Christ made respectable. Christ crucified.
But why does Paul insist on keeping the cross at the centre? Because the cross reveals not only who God is, but also how wrong our lenses and assumptions often are. The cross tells us that God’s power does not look like domination but like self-giving love. That God’s wisdom does not avoid suffering but enters it. That God’s glory is revealed not in triumphalism but in faithfulness even to death.
And if we’re totally honest with ourselves, that unsettles us. Because although we aren’t people of Paul’s time, or from the Greek tradition, we, too, still come with expectations.
Some of us might look for God in certainty: clear answers, firm doctrines, a faith that leaves no room for doubt. Others of us might look for God in success: a life that makes sense, prayers that work, growth that can be measured. Others still might seek God in feeling and emotion: emotional intensity, spiritual reassurance, the sense that we are doing things “right.”
Yet when God does not appear in those forms, we may assume God is absent, or has forsaken us, even temporarily.
But Paul invites us to consider another possibility: that God is present precisely where our usual ways of seeing fail. God in the in between spaces, God in the cracks.
As the Leonard Cohen lyrics, from his 1992 song, Anthem go, "Ring the bells that still can ring, Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." God challenges our lenses but still finds a way to get to us.
Paul says that Christ is “the power of God and the wisdom of God,” but only if and when we are willing to let God define, not us, what power and wisdom mean. Christ becomes, our righteousness, our sanctification, and our redemption; not as abstract ideas, but as lived reality. In other words, God does not give us what we think we need on our terms. God gives us God’s self.
And that self is revealed in the cross.
This doesn’t just have implications for theology and academic theory, but in practical ways for how we see ourselves and one another.
Paul reminds the Corinthians, and us, that God chooses what the world considers foolish, weak, and lowly. Not to humiliate us, but to free us. To free us from the exhausting work of self-justification. To free us from the illusion that our worth depends on our intelligence, our success, our moral performance, or our religious credentials.
At the foot of the cross, all those hierarchies collapse. No one stands higher. No one is shut out. No one gets to boast. That can feel unsettling, especially for those of us who are used to trying to be competent, articulate, or acceptable. The cross asks us to give up on our favourite ways of proving ourselves; before God and before others.
So how might we seek God through this different lens? Perhaps we could pay more attention to the places we usually avoid: grief, uncertainty, failure, silence and instead of rushing to fix them, we might pause and consider, “Where might God be meeting me here?”
Maybe we could listen more carefully to voices we are tempted to dismiss, such as those who speak from vulnerability and experience rather than authority.
And it might mean that we have to allow ourselves to be changed; not by becoming stronger, but by becoming more open and honest with ourselves.
The cross does not ask us to think less or give up on our opinions but it does ask us to love more deeply. It does not ask us to abandon wisdom but it asks us to receive it as a gift, not a possession. It does not ask us to stop seeking God but it does ask us to let God surprise us.
Gerard W. Hughes wrote in his book called God of Surprises ‘God is not where we expect God to be and therefore, we should be open to divine surprise.’ He goes on to add that being able to receive God’s grace in surprising ways, allows a new understanding of God to develop which he sees as a conversion process. He concludes that ‘religion offers people a lens through which to see God but as they grow spiritually, these windows begin to distort their view so in them being broken, through experiences like doubt or suffering, we can change the lens and rather than see it as a potential failure or loss of faith, it can be reimagined as a purification process, refocusing with a new/different lens that allows us to see more clearly again’
Because the God we meet in Christ crucified is not the God of our projections, but is instead the God who meets us, as He is and where we truly are, without judgement.
And that is good news.
Amen