1 Corinthians 1:23 Meaning But We Preach Christ Crucified

Christ crucified is your own imagination fastened to a desire and held there until it takes form. To crucify is to nail attention to an unseen state and feel it as your own, refusing every report of the senses that says it is not so. This is a stumbling block to those who want a sign, and folly to those who trust only reason, because Christ is not a man in the past. He is the creative power and wisdom of God asleep in you as your own imagination.

What looks like weakness, the willingness to feel a thing so while nothing outside confirms it, is the very power that hardens it into fact. The weakness is the power. The self you fix in awareness is the self that is lifted up and made visible. To dwell on a state until it becomes flesh is what these words call preaching Christ crucified, and the thing held faithfully on that cross rises as fact in your world.

The same event can land as an insult, a joke, or a rescue, and the difference is the model receiving it.

An event arrives with no meaning attached, and the model a person runs assigns one inside a second. A model that demands a display of power reads a crucified Messiah as an offense; a model that demands cleverness reads him as nonsense. Nothing about the cross changed between the two hearers, and the emotion each one felt decided which way they walked.

Preaching it anyway is a decision with retreat cut off, since trimming the cross into something both models could accept would strip out the one thing neither had. A person who keeps only what fits the model they arrived with keeps the model and loses what would have rebuilt it.