“And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:1-2).
It’s fair to ask why Paul does not say, “…Christ and him resurrected.” It would be straightforward to argue that the Resurrection marks the finished work of Christ, including the satisfying conquest of sin, suffering, and death. The Corinthians were already a difficult crowd. To proclaim a Redeemer as having been slain on the Roman instrument of torture and death seems to unnecessarily complicate and darken the things. Why borrow trouble?
Paul’s answer, in all its brevity, is just a few verses prior (1:23). He says he is intent on reaching the Corinthians through the power of God alone, without recourse to signs (such as a resurrection might be viewed, which would pander to the Jews) or eloquence and wisdom (which pander to the Greeks). You could say he intends to make Christ difficult to apprehend by any natural process, so the faith of the Corinthians would rest on supernatural processes alone.
But that doesn’t necessarily answer the question, or at least it doesn’t demand that Paul speak of the Crucifixion instead of the Resurrection. He may be doing something else. Recently I came across this: “The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said that the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity. The only joy to be trusted is the joy on the far side of a broken heart; the only life to be trusted is the life on the far side of death.”
The Crucifixion answers on its own terms a world groaning beneath the weight of this present darkness, a world filled with broken hearts and death. No honest person wants a redeemer “unable to sympathize with our weaknesses” (Heb 4:15). We need to know that “Christ suffered in the flesh” (1 Pet 4:1) just as we suffer in the flesh, that he was “tempted in every way just as we are.” We need to be able to find him on the far side of our broken hearts, the far side of those we have lost to death, the far side of despair and misery. There, at the end of some wasting travail, we find in him a “living hope,” a “joy filled with glory,” the “salvation of our souls” (1 Peter 1:3-9).
When Paul preached Christ and him crucified, he was preaching a hope capable of enduring the world’s grim, dismal reality — and equally capable of coming out the other side to “joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory” (1 Pet 1:8). The world wants the latter without the former, which is why Paul said, “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” (1 Cor 1:18). Don’t be afraid to stay by the cross for a while. We will come to Easter, in all its sweetness and glory, soon enough. Learn to “boast… in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” by which the world has been crucified to us, and we have been crucified to the world.