Preaching is at the heart of priestly ministry — the preaching we do every week from the pulpit and the preaching we manifest through our ministry. For St. Paul, nothing was more important. He writes: “For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with the wisdom of human eloquence, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its meaning” (1 Cor 1:17).

Nor was preaching a trivial matter for the great apostle. For the preached word has the power to bring people to either life or death, as he writes in his second letter to the Corinthians: “For we are the aroma of Christ for God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to the latter an odor of death that leads to death, to the former an odor of life that leads to life. Who is qualified for this?” (2 Cor 2:15-16).

But how did Paul preach? I propose that Paul preached in a way that reflected the message he proclaimed, the message of Christ crucified and risen from the dead: Paul preached from the cross.

This phrase, of course, is ambiguous. It could mean that Paul preached from the perspective of the cross, or it could mean that he understood himself as preaching from the cross with the crucified Christ. I have both meanings in mind. Paul preached from the perspective of the cross and, inasmuch as he understood himself as crucified with Christ, he preached from the cross.

The Role of Rhetoric

No preacher is without critics, Paul included. In 2 Corinthians, Paul defends himself from evangelists who came to Corinth, whom he sarcastically calls “superapostles” (11:5). In the eyes of the Corinthians, these superapostles were attractive ministers because they preached with rhetorical skill. In comparison to them, Paul appeared as a weak and inferior apostle because he lacked their rhetorical skill. Paul was aware of this criticism, and he acknowledges what others were saying about his preaching: “For someone will say, ‘His letters are severe and forceful, but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible’” (2 Cor 10:10). Paul concedes that he is not a trained rhetorician: “For I think that I am not in any way inferior to these ‘superapostles.’ Even if I am untrained in speaking, I am not so in knowledge; in every way we have made this plain to you in all things” (11:5-6). 

But preaching is not to be equated with rhetoric. Preaching requires knowledge of Christ, more specifically, knowledge of Christ crucified. And it is this knowledge of the crucified Christ, rather than the rules of rhetoric, that determines how Paul preaches the Gospel. The power of Paul’s preaching does not reside in his oratorical skill but in the power of the Gospel he proclaims.

Does this mean there is no room for rhetoric in preaching? Hardly! Paul’s letters are full of rhetorical passages. But in the light of the crucified Christ, he knows that the message of the Gospel is not dependent on the rhetorical skill of the preacher. The power of the Gospel is paradoxically revealed in the weakness of the cross, which must be mirrored in the lives of those who proclaim it. Paul’s criticism of the superapostles, then, is the dissonance between how they preach and how they conduct themselves.

In his letter to the Galatians, Paul writes, “I have been crucified with Christ; yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me; insofar as I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who has loved me and given himself up for me” (2:19-20). It is the content of the Gospel rather than his rhetorical skill that determines how Paul preaches. He seeks to preach in a way that his proclamation embodies the Gospel he proclaims. He preaches from the cross.

Preaching from the Cross

Preaching from the cross required Paul to embrace the weakness and the shame of the cross in his ministry in order to show the paradoxical way in which God manifests power and wisdom in the crucified Jesus. Paul accomplishes this in three ways.

First, he did not preach with “with the wisdom of human eloquence” (1 Cor 1:17), even though such speech would have been pleasing to the Corinthians, lest he empty the message of the cross of its meaning by drawing attention to himself rather than to the cross. Instead, he purposely preached in a way that did not conceal the message of the crucified Christ in all its shame and weakness. He proclaimed the Gospel in a way that “Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified” (Gal 3:1). To hear Paul preach was to see Christ crucified.

There are two opposing ways of preaching according to Paul. The first seeks to persuade through oratorical skill. The other allows the power of the Gospel to persuade those who hear it. The Gospel must be presented in a way that those who hear it are persuaded by the message of the cross rather than by the rhetoric of the preacher. The message is more important than the messenger.

Second, Paul was often overcome with fear and trembling when he preached as he reveals in his first letter to the Corinthians:

When I came to you, brothers, proclaiming the mystery of God, I did not come with sublimity of words or of wisdom. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear and much trembling, and my message and my proclamation were not with persuasive (words of) wisdom, but with a demonstration of spirit and power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God. (2:1-5)

He came to Corinth with fear and trembling because the Gospel had already been rejected in other places, and there was no reason to suppose that it would not be rejected in Corinth. Although such weakness would be a matter of shame to most people, for Paul it was a badge of honor. For it was the weakness of his ministry that united him with the weakness of the crucified Christ in whom the power of God was at work.

Rather than offer an apology for his Gospel of the crucified Christ, Paul relied on the power of the Spirit to touch the hearts of those who heard the Gospel. Consequently, it was the power of the Spirit at work in his preaching, not his eloquence, that persuaded the Corinthians to believe in the Gospel. When they embraced the Gospel in this way, the Spirit was manifested in their community in a variety of spiritual gifts.

Third, Paul preached God’s wisdom. He did not rely on human wisdom because the world, in its wisdom, did not know God. But this does not mean that his preaching was devoid of wisdom. He preaches a wisdom that those who are mature in faith understand. He proclaims Christ, the wisdom of God:

Yet we do speak a wisdom to those who are mature, but not a wisdom of this age, nor of the rulers of this age who are passing away. Rather, we speak God’s wisdom, mysterious, hidden, which God predetermined before the ages for our glory, and which none of the rulers of this age knew; for if they had known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But as it is written: “What eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and what has not entered the human heart, what God has prepared for those who love him,” this God has revealed to us through the Spirit. (1 Corinthians 2:6-10)

Preaching with Transparency

One of the most revealing passages of how Paul preached is 1 Thessalonians 2:3-11. After reminding the Thessalonians how fruitful his visit among them was, he recalls how he preached to them:

Our exhortation was not from delusion or impure motives, nor did it work through deception. But as we were judged worthy by God to be entrusted with the gospel, that is how we speak, not as trying to please human beings, but rather God, who judges our hearts. Nor, indeed, did we ever appear with flattering speech, as you know, or with a pretext for greed — God is witness — nor did we seek praise from human beings, either from you or from others, although we were able to impose our weight as apostles of Christ. Rather, we were gentle among you, as a nursing mother cares for her children. With such affection for you, we were determined to share with you not only the gospel of God, but our very selves as well, so dearly beloved had you become to us. You recall, brothers, our toil and drudgery. Working night and day in order not to burden any of you, we proclaimed to you the gospel of God. You are witnesses, and so is God, how devoutly and justly and blamelessly we behaved toward you believers. As you know, we treated each one of you as a father treats his children, exhorting and encouraging you and insisting that you conduct yourselves as worthy of the God who calls you into his kingdom and glory.

First, he emphasizes how he did not preach. His appeal to them did not originate from deceit, trickery or impure motives. He did not act as a charlatan, taking

advantage of them with flattering speech. Because he had been approved and entrusted by God with the Gospel, he sought to please God, who knows the heart, rather than to please them. Thus, he preached in a way that was faithful to the word the Lord entrusted to him. Aware that he was sent to preach God’s word rather than his own, he did not deceive or trick the Thessalonians when he proclaimed the Gospel among them.

Next, he insists that he did not preach for profit or gain. He did not seek the praise of the Thessalonians or insist on his status as their apostle. In addition to sharing the Gospel with them, he shared his very self. By preaching with integrity, Paul in his ministry mirrored the Gospel he proclaimed. And because he preached with integrity, the Thessalonians accepted the word he proclaimed as the word of God rather than as a merely human word: “And for this reason we too give thanks to God unceasingly, that, in receiving the word of God from hearing us, you received not a human word but, as it truly is, the word of God, which is now at work in you who believe” (1 Thes 2:13).

Paul’s Preaching and Our Preaching

How can we preach in a way that touches the lives of those who hear the word? How can we preach in a way that those who hear us preach will hear God’s word rather than our words? How can we evangelize anew?

1. Preach as if for the first time. Our contemporary situation is different from Paul’s. Our parishioners have already heard the Gospel. We are not proclaiming the message of the cross to them for the first time. Indeed, the cross has become so familiar to us and our congregations that we have turned it into a piece of jewelry. But this presents a problem. Having heard the Gospel preached week after week, the congregation can become immune to the radically new thing God did in Christ and continues to do in our day. We and the congregation no longer perceive the scandal of the Gospel, the scandal of God manifesting divine power and wisdom in the folly and weakness of the cross.

The challenge for our preaching is to proclaim the Gospel in a way that people will hear it as if for the first time. And hearing it as if for the first time, they will believe anew and call on the name of the Lord. Preaching in a Pauline mode enables us to evangelize the evangelized by focusing our preaching on the power of the cross and the new creation God brings about in the cosmic event of Christ’s resurrection (2 Cor 5:17). But such preaching takes work: the work of internalizing the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection and then proclaiming the mystery in a manner that manifests God’s power and wisdom in the weakness and folly of the cross.

If this is to happen, we must be obedient to the message we have been sent to proclaim. It is not our message that is the content of our proclamation; it is God’s word in Christ. And so there must be a coherence between what we proclaim and how we proclaim it. For St. Paul, this meant preaching from the cross with Christ, who died in weakness so that the power of God might be manifested in his weakness. When we preach from the perspective of Christ’s cross and resurrection, the effectiveness of our preaching does not come from our words, as eloquent as they may be, but from the power of the Spirit at work in the proclamation of the word.

There is room for eloquence and rhetoric. But the effectiveness of the word does not depend on our rhetoric and eloquence. The word has its own inner power, the power of the Spirit. To the extent that the preached word is the word of the Gospel, the power of our preaching comes from God’s word and the Spirit of God at work in our proclamation. This understanding of preaching requires us to be faithful to the message that has been entrusted to us. It requires us to proclaim the word of the cross rather than our word. It calls us to preach in a way that every homily finds a way to focus on the message of Christ’s death and resurrection so that it challenges people to hear the Gospel as if for the first time.

2. Preach with integrity. To preach the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ without living a life conformed to Christ’s death and resurrection is to empty preaching of its power. Since we have been commissioned to preach, our lives must mirror the Gospel we proclaim. As ministers of the word, we must be able to say to our congregations as Paul said to his converts, “Imitate me” (see 1 Cor 4:16 and 11:1; Phil 3:17). Imitate me and you will know what it means to be crucified with Christ. Imitate me and you will understand the meaning of the paschal mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection. Imitate me and you will be a Christian. How we preach, then, should be the fruit of a life lived with the crucified Christ. If preaching is about Christ without witnessing to Christ, it is empty. Preaching must include our own witness to Christ’s presence in our lives. It needs to reveal our personal encounter with the crucified Lord. How Paul preached was the fruit of a life lived in Christ. How we preach is the fruit of how we live our lives in Christ.

Paul understood the burden of preaching. Because he had been called by Christ to preach, he described himself as under an obligation to proclaim the Gospel: “If I preach the gospel, this is no reason for me to boast, for an obligation has been imposed on me, and woe to me if I do not preach it!” (1 Cor 9:16). Because he understood the power of the preached word to lead others to life or to death, he asked, “Who is qualified for this?” (2 Cor 2:16). He realized that through the power of God’s Spirit he had been made the minister of a new covenant. He was Christ’s ambassador who, through his proclamation of the Gospel, called people to be reconciled to Christ (2 Cor 5:20). Paul understood that his preaching was a matter of life and death (2 Cor 2:15-16). Do we?

As ordained ministers, we have been entrusted with a glorious ministry that has the power of bringing people to Christ or turning them from Christ. There is no place, then, for the hastily prepared homily, the homily given off the cuff, without prayer and intimate engagement with the text. There is no place for the homily that uses the Gospel to proclaim our personal views. There is no place for the homily that insults and berates people. There is only room for the homily that faithfully and obediently expounds the word of God in all its power, weakness and beauty.

MSGR. FRANK J. MATERA, a priest of the Archdiocese of Hartford and professor emeritus of The Catholic University of America, is a leading expert on St. Paul. Among his numerous books on the saint is “Preaching from the Cross: Paul’s Theology of Proclamation” (Baker Academic, $22.99).