Please read the passage before reading the commentary
Paul was an educated man. He came from Tarsus and was a Roman citizen. He had studied under Gamaliel in Jerusalem. He was also a tentmaker and seemed to have been able to move about the layers of society easily.
The Corinthian, however, were from the lower class of people, with little formal education and without the ability to move through the more influential class of people with any ease. Had they heard Paul speak in elegant and sophisticated terms about Christ, they probably would have scratched their heads in confusion and walked away.
Paul, however, had not come with “sublimity of words or of wisdom”, but “in fear and trembling” to preach Jesus Christ, crucified and risen from the dead. Paul preached that Jesus Christ, a man like the ordinary Corinthian, had come, proclaiming the kingdom of God, that he was put to death by the Romans, but that he had risen from the dead to save Paul’s audience.
In his rising from the dead, Jesus had destroyed our deaths and given us all the hope of living forever. Jesus Christ, because he had given up the richness of God and proclaimed the forgiveness of sin, had enriched the Corinthians and delivered them from the prison of their sins.
Roman governance, like even governance nowadays, knew that by enforcing laws they could control people in bondage. Laws that make it difficult for people to exercise their rights to life, to vote, to own property hold the poorer of people in bondage. Christ, by proclaiming forgiveness of sin, gave all the people the ability to live free from fear in the service of God. Proclaiming sin proclaims a kind of slavery of control; proclaiming freedom from sin proclaims the liberty of freedom to respond in love instead of fear.
When Paul spoke of the crucified and risen Christ, the people of Corinth found a resonance in their own lives. When they saw Paul, perhaps struggling to bring his message to them in their own terms, they saw the power and the wisdom of God at work in his words, and they believed.
In God’s inevitable wisdom, the educated Paul came in weakness to proclaim the power of God at work in the simple people of Corinth. The faith of the Corinthians rested not on human wisdom and strength, but on the real wisdom and power of God.