Part of the problem is the challenge of how large or small to make the sections that we look at each week. How long or short do you make a series on a book like 1 Corinthians. On TV here in New Zealand this last week a documentary series called 'New Zealand from above" has begun to air. It explores regions of this country by using aerial and satellite photography occasional dropping down to make contact with the people who live in that landscape. I found that was a helpful metaphor to the approach I am taking with this series. Both from above as we see the big patterns and vista and from the ground as we tread through the whole landscape up-close and seeing all the details, we can grasp and understand and see the beauty and grandeur of the landscape and the Spirit is able to speak to us a we endeavour to remain faithful allowing people to explore and apply the Word of God.
About six month before Kris and I got married my mum went to
the doctors because she was worried about a metallic taste in her mouth. Now
our family doctor was really wonderful because my mum was often worried about
little things like that but he took her seriously and ran some tests and sent
her off for scans. It turned out she had bowl cancer. About six week before our
wedding she went into hospital and had it operated on. She was a bit wobbly and sore at our wedding
but was there and despite a re occurrence of bowl caner about twelve years
later, which was diagnosed and dealt with again, she lived to be eighty five.
As we are working our way through the book of 1 Corinthians
we see Paul dealing with a whole raft of symptoms that are presenting
themselves, that speak of some deeper issues in the church. The church has thought they were spiritual
and healthy, they boasted about their wisdom but Paul is able to tell by what
is happening; division and squabbling, not dealing with Church disciple and in
the readings from today lawsuits and people visiting prostitutes that things
were not right. These were outward signs of false understanding of the gospel
that needed to be dealt with, Issues that reached to the very core of who they
and we are in Christ, their identity and ours as the new people of God and how
we embody and live that identity out.
Greek society was known for their involvement in the courts,
they were a litigious society. The Greek playwright Arisophanes has one of his
characters look at a map and ask where Greece is located. When it’s pointed out
to him, he replies that there must be some mistake-because he cannot see any
lawsuits going on. Some in the church were continuing to take each other to
court. Paul challenges their going to those outside the church for judgement as
it was a bad witness.
Paul says if they are wise and spiritual why are not able to
deal with it themselves. One of the
theological problems in Corinth was that they thought they had already arrived,
that they were reigning with Christ. So Paul picks up their understanding of
what that meant and asks in a series of rhetorical questions, if they are to be involved with Christ in
judging the unrighteous, even fallen angels how come they can’t deal with these
trivial matter. If they are to judge the
unrighteous how come they take matters before the very people they will end up
judging? Isn’t it better to seek reconciliation themselves? It’s full of
sarcasm as Paul asks them…isn’t anyone wise enough to do that?
Now Paul is not saying the roman court system was bad or
corrupt, In Acts 18 when Paul was in Corinth the Jews had tried to have him
arrested and punished the proconsul Gallio deals quite justly with the
situation. Civil courts and the justice system are to be respected and honoured
the challenge is how do we as believers deal with these kinds of disputes. We
need to live differently that the world around us.
A lot has been made of Paul’s eschatology here that is his
understanding of what will happen when Christ returns. Can I just say two quick
things about that? Firstly, if we focus on that we can miss the challenge to
live as the new people of God here and know, just as the church in Corinth
were, and secondly while what Paul is saying here comes out of an understanding
of Daniel 7:22 I wonder if Paul isn’t using the Corinthians own
misunderstanding and words to challenge their behaviour.
Paul goes on to say
that by simply having this dispute that both sides have actually lost, they’ve
been defeated, it’s game over. Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount had showed that
we should love one another even when we are wronged, and not seek retribution. Paul
will later sum this up in Romans as not returning evil for evil. That’s hard
for us handle, particularly in a society where we value our rights and our
dignity and that is almost as litigious as the Greek. Gordon fee points to the
fact that by enduring undeserved loss the plaintiff enters into the true
meaning of the cross. If Paul stopped
there it would sound so unjust, that the plaintiff was at fault but Paul goes
on to challenge the guilty party by saying that we should not behave like this,
that we are called to live differently than the society round us.
Paul gives a list of lifestyles or identities constructed
round particular behaviour as being outside the Kingdom of God. Paul uses the
same list that he had used in chapter five, sexually immoral, greed, drunkards,
slanderers and swindlers, and you can see how some of those would have been
pertinent to the situation in hand and again we get the idea that no sin is
worse than the others. He adds four new categories… Idolaters we can
understand. Adulterers is significant as Paul will go to talk about prostitutes
and in the next chapter marriage.
Thieves, fits in with what the law suit is about, it’s about property or
a shonky business transaction, and of
course the one category that is most contentious in our society, what the NIV
translates as men who have sex with men.
I need to focus on this briefly, firstly there are two words used in Pauls’ list one
which means a male prostitute, usually a young man who sells their bodies for
sex to other men, a rent boy. The other is the person who takes advantage of
such young men. There is some debate whether these words actually are meant to
mean all homosexual behaviour or refer specifically to that unequal exploitive relationship. Paul’s Jewish background would make him see all
such behaviour as abhorrent, and we are left to wrestle with questions about
did the ancient world have an understanding of sexual orientation like we do
and is this something like slavery that our attitude has been changed about, by
the Spirit, over time. By saying that some of you were once like this infers
that the church has had to deal with issues of sexual orientation from its
earliest days.
What Paul goes on to say then is helpful as he says that we
are not trapped in identifying ourselves in all these old categories. Many of
you were like that he says but in a wonderfully Trinitarian formula he
redefines who we are and invites us to live out that new identity. We are
washed made clean by what Christ has done for us, we
are ‘sanctified’ set aside for the use of God by the indwelling of the Holy
Spirit, and justified made right before God.
This is the identity that should influence our behaviour; we are not
locked into other definitions of who we are. To the people involved in disputes
and suits this is the basis of working the issue out.
Paul then moves on to correct a misunderstanding of freedom
that had developed: that freedom in Christ is licence to do whatever they felt
like. Paul even quotes one of their slogans ‘ I have the right to do anything’,
and Paul challenges that by saying yes you are free to do anything but are all
things beneficial and yes also while you are free to do anything you want-
don’t let your freedom lead you back into bondage. William Barclay sums this up
by saying ‘Yes Christ has set us free from sin, not free to sin’.
Paul moves on to explain that in terms of another issue in
the church at Corinth…Visiting prostitutes. Corinth was a city that has a reputation
for its prostitution, it was a port city, but also dominated by the temple of Aphrodite, and there were well
over a thousand temple prostitutes, male and female, dedicated to her. It was simply a way of life in Corinth, but
Paul again calls the believers to be different.
He sees this not only being an issue of freedom and
different cultural standards but an issue that comes from the Corinthians
misunderstanding of what it is to be human. The Corinthians had a saying that
food was for the stomach and the stomach was for food and God will destroy them
both’… basically our bodies are made for sex so it’s ok…That our bodies do not
matter in the scheme of things, what was done with the physical body did not
have an impact on spiritual life. Greek philosophy and in particular Plato held
this duality between the body which would pass away and wasn’t really important
and the soul which would carry on and could know an ultimate reality beyond the
physical. In the Jewish understanding of what it was to be human, there isn’t
that split. We are so used to the Greek philosophical understanding that we
think it’s a Christian understanding. We often talk of the human being, being
made up of body, mind or soul and spirit. We talk of God saving the soul to the
point that often people have focused on that and left dire physical needs go
unaddressed.
But in the Jewish and biblical understanding of what is a
human being body and soul are not
separate, the body is not the throwaway casing, like a banana skin. We were
created in God’s image, the complete package. Salvation and peace are
formulated in terms of shalom, or wholeness. Our physical bodies, as part of
the wider body of Christ are the temple of the Holy Spirit, God dwells within
us. Paul affirms that our bodies will be raised with Christ a theme continued
in chapter 15.
This then forms the basis for Pauls’ teaching on sexual
immorality. Paul says what we do with our freedom in our body actually matters.
The Corinthians might have thought that sex simply had to do with a physical
part of them, but Paul says it affects all of us. He uses the words of genesis
that the two become one flesh. The biblical view of sex is that it is wonderful
and great, it was created as the physical expression of the deepest communication
between two people; it was to be expressed and treasured in a man and women
committed to forming a new family unit.
Paul’s instruction then for the church at Corinth is that they
should flee from sexual immorality, and to honour God with their bodies. For me
the picture of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife comes up when I hear that term.
Joseph wants to honour God so runs away from Potiphar’s wife advances. I turned
up to visit a friend who was a policeman one day and was asked to council a Christian
young man in the interview room. He had been with his mates when they had
broken in to a school and robbed it. He hadn’t gone and done the burglary with
them rather he had stood at the school gates and waited for them, basically
acting as a look out, and after they had done the job, he accepted some of the
stuff they had stolen and of course got caught with it. He was devastated by
the fact that his witness with his mates had been ruined. I told him how he
dealt with that lapse would be equally a witness to Christ, and suggested that next time he adopt the
Joseph method of avoiding immorality and simply high tail it away from his
mates. That is good practical advice for dealing with things that tempt us
towards immorality of all kinds.
Again Paul uses a Trinitarian formula to finish his
argument. He points out that our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit, that
God sent that spirit and that while we have been given freedom from sin, that
Christ paid a high price for us, to buy us free. There for we should honour God
in our bodies as they belong to him. In
our society today we are coming to understand this idea of honouring God in our
bodies not only applies to moral issues but how our physical well being has a
huge impact on our spiritual lives. As I searched for images to go with this
text for the service it was hard to find any that didn’t include running or
other exercise. And I have to say that I find that challenging. How am I
honouring God in my body if I’m over eating or not exercising enough? I need to some more fleeing.
Let me finish with two quotes from NT Wright who always
seems to put thing so succinctly…
Because Christianity means freedom nothing is allowed to
give me orders. Not my appetites, not my habits, not the surrounding atmosphere
of my culture with its hardly noticed pressures towards certain styles of life…
“
And
“ if you spend lots of money on a house you don’t go spray
painting silly patterns on the door” you don’t graffiti it. In the same way
those who have been bought at a tremendous cost must remind themselves of what
special people they are and live accordingly.”
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