Scripture Daily

Context No. 921 of 4322 · 1 Corinthians

Context · Reflection

1 Corinthians 5:6-13: in context

6Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little yeast leavens the whole lump? 7Purge out the old yeast, that you may be a new lump, even as you are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed in our place. 8Therefore let’s keep the feast, not with old yeast, neither with the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. 9I wrote to you in my letter to have no company with sexual sinners; 10yet not at all meaning with the sexual sinners of this world, or with the covetous and extortionists, or with idolaters, for then you would have to leave the world. 11But as it is, I wrote to you not to associate with anyone who is called a brother who is a sexual sinner, or covetous, or an idolater, or a slanderer, or a drunkard, or an extortionist. Don’t even eat with such a person. 12For what do I have to do with also judging those who are outside? Don’t you judge those who are within? 13But those who are outside, God judges. “Put away the wicked man from among yourselves.”

Paul has been confronting the Corinthian church for tolerating flagrant sin in its midst and even being proud of its tolerance. Here he uses the image of yeast: a little yeast leavens the whole lump, so purge out the old yeast, because Christ our Passover has been sacrificed. He tells them not to associate with someone who claims to be a brother yet lives in unrepentant sin, not even to eat with such a person. As for outsiders, that is God's business; but the church is responsible to judge those within.

There are two things here we usually get backwards. First, the yeast principle: sin tolerated in a community does not stay contained; a little of it works through the whole batch, so the loving thing is not endless tolerance but honest confrontation for the sake of the whole body and the person themselves. Second, and this is the part often flipped, Paul restricts this judgment to inside the church. He is emphatic: what business of mine is it to judge outsiders? God judges them. The Corinthians, like us, were probably tempted to be lenient with the insider they liked and harsh with the outside world they did not, and Paul turns it around. We are not called to police the morals of people who make no claim to follow Christ; we are called to hold accountable those who do claim it, ourselves first. The church that is fierce toward the world and soft on itself has the whole thing inverted.

Am I quick to judge the world outside and slow to face sin inside my own community and my own life, exactly backwards from what Paul asks?

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