3/10 June 1 Corinthians 1-2
May I speak, and may we hear, not words taught by human wisdom, but words taught by the Spirit. Amen. cf 1 Cor 2.13
Over the next few weeks
the majority of our sermons will take us on a journey through St Paul’s first letter
to the Corinthians. A lot of people shy away from Paul because he is considered
difficult to understand. Even when he first wrote his famous letters, that was the
case. St Peter, who got to know him well, wrote that Paul’s ‘letters are hard
to understand’ and that some people distorted what Paul said, but that Paul was
full of God’s wisdom (2 Peter 3.15-16). Paul’s letters are full of energy, and
sometimes we see Paul working his ideas out as he spoke them to whoever was
scribing each letter.
As we begin, I would
like to invite you to read this letter in one sitting. Ideally, read it aloud –
perhaps you could get together with some friends. Have a coffee, or a glass of
wine, perhaps take a chapter each in turn, and read with as much energy and
emphasis as you can. By hearing the whole letter in one go, you’ll get more of a
sense of what Paul’s overall intention and how it all connects together, as
well as getting more of a sense of Paul’s voice. I strongly commend it.
Let’s begin by setting
the scene. Corinth is in Greece, in a region that was called Achaia. It had
three large harbours, and was a centre of trading and commerce attracting
people from all around the world. For hundreds of years it had been one of the
most important of the Greek cities, and boasted many temples, including a particular
cult of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. in 146BC the Achaians went to war
against the Romans, and Corinth suffered a heavy defeat at the hands of
Mummius, who destroyed the city. For the next hundred years Corinth was a shadow
of its former self, until in 44BC Julius Caesar reinvented it as a Roman colony
for former soldiers. Corinth became once again a thriving trading centre, now
with a strongly multicultural feel. Its inhabitants were former soldiers and
their families from all over the new empire, along with a changing population
of traders from across the known world: India, China, Indonesia, North Africa, Italy,
Spain, Northern Europe. Corinth became known as a place of new beginnings,
where you could leave behind one identity and take up a new one. It attracted
many freed slaves, living their free lives in a place where they weren’t remembered
as slaves – some of the names mentioned by Paul in this letter are typical
slave names – Quartus, for example – and may well be people who started out in
Rome as slaves and came to Corinth for a new start. It was a city of Jews and
Greeks, slaves and free, a city where many people passed through as stopping
points on longer journeys and others stayed, enjoying the vitality and colour
of the place.
Here, early in 51AD, Paul
arrived, travelling from Athens by himself, but soon to be joined by his
friends Timothy and Silas. Paul stayed with Prisca and Aquila, Jewish followers
of Jesus who had left Rome when Claudius threw the Jews out, and settled in
Corinth, where they could thrive in their tentmaking business. Paul stayed with
them and shared their workshop. AD 51 in Corinth was a good year for
tentmaking, as it was a year when the Isthmian games was held. People travelled
a long way to take part or to watch the great games, and many stayed in tents –
the workshop would have seen plenty of new customers during that year.
Paul wasn’t there to
take advantage of a great time for the tentmaking business, though that must
have been an advantage. His purpose was twofold: to share the good news of
Jesus, and to collect money for the poor members of the church in Jerusalem. The
gospel was already known by some in Corinth. Prisca and Aquila were great
evangelists, and others had passed through. The followers of Jesus in towns
like Corinth were always glad to welcome visits from apostles like Paul, who
encouraged them and taught them much more about Jesus. Other apostles travelled
too. St Peter regularly visited the young churches across the Mediterranean, St
Thomas journeyed in a different direction into India, and St John settled in
Ephesus. Some time after Paul’s visit to Corinth, Peter also visited, and made
just as strong an impression as Paul.
Wherever Paul
travelled, he always began in the synagogue, or wherever Jews met if there was
no synagogue. Following Jesus’ example, he began with the people of Israel.
Given that Paul is known as the apostle to the Gentiles, and that he is known
for his strong arguments for including Gentiles freely within the family of
Jesus’ followers, it is easy to forget how important it was to him to make sure
that wherever he went his Jewish brothers and sisters had the chance to hear
that the scriptures had been fulfilled in Jesus. But we need to remember this
in order to understand him. In Corinth Paul taught about Jesus in the synagogue
for some time. He brought the synagogue ruler, Crispus, to faith, and baptised him
with his whole household. Other Jews came to faith as well – and as always
happened wherever Paul went, there was increasing tension between the Jews who
followed Jesus and the Jews who did not, particularly over Paul’s mixing with
Gentiles and his failure to insist that Gentile believers should fully convert
to Judaism and undergo circumcision and obedience to the Jewish law. In
Corinth, the Jews became abusive. Crispus had to leave the synagogue, and (as
always happened with Paul), Paul had to stop preaching to the Jews and
concentrate on the Gentiles.
In Corinth, the next
thing Paul did was rather provocative. He accepted an offer to hold regular worship
and teaching sessions in the home of a Gentile worshipper called Titius Justus.
As it happened, Titius Justus’s house was right next door to the synagogue.
Paul was asking for trouble. He saw a vision of Jesus telling him to stick with
it, that all would be well, and that vision encouraged him to keep on talking
of Jesus in the tentmaking workshop and at worship sessions in the house by the
synagogue. Eventually the Jews – led by their new synagogue ruler, Sosthenes - made
their attack on Paul, and brought him to the proconsul, probably some time in
AD52. The proconsul was Gallio (brother of the philosopher Seneca), and his
ruling was a landmark ruling that affected the way that Jesus followers were
seen in Roman law.
Jews were excused
attendance at Roman sacrifices and were not expected to worship the deified Caesar.
They were an exception to the usual rules followed by Romans about religious
practice. When Gallio listened to the case against Paul he heard what the Jews had
to say and then forbade Paul to speak – he had probably been warned about the
length of Paul’s speeches, or perhaps had heard about the long defence Paul had
made when last on trial, in Athens. Instead Gallio ruled that the dispute was
an internal one amongst Jews. By deciding that, Gallio was declaring that all
Jesus followers counted – at least in the eyes of Rome – as Jews, and that
meant that all Jesus followers were exempt from worshipping Caesar and the other
Roman gods.
Paul stayed on in
Corinth for a few more months before moving on in the company of Prisca and
Aquila. Timothy and Silas stayed on for a while in Corinth, presumably helping
the young church, especially the groups converted by Paul, to carry on
comfortably without Paul present. Meanwhile Prisca and Aquila set up a new
workshop in Ephesus, where Paul would later join them, and Paul went on a
journey visiting other churches that he and Barnabus had founded during the
first missionary journey. Prisca and Aquila soon met a new and enthusiastic
young preacher in Ephesus who had learned about Jesus from group of John the
Baptist’s disciples. The young preacher, Apollos, hadn’t quite got all his
facts right, but the tentmaking couple invited him to stay with them and
explained the gospel to him properly. By the time Prisca and Aquila were
finished, Apollos was ready to be an evangelist, and the church in Ephesus
trusted and encouraged him. Apollos felt called to go to Achaia, and was sent
with the blessing of the Ephesians, and, no doubt, letters of recommendation from
Prisca and Aquila. Apollos was as successful in his ministry as Paul – indeed possibly
more so, as his preaching would have been easier to understand than Paul’s! By
the time Paul wrote the letter we are studying, Apollos had returned to
Ephesus, and he and Paul had got to know each other. Indeed, when Paul signed
the letter off he wrote that he had tried to persuade Apollos to be one of the
group who went to Corinth to deliver the letter. That didn’t fit in with Apollos’s
plans, but he promised via Paul to make a return visit to Corinth before long.
Everything I’ve told
you so far can be found in Act 18, or in 1 Corinthians. Some things, however,
we can only guess at through the clues in the texts or in what we know of the history
of the period. The church in Corinth, which would have consisted of a number of
small groups meeting in private houses and only coming together as a whole city
group very occasionally, grew and was influenced strongly by the different
people who visited the city. Many of the churches were very charismatic in
style – there was much speaking in tongues and a great expectation that the Holy
Spirit would work dramatically amongst them. Over time, the cultural influences
brought into the group from the Jewish and Greco-Roman worlds came into
conflict, and it wasn’t always easy to remember how to balance the cultural practices
of Corinth with the teaching of Jesus. What to do when sitting wealthy people and
poor people down to share a meal in the same room? What to do in a town with many
prostitutes and different understandings of how marriage worked? Believers disagreed
on how to deal with certain problems, and some of them wrote to Paul about
their difficulties and disagreements.
The letter we call 1
Corinthians is almost certainly not the first letter Paul wrote to the Corinthian
church. In chapter 5.9 Paul mentions a letter that he had sent before about a
particular problem that had been brought to his attention. We’ll talk about the
problem itself later in this series. After Paul settled in Ephesus with Prisca and
Aquila, he received a visit from some of his Corinthian friends, including a
group he calls ‘Chloe’s people’. They brought him letters from Corinth and updated
him on the state of the church there. Although they could report good teaching
from Apollos, and that Peter had made an influential visit, the news was not
all good. Paul was very disappointed in what he was told, hearing about a
church that divided itself, and members who put their arguments and grudges
ahead of being one united group of followers of Jesus. He was also disturbed at
the immoral behaviour of some of the members. This letter is his response to
that visit.
Paul’s letters were usually
co-authored with someone else, and in this case the other author is called
Sosthenes. We can imagine Paul and Sosthenes sitting down with the scribe, and
Paul pacing the room, dictating as he thought. Sometimes he lost the flow of thought
or interrupted himself. Occasionally we can imagine Sosthenes interrupting or correcting
him. For example, in today’s reading Paul listed those he had baptised – only Crispus
and Gaius. I imagine, as he told the scribe to write that no one else was
baptised by him, Sosthenes saying – ‘But Paul, you baptised Stephanus’s
household too!’ A pause. ‘Oh yes, I did, didn’t I? Was there anyone else?’ ‘No,
I don’t think so’. So Paul adds a comment about Stephanus and the patient
scribe carries on. The ‘I’ in Paul's letters always denotes Paul, so we have to
live with the frustration of knowing almost nothing about Sosthenes, or how he
came to be writing with Paul.
We’ll think more about
the divisions in the church that Paul was writing about in the second sermon of
the series. If you don’t have time to prepare for this sermon series by reading
the whole of 1 Corinthians in one sitting – although it would take you more
than an hour – then at least read chapters 1-3.
Over the next few weeks
we will get to grips with this famous letter, asking what it meant to the people
of first century Corinth, and what it means to us today.
