January 29, 2021
Sharing from the Congregation – David Petty
The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread. —1 Corinthians 10:16
Tomato plants need a lot of water, but if you overwater them, especially some varieties, the tomatoes can grow so fast that that they begin to split. Something like that seems to have happened to the church in Corinth.
Corinth was the Second City of the Greek peninsula, behind only Athens in its intellectual and cultural fame, and probably an even bigger center of trade. With its booming multicultural population and the relative religious tolerance of the Greeks, it looked like a great place to start a church. Apparently the church there did well for a while, but by the time of Paul’s first known letter to it (perhaps 5-10 years after the founding) divisions were forming. We don’t know exactly what the divisions were about (reading an epistle is like listening to one end of a telephone conversation and trying to figure out the whole conversation) but from the early part of the letter it seems to have had to do with what Paul calls wisdom.
Paul speaks negatively of wisdom; this is odd, because the Bible holds wisdom in high regard. There are entire chapters in Proverbs devoted to it. The explanation for Paul’s attitude has to do with his somewhat ironic definition of wisdom. He is apparently speaking of the “wisdom” of the Greek thinkers — their endless arguments over trivial points and abstract ideas. In verses 2:6-7 he distinguishes between this and true wisdom, what he calls “God’s wisdom.”
Over the course of the letter, Paul develops several arguments for church unity. Chapter 10 is a brief foreshadowing of his description, two chapters later, of the first communion. The passage in Chapter 12 is one of four communion descriptions in the New Testament (the others are in Matthew, Mark, and Luke), and it’s perhaps the best written. The remarkable thing is that that Paul’s version, quotable as it is, does not seem to be primarily about communion itself. Instead he seems to be using the communion account as a way emphasizing that we are “one body.” This is essentially the same point that he makes, more succinctly, back in Chapter 10.
Divisiveness in the church obviously did not end in Corinth; it has continued ever since and is a hot topic in our denomination now. It’s a complex problem and it is not my place to judge the wisdom of folks who disagree with me. But I agree with the political leaders who say that what unites us is greater than what divides us, and I think that applies even more to the church than to the political world.
Gracefully submitted,
David Petty