#BCCSundaySchool2019: “Ye Are the Body of Christ”

1 Corinthians 8-13

Many of the more quirky traits of Paul’s letters are evident in 1 Corinthians 8. The chapter is, first of all, a valuable illustration of the complicated nature of scripture. Paul’s letters are often dashed-off and wandering productions, dictated to scribes frantically scrambling to stay engaged with Paul’s meandering trains of thought (see, for instance, 1 Cor. 16:21; Romans 16:22), preoccupied with issues not fully explained (in 1 Corinthians 7 Paul tells us the letter we are reading—that is, 1 Corinthians itself—is Paul’s reaction to a letter from the Corinthians in which they are complaining to and querying the apostle. We know next to nothing about that letter), and intensely engaged with apparently mundane but today obscure and confusing beliefs and practices.

1 Corinthians 8 gathers all these points together. But it also illustrates Paul’s gift for taking seeming trivialities and drawing powerful themes from them.

The chapter is about whether or not Christians should feel uncomfortable eating meat offered to idols, to use Paul’s words (see verses 4, 7, etc). Already this requires clarification. By “idols” Paul mean deities sanctioned by the Roman state. It’s unclear what he means by “offered.” Like Jews Romans offered animal sacrifice to their gods, and often these things would happen in the context of state-sponsored worship. But it was equally common for Romans to make small offerings during dinners and to offer libations (that is, pouring of liquids) in events so mundane as a meal or as prominent as funerals. Romans might make such offerings alone or in groups.

It’s unclear, then, if Paul means the meats remaining from formal offerings, or if he means eating at meals in which such offerings were made, or if he means meat sold at a market but blessed first. Or a dozen other things.

Any such meat would be objectionable to Jews, strict monotheists for whom the rather laissez-faire theology of the Roman world (which functioned rather like this: We have lots of gods already; we’d be happy to acknowledge your god and even say she’s one of our gods by another name. So don’t cause trouble) was horrifyingly sloppy.

It’s also clear from the simple fact that Paul is talking about this at all that some such Jewish attitudes have bled over into the brand new Christian movement, because, of course, many Jewish Christians (Paul included) did not see the two as different religions, but rather thought that Christianity was simply what Judaism had become now that the Messiah had appeared.  Many of these early Christians were in the throes of trying to figure out how much Jewish law still applied. For some of those Christians, avoiding offered meat would mean exclusion from dinner invitations, marketplace gatherings, and family dinners or state celebrations. This would obviously become a significant handicap pretty quickly.

The chapter progresses in thirds. In each section (the first three verses, verses four through six, and verses seven through thirteen) Paul appears to be quoting from that letter he received and responding. He is dealing with a group of Christians who claim to “possess knowledge” (verse 1). These people (verse 4) “know” that “idols” (ie, pagan gods) don’t exist. They also claim that “food will not bring us closer to God.” (verse 8).  That these passages are quotations is mostly inferred from context; reading the passages straight through is a bit confusing if we don’t assume Paul isn’t quoting somebody.

As we tease these passages apart, Paul’s overall message becomes evident. In this case, there seem to be a certain group of Christians who don’t think eating “offered” food is that big of a deal.  The Epistle to the Romans give us a sense of what these folks might be like. In chapter 16 Paul greets specific people—and note that he includes such civic luminaries as the city treasurer, Erastus, and the wealthy man Gaius, who can afford to sponsor a whole church. For the sake of their careers these folks would balk at not eating Roman meat.

Paul calls them the knowledgeable, and his mixed reaction to them illustrates two of his deeper principles.

First, he warns that knowledge can often lead to pride. These people seem impatient that others are not so enlightened as they.

Second, Paul insists that the health of the community must trump the quest of any particular member of it for wealth or standing. “By your knowledge those weak believers for whom Christ died are destroyed,” he states, flatly. (verse 11)  He does not want the knowledgeable to insist on eating offered meat, because that would shake the faith of the poor, the less educated, those who might believe that doing so is a sin.

Does Paul think eating offered meat is a sin? It does not appear so (though he may in verse 5 signal that he thinks these Roman deities might be real in some sense). Rather, Paul conceives of this dietary restriction as a act of social grace, a sacrifice of one’s own conveniences for the good of one’s siblings in Christ. He is here insisting that social elites should humble themselves and bow the knee to aid the uneducated and the poor.

And that, overall, is Paul’s message in 1 Corinthians. His famous passages in chapter 12 speak to it. “We were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit . . . The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable.” (verses 13, 21-22)

Paul proclaims a word that is already transformed by the life and death of Jesus; a world in which conventional measures of wealth, honor, power are overturned and replaced with, as he puts it, a world in which “God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member,  that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another.” (verses 24-25)

This is not about sinning or not sinning; the obsessions Christianity has cultivated over the past two millennia have trained us to think that religion is about God demanding we do things and punishing us if we don’t.

Rather, Christianity as Paul conceived it was a transformed social order. It was a way of thinking about our relations to each other and to God that would, by their simple fact of being, revise what we understand our obligations to each other to be.  Perhaps he offers us, from all those years and miles away, a new way of understanding what it might mean to be religious today.