The Message Remix (340 page)

INTRODUCTION
01CORINTHIANS

 

When people become Christians, they don’t at the same moment become nice
. This always comes as something of a surprise.

Conversion to Christ and his ways doesn’t automatically
furnish a person with impeccable manners and suitable morals.

The people of Corinth had a reputation in the ancient world as an unruly, hard-drinking, sexually promiscuous bunch of people. When Paul arrived with the Message and many of them became believers in Jesus, they brought their reputations with them right into the church.

Paul spent a year and a half with them as their pastor, going over the Message of the “good news” in detail, showing them how to live out this new life of salvation and holiness as a community of believers. Then he went on his way to other towns and churches.

Sometime later Paul received a report from one of the Corinthian families that in his absence things had more or less fallen apart. He also received a letter from Corinth asking for help. Factions had developed, morals were in disrepair, worship had degenerated into a selfish grabbing for the supernatural. It was the kind of thing that might have been expected from Corinthians!

Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians is a classic of pastoral response: affectionate, firm, clear, and unswerving in the conviction that God among them, revealed in Jesus and present in his Holy Spirit, continued to be the central issue in their lives, regardless of how much of a mess they had made of things. Paul doesn’t disown them as brother and sister Christians, doesn’t throw them out because of their bad behavior, and doesn’t fly into a tirade over their irresponsible ways. He takes it all more or less in stride, but also takes them by the hand and goes over all the old ground again, directing them in how to work all the glorious details of God’s saving love into their love for one another.

 

 

From:
Paul grew up in a pagan city where people urged Jews to shed their traditions and live like everybody else. Paul’s family resisted this pressure. They wouldn’t even eat with non-Jews and sent their boy to Jerusalem for a “Bible college” education untainted by worldliness. But the more Paul came to grips with Jesus, the more he wanted to take the Message to the very pagans he’d been raised to avoid. He asked God which parts of his heritage were moral absolutes and which were cultural preferences he could set aside when relating to non-Jews like the Corinthians.

 

To:
If you wanted to ship goods to Rome from anywhere in the East, you probably passed through Greece at the narrow neck of land at Corinth/Cenchrea. Corinth was full of rich merchants and of sailors looking for a good time. Corinth’s temple of Aphrodite housed a thousand priestess-prostitutes. Although Corinth was no Athens, its upper class had pretensions of philosophy and took pride in “wisdom.”

The church in Corinth included most levels of society: not ruling elites or peasants, but everybody in between from city treasurer to slave, women and men. Their different life experiences fed tensions in the community.

 

Re:
About A.D. 55. Most men in Roman cities belonged to one or more clubs. The blacksmiths of Corinth would have a clubhouse with a god as official patron, as would the silversmiths and the linen weavers. Immigrant groups (Syrians, Egyptians) had their clubhouses. Jews had their synagogues. Much business was done over dinner in these clubs, so it was a real hardship if a Christian felt he had to stop participating in his club meetings because they started with a little ritual offering the meat to the patron god.