To Judge or Not to Judge

Week Five - Day 3

Today's Reading

1 Corinthians 4:1--8:13

To continue from yesterday, the issues in Corinth are deeper than just who the believers are lining up behind, whether it be Paul or Apollos or Cephas.  Paul is reacting to an apparent challenge to his authority as an apostle, and warns the Corinthians about pronouncing "judgment before the time" and to leave such matters to the Lord.  This, of course, doesn't prohibit Paul from telling the community to clean up its act and to shun those within the community who are not measuring up to what Paul states are the standards of conduct for believers.

This section of Paul's letter points out not only the difficulty of trying to literally apply every verse of the Bible, but needs to be a reminder of the sources behind the writings.  These are the words and reflections of human beings who are attempting to make sense of the experiences they have had of God, and also the world in which they lived.  Sometimes those words can have unintended consequences.  For example, in Paul's concern for the purity of the Christian community against what he sees about him in the pagan Greco-Roman world (5:1-13), he says that the community should expel a person whom it judges to be immoral and "to hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of their flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord" (5:5).  As one commentator puts it: "Paul's reasoning for this excommunication had a disastrous effect in later centuries when the church had the power to sentence sinners, heretics, and witches to torture and death to save their souls" (Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, in Harper's Bible Commentary).

Power struggles, legal battles, the intimacy of marital relationships, human sexuality, you name it and somehow it could become a point of contention.  The underlying struggle, then as it is now, is to discern what it means to live a holy and faithful life with God and one another.  Two thousand years of history should have taught us that we, of any age, do not know as much as we think we do, and that a little humility goes a long way in forming and maintaing the bonds of love and respect that bind us together with Christ.