Starting last week and continuing unit Lent begins, the second lesson at Sunday Mass is taken from the First Letter of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, and I encourage you during these six weeks to read and study all of First Corinthians, which runs to about twelve pages in most Bibles.
Corinth was a seaport in Greece, about halfway between Athens and Sparta, and there is evidence of human habitation in Corinth as far back as 6500 BC. But the growth of Corinth into a large and prosperous city really began in the sixth century before Christ, a sign of which was the construction of a beautiful temple to Apollo around 550 BC.
In the second century before Christ, Corinth had a population of over 90,000 people and was a wealthy trading center, but the Corinthians made the fatal mistake of opposing Roman rule, so in 146 BC the Romans conquered the city and razed it to the ground so that others would learn not to resist Rome.
But the location of Corinth was too tempting to abandon, so one hundred years after the Romans destroyed old Corinth, they built a new town, and Julius Caesar made the new Corinth into a model Roman city and provincial capital. It was to that new Corinth that Saint Paul traveled after a brief stay at Athens, and the Apostle remained in Corinth for eighteen months to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ and establish a permanent Christian community there.
Paul began his preaching among the Jews in Corinth, but after some initial success convincing them that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, Paul encountered violent opposition in the Corinthian synagogue and so moved his preaching to the much larger Gentile population of the city. During Paul’s day, the population of Corinth was around 200,000 free citizens and perhaps twice that many slaves.
Even by modern standards, Corinth was a huge city, and great wealth flowed there through the seaport, along with every vice and social problem known to man. Corinth was also a truly international city and home to people of every race and religion in the ancient Mediterranean world.
For a year and a half Paul personally instructed a community of converts in Corinth, with the able assistance of a man named Apollos, a Jewish Christian from Alexandria in Egypt. Paul also became intimate friends with a couple of tent makers, a Jewish Christian named Aquila and his wife Priscilla, who had come to Corinth from Italy when the Emperor Claudius expelled all the Jews from Rome in 49 AD.
After a year and a half in Corinth, it was time for Paul to move on, so Apollos remained there to continue leading the church, while Aquila and Priscilla traveled with Paul to their next missionary destination, Ephesus, where they stayed for nearly three years.
While Paul was in Ephesus, he corresponded with the Christians back in Corinth and received letters from his old friends telling him about their joys and sorrows. The letters Paul received from Corinth are sadly lost to history, but two of the letters Paul wrote back to his friends were saved and are known to us as two of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, First and Second Corinthians.
Chapter eleven of First Corinthians contains the oldest written account we have of the Last Supper, in which Saint Paul describes the events in the Upper Room on Maundy Thursday night. The Apostle then explains that for Christians the celebration of the Holy Eucharist is our nourishment unto everlasting life, even as he warns us that if we receive the Body and Blood of Christ unworthily, then we are guilty of a sacrilege in which we eat and drink our own condemnation.
Paul wrote this letter to the Christians in Corinth around 55 or 56 AD while he was still living in Ephesus, and he sought to correct some of the errors which had crept into the young church in Corinth after his departure.
Paul was especially concerned about the mistreatment of the poor, abuses of divine worship, sexual immorality, personal vanity and ambition, the temptation to live like one’s pagan neighbors, misunderstandings of the nature of apostolic authority, the dangers of idolatry, factionalism in the community, and false doctrine on several points, including the resurrection of the body and salvation by esoteric knowledge rather than by God’s grace. In other words, the Christians in Corinth wrestled with the very same problems which confront us.
Our second lesson today is the continuation of last week’s second reading, and both are taken from chapter twelve of First Corinthians, in which Paul explains the relationship of the Lord Jesus to his disciples by using the metaphor of a human body. Christ is the head of the body, and we are all members or parts of the same body such as the hand, foot, eye, and ear. And that body is the Church.
Paul teaches that each member of the body has its own proper identity and purpose, and so no member should be jealous of any other member because only together do all the members constitute one complete body.
If any one member is missing or injured or diseased, then the entire body is diminished, and by uniting many different members in his one Body, the Lord Jesus provides both unity and diversity in his Church while distributing gifts of many kinds among his disciples so that they may all work together for the glory of God and the proclamation of the Gospel.
Last week’s reading was a warning to the Christians in Corinth who sought extraordinary gifts of the Spirit like speaking in tongues, and Paul wanted them all to understand that no one receives a gift from God for his own sake. All the gifts we receive are given to us for the benefit of others, and so each disciple should rejoice in all the gifts that are given to others for the sake of the growth and health of the entire body, the Church.
In today’s reading, Paul emphasizes the fundamental equality of all the members of Christ’s body through Holy Baptism. “For in one Spirit” he writes “we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, slaves or free persons, and we were all given to drink of one Spirit.”
And because of this fundamental equality there is no need to be concerned about who has received greater or lesser gifts, “so that” as Paul explains “there may be no division in the body, but that the parts may have the same concern for one another. If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it; if one part is honored, all the parts share its joy.”
This understanding of all disciples as joined together in one body with many different parts, all of whom have Christ as their head, created a radical new possibility for human affairs in the whole history of the world: the Church. The Church of Jesus Christ is a universal communion of men and women from every social class, from all races and nations, and from all ethnic and linguistic groups, existing together in fundamental equality from sharing the same Baptism.
The Church is a communion of people who have different professional endeavors, educational attainments, economic situations, personal capacities, and political convictions. The Church is a communion of people all of whom, despite their many differences, truly belong to each other because they all belong to Christ.
And more than that, Christians understand themselves first not by reference to the individual markers of their personal identity like race, sex, wealth, ethnicity, politics, or profession but simply by being Christians. Being a Christian always comes first. Belonging to Christ, and therefore to his Church, comes before all else.
This radically new understanding of human community and communion is one of the reasons why the Church was so attractive in the ancient world, and that is what Saint Paul wanted the Christians in Corinth to understand about the nature and dignity of being a disciple of Jesus Christ.
But it was a constant struggle for Paul to help them grasp their new identity as members of the Body of Christ, and so Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians was followed by a second and then perhaps by at least two others which were lost to us.
We all need constant reminders that in Jesus Christ we have become a new creation and that all of us are called in hope, by grace through faith, to live according to the more excellent way of divine love. That way of divine love, of course, is the Way of the Cross, and we are each called to that radical love by him who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
Friends, we can understand who we are only when we know whose we are, and Christians belong to Jesus Christ who redeems us from the grave and offers us the gift of eternal life. We are united to Christ in Holy Baptism and the Holy Eucharist, and through Christ we are all united to each other as members of his mystical body, the Church.
And that is why we find our true dignity and eternal destiny only by living as a new creation in the Church as disciples and friends of the divine savior of the whole human race: the Lord Jesus Christ.
This is the text of my homily for 26 January 2025, the 3rd Sunday of the Year.
Fr Jay Scott Newman