Epiphany 2, Year B, 2024: 1 Corinthians 6:12-20

 I am a big fan of musical theater. My first love was Les Miserables. I could probably still sing the whole thing straight through, due to all of the times I listened to the two-CD set of the original Broadway cast. At the very beginning of the story, the thief Jean Valjean is paroled with his “yellow ticket of leave”, which identifies him as a convict and makes it near impossible for him to find reputable work or a place to stay. A bishop, who in the book Victor Hugo spends an inordinate amount of time introducing and establishing as a pious and honest man, takes pity on Valjean and offers him shelter. Valjean steals silver from the church and makes off with it into the night, but is caught and brought back to the bishop by the police, who are checking the veracity of Valjean’s lie that the bishop gifted him the silver. But the bishop surprises Valjean by not only lying by affirming Valjean’s story, but giving him the silver that he missed in his haste. When the police leave, the bishop says to Valjean that he must “use this precious silver to become an honest man” and that “by the witness of the martyrs, by the passion and the blood, God has raised you out of darkness, I have bought your soul for God.”

In Paul’s time, there was a religious custom where the slave whose freedom was bought with money previously deposited in the temple treasury was regarded as the property of the god of that temple, in the same way as Jean Valjean was “purchased” by the bishop. For Paul, the crucifixion was the price that was paid for us. was paid at the crucifixion. Paul is reflecting on what our “ownership” as the body of Christ means in terms of conduct.

In his letters, Paul, who is trying to simultaneously lay down ground rules while not being legalistic, is towing a difficult line.  And, context is an important part of understanding the ancient world in which scripture was written. So, as someone living 2000 years after Paul, I try to read him through the lens of what he’s trying to accomplish. In today’s Gospel, we learn of Jesus’ invitation to “Follow me.” Almost always one of the questions Paul is answering is, “what does it mean to be a part of this new community of followers of Jesus?” In this case, the question is, “how does being a follower of Jesus affect my daily life?” Paul might answer that question with, “everything we do is through the lens of putting Jesus first.” Greek Corinth had acquired an overblown reputation (partly through slander) for sexual license, so much so that Greek words for whoremongers, prostitution, and fornication were coined employing the city’s name. So, it would have been understood that any of these words were associated with Corinth. Interestingly, despite references to this “city of love” with a thousand priestesses of Aphrodite (Venus) who were sacred prostitutes, only two small temples to that goddess were found. Whatever may have been true of Greek Corinth, we should think of Roman Corinth (which is what it was during Paul’s life) simply as having all the problems of a rough, relatively new boomtown adjacent to two seaports. (Brown, 513) But, as we know, reputations have staying power so its move to a Roman city doesn’t fix the reputation which Corinth carried. This context is important to know when taking into account what Paul is addressing and how he’s going about addressing it. He’s taking the culturally understood reputation of the city that is part of the body of the world  and setting it up in stark contrast to what it is to be part of the body of Christ.     

Comedian Nick Griffin quipped that when he got married, he was told the things married couples argue about the most were money and sex, to which he responded, “great, how can we fight about something we don’t have?” Today, correctives about sex are often dismissed as Victorian, but that gives her majesty credit for something that far precedes her, going back to 1st century Christianity. Responsible sexual behavior in and out of marriage is a major issue in life; and inevitably what belief in Christ meant for such behavior became a problem, especially since the Jews and Gentiles who came to faith did not always come to the conversation with the same presuppositions. (Brown, 517-518)

In the beginning of today’s reading from Corinthians we hear a slogan in circulation at Corinth that presumably is at the root of much of what Paul condemns: “All things are lawful for me.” Paul qualifies it by insisting that although all things are lawful, not everything brings about good and by insisting that none of our choices must produce mastery over us. To indulge in loose behavior (sexual or otherwise) is not freedom but bondage to compulsions. Sexual (and other) permissiveness affects the Christian’s body, which should be evaluated as a member of Christ’s body and the temple of the Holy Spirit. (Brown, 518)

Paul is really concerned, in a broader sense, with idolatry. He had seen - and experienced firsthand, turning the legalistic following of the Law into a form of idolatry; how following the letter of the Law became more important than what the Law was supposed to do - to bring people closer to God and to demonstrate by their actions that they were God’s people. Therefore the Law itself became more important than the God it was supposed to help them worship. Paul is particularly straightforward in his assertion that, due to the fulfillment of the Law in the death and resurrection of Jesus, it was no longer a requirement to keep the Law of Moses, that salvation comes from the death & resurrection of Jesus Christ, not from following the Law. But this opened up a whole new can of worms.

Paul quotes that slogan of the Corinthians - notice the quotations around the beginning of verse 12, “All things are lawful for me” - asserting liberation from cultural taboos. Here, Paul is in conversation with the culture, with things he has heard in his time in his ministry. Paul appeals to his characteristic idea of the church as the body of Christ in order to exclude the possibility of contact with those things that will separate us from God. Like the community as a whole, each believer is a temple of the Holy Spirit.

This whole series of ideas has a messy history when taken out of context. It has been used to feed purity culture, which overemphasizes one’s sexuality to the point where not just how good of a Christian you are but your value as a person, can be solely defined by your sexual experience. And purity culture uses Paul to bring us full circle back to what Paul is fighting against - using legalism to put on a show to the world about how pious we are, as opposed to being motivated by gratitude and a desire to glorify God not just in our bodies but in all that we do.

“Are you having sex?” is a much easier question to answer than “What are you putting ahead of God?” The latter, “what are you putting ahead of God?” is Paul’s concern. It’s easier to get wrapped up in the salacious language of Paul and miss the point. The word translated as “fornication” can also mean “immorality”, “unchastity”, “adultery”, and “idolatry”. The same word is used in the book of Revelation metaphorically to describe the worship of idols.

Context. It’s really easy to discount Paul as being preoccupied with sex, especially when he uses language we experience as inflammatory. But it’s important to remember that context and take that text as part of a whole letter giving instruction of how to be a follower of Jesus to a particular community with its particular issues, to remember what is going on in the community he’s writing to, and then to reflect on why this text is holy scripture with relevance for us today. And this text is a really good case study in that practice. Paul is reminding us that, as members of the body of Christ, we are no longer to live only for ourselves but to show how being Christ’s own forever, as we are sealed with those words in our baptisms, impacts not just how we think, not just how we feel, but how we live. Amen.