1 Corinthians 5

Sexual Immorality Defiles the Church: 1 Corinthians 5✞

For the last few passages Paul has been talking to the Corinthians about their misplaced boasting (which manifested itself in the Corinthians “following” certain Church leaders over others), and showing how this boasting is spiritually infantile. In this chapter there seems, at first glance, to be a hard shift in topic, but we’ll see that it’s actually part of the same discussion: a different way the Corinthians’ spiritual immaturity—not to mention their misplaced boasting—is manifesting.

The passage starts with a pretty shocking (to my ears) activity that’s been happening:

¹ It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father’s wife.

Given the wording I’m going to assume this isn’t a man sleeping with his own mother, he’s sleeping with his step-mother, but it’s still pretty shocking.

In fact let’s go even further, because in that day and age it was very common for men to remarry younger wives. It’s a sad fact that women dying in childbirth was very common, so it was also common for a man to remarry: his wife would die in childbirth so he’d find a new wife – typically a younger one. Which is relevant because, for the sake of argument, I’m even willing to assume that the step-mother this man is sleeping with may be closer to his own age than to his father’s!

Even with all of that, I personally find this pretty shocking. I think most people in Paul’s day would have found it even more shocking than I do, though; for me it’s a sexual sin, but for them it would have additional issues wrapped in it that I don’t even understand, of a son claiming his father’s authority by sleeping with his father’s wife. (We sometimes see such things happening in the Old Testament—usually with regard to kings—and may not fully understand what’s going on if we don’t recognize that this is about more than just sex.)

Paul says that even the pagans in Corinth, who know nothing about Christ, would refuse to tolerate such behaviour!

So I’m claiming that this is shocking, and that it would be even more shocking to someone in the day and time it was occurring. The question is, what do the Corinthians think?

² And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn?

Now, I’m going to stop on this point for a minute, because it’s the reason I don’t see this chapter as a change in topic from the previous chapter. I think Paul is continuing along with the thoughts he’s already been outlining¹. The Corinthians boast about the wrong things, including a man sleeping with his father’s wife. And why would they boast about this?

Paul doesn’t say explicitly, but given the context I think it’s because the Corinthians are revelling in their freedom in Christ. “We are so free from the burden of obeying the Law,” they’re thinking, “that we’re able to do whatever we want!”

They seem to have grabbed hold of a part of the Gospel—because it’s true, we aren’t shackled to obedience of the Law for salvation—but missed the fact that a true Christian is not only saved by Christ, but saved in order to become more like Christ – if you can’t picture Jesus the Messiah sleeping with his father’s wife, it’s not something you should be doing either – let alone be proud of someone in your midst doing it!

When I see this kind of thinking my mind immediately goes to Romans 6:1–14, where Paul covers this topic. It can be summarized by the first few verses of that passage:

¹ What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? ² By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? ³ Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?

Romans 6:1–3✞

The idea that a Christian would come to the conclusion that our freedom would lead to sinful lives is shocking to Paul².

But back to our current passage, Paul has instructions to the Corinthians as to how to handle this person:

Let him who has done this be removed from among you.

³ For though absent in body, I am present in spirit; and as if present, I have already pronounced judgment on the one who did such a thing. ⁴ When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present, with the power of our Lord Jesus, ⁵ you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.

Once again I find myself advising my readers to reign in their imaginations. 🙂 When Paul commands the Corinthians to “deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of his flesh,” he means putting him out of the church. There may be some room for disagreement on this point—I notice the ESV Study Bible notes say this probably refers to removing him from the church—but I really can’t imagine that this refers to something more fantastical than that.

Since I mentioned them, let me quote the ESV Study Bible note for verse 5:

1 Cor. 5:5 Deliver this man to Satan probably refers to removing him from the church, since those outside of the church are in Satan’s realm (Luke 4:5–6; Eph. 2:2; 1 John 5:19). destruction of the flesh. Although it is certainly not always the case (cf. John 9:1–3), personal sin sometimes has grave physical consequences (Acts 5:1–11; 1 Cor. 11:29–30). spirit may be saved. The purpose of the discipline was not to punish the man for punishment’s sake but to effect his restoration to the church and eventual salvation (see 1 Tim. 1:20).

ESV Study Bible

So Paul is instructing the Corinthians to revoke this man’s membership in the church, with the hope that he’ll eventually come to repentance and be restored to the church, but he’s also worried about the impact this sin will have on the rest of the congregation:

⁶ Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? ⁷ Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. ⁸ Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

If the Corinthians let this pass, they’ll find that more and more sin is creeping into their congregation. Because… if something that extreme is ok, then what’s the big deal about… I don’t know, adultery in general? Or stealing? Or lying? Everything starts to become ok.

Or, to put it in a more specifically Christian way, we start to think that living like Christ isn’t actually important. We fall into a “Christ is my Saviour but not my Master” kind of mentality: “Sure, yes, Christ saved me from me sin, but He can’t tell me what to do!”

Paul also uses an interesting metaphor here – or rather, he takes the metaphor of leaven and extends it further, to the unleavened Passover bread. In Paul’s day, leaven was similar to the yeast we use today; they’re not quite the same, in a way that I (as a non-baker) don’t understand, but they’re alike in one sense: you use a little bit of it and it works its way into the entire batch of dough. You don’t need a lot, just a little bit of leaven (or yeast) and it’s enough to make an entire loaf of bread. Paul is warning the Corinthians that that’s what’s going to happen to them, if they’re not careful. But then he extends it to the Passover celebration, because the bread eaten at Passover was unleavened – it didn’t have any leaven at all! So Paul is telling the Corinthians that it’s really an either/or situation: you can be like Christ, with no leaven, or you can introduce some leaven and it will eventually work its way through the entire congregation. Paul doesn’t recognize a situation in which a little bit of leaven is healthy or acceptable; be like Christ, or be unlike Christ, those are our two options.

So Paul is telling the Corinthians that they need to put this man out of the church and the reason, at least in part, is that his sin is going to “contaminate” the whole congregation. But we should remember that this letter isn’t the first letter Paul wrote to the Corinthians; he wrote them another letter before this one (which hasn’t been preserved), and in that letter he’d already given them related instructions: they weren’t to associate with sexually immoral people:

⁹ I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— ¹⁰ not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. ¹¹ But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one. ¹² For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? ¹³ God judges those outside. “Purge the evil person from among you.”

We don’t know what he said in that previous letter (other than what he reiterates here), but in this letter he’s making it clear: he wants them to avoid associating with sexually immoral people who claim to be Christian. He’s not telling them to stop associating with non-Christians.

And if we’re honest, this seems backwards to us! Many Christians get into a kind of ghettoized approach to Christianity: if we avoid the rest of the world, and only hang out with other Christians, in our own little Christian communities, then we’ll be free from the sins of the world, and can be more Christ-like!

Paul says the opposite: we are to associate with non-Christians. (He doesn’t say this here, but how else is the Gospel supposed to spread?) We shouldn’t judge them, but we should associate with them – eat and drink with them! Involve them in our lives, and be involved in theirs! Work for them, and/or hire them to work for us!

What we should not do, on the other hand, is tolerate people who claim to be Christians and yet display these types of egregious sins. In this passage Paul explicitly refers to those who are sexually immoral, and… look, I can’t think of a more topical example! Because if the Church—in North America, at least—gets it wrong when it comes to non-Christian, we really get it wrong when it comes to holding our leaders to account! Leaders who are sexually immoral are all too common – and all too seldom held to account for it!

We can probably think of countless examples of high-profile Christian leaders caught in some kind of sexual scandal where the church absolutely refuses to hold them to account. We talk a big game about allowing room for repentance and go out of our way to assume it’s not as bad as it’s being reported, bending over backwards not to hold them accountable for their actions.

Paul tells us two things in this passage, and we go against him on both:

Topic	What Paul Tells Us	What the North American Church Does
Associating with Non-Christians	Be involved in their lives. Don’t judge them, but be an example for them by your own behaviour.	Avoid non-Christians whenever we can, because we prefer to be among “our own kind” – we only want to hang around with other Christians
Holding Christians to Account	Do not even associate with Christians who live a pattern of being sexually immoral	“Who are we to judge? Aren’t we told not to judge others? He’s just a man, after all – despite all evidence to the contrary, he claims to have repented!”

Footnotes

1: This is another good opportunity to remind ourselves that Paul didn’t write this letter with chapter or verse numbers; he just wrote a letter, the same way we do today. Chapters and verses were added thousands of years after this letter was written. So Paul wasn’t thinking to himself, “I’ve finished Chapter 4, now I’ll write Chapter 5!”

2: I notice, however, that Paul’s letter to the Romans was written after this letter to the Corinthians. It makes me wonder: did he have the Corinthians in mind when he wrote that part of his letter to the Romans?