January 28, 2024, Love Trumps Theology, I Corinthians 8 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ January 28, 2024 ♦ Leave a comment

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One tricky thing about reading the Bible is that it was written two thousand years ago. The people who were writing were living in the ancient Middle East – they were raised as faithful Jews, schooled in the Torah – their lives revolved around the cycles of Temple worship and the seasons of the growing year. There were different expectations for men and women; there were certainly limitations for women. And we always have to take all of those things into account if we want to understand what Jesus is saying, or what a parable means, or why on earth Paul says what he says.

Today we read in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, and we find him talking about food that has been sacrificed to idols. Corinth, and most of the other cities we read about in the New Testament, were pagan cities, and idols were big business in that time and place. The problem of eating meat sacrificed to idols wasn’t just a matter of slipping in to some secret ceremony and sharing forbidden food. If you went to the market to buy meat in downtown Corinth or Ephesus or Galatia, you were very likely to find meat being sold there that had been sacrificed to idols – in fact, you might be hard pressed to find meat for sale that had not had its origin in the local temple dedicated to some pagan god or other.

So Paul is addressing what was a very relevant issue in the young church there in Corinth. The church was only about 3 years old, just a baby, really, and there were a lot of people who were brand new converts to Christianity. Some of them had lived their whole lives until the moment of their conversion as pagans. Before their conversion, that meat had had religious significance for them, and even though they had given themselves wholeheartedly to Jesus Christ, there was still a connection, there was still something in their minds and hearts, that pricked at their consciences when they thought of eating that meat. This question of eating or not eating was a real crisis of faith for those people.

There were also mature Christians in the church who knew, as Paul says, that the pagan gods were no gods at all. They knew that a hunk of beef or mutton that was offered to Athena, or to Apollo, or to Aphrodite, that was nothing more than a hunk of meat. They knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that they could sit down to their Sabbath pot roast and eat with a clear conscience, because they knew, as Paul himself knew, that what you eat doesn’t bring you closer to God and what you don’t eat doesn’t bring you closer to God. Hadn’t the Lord Jesus himself declared all foods to be clean? Yes, he had, and they knew that too.

But Paul turns the tables on those “mature” Christians by changing the question. You know you are free to eat anything, great, he told them. But what use are you making of your freedom? If you wound the conscience of your brother or sister by exercising your freedom, you are sinning against them, and more – you are sinning against Christ, whom you claim to worship as the one and only God.

Knowledge is all very well, but it has a tendency to inflate the ego of the one who thinks he’s knowledgable. But love – love doesn’t puff up your own self, it builds up the other person. How can you use your freedom to eat meat if it’s a stumbling block to my brother or sister? I will never eat meat again, Paul vows, if that’s what I have to do to keep from causing even one of them to fall.

But that’s a very first-century problem, right? When was the last time you had to worry about whether your meat had been sacrificed to idols when you went to Price Chopper? How many of your brothers or sisters or neighbors grew up worshiping Apollo?

But of course, Paul wasn’t really just talking about meat, was he? The problem Paul was addressing was how do we make use of our knowledge and our freedom when they come into conflict with the love and respect and care we owe to our fellow human beings, and especially our brothers and sisters in the church? When do our knowledge and our rights – even our correct knowledge and even our valid rights – when do they become weapons with which we do harm to one another? And all of a sudden Paul’s words have a very twenty-first century sound.

I have spent quite a bit of time in the company of clergy, and I can testify that this is absolutely a modern-day issue. Studying theology is often all about knowledge – who has the right interpretation of a Scripture passage: what is the correct application and what is the wrong application? Our Diocese has been in conflict for years over these exact questions. Thanks be to God that we are growing and working towards healing what was a nearly fatal rupture in our community of faith. But the only way we are able to find a way forward is by loving one another. The only way we can find a way forward together is by seeing one another as beloved brothers and sisters and not opponents.

It’s important, I think, to say that knowledge and understanding do matter. Paul was very clear to explain himself. “We know there is only one God” “ We know that we’re no better off if we don’t eat that meat and we’re no worse off if we do.” That’s the truth, Paul says. But “If food is a cause of my brother or sisters falling,” Paul wrote, “then I will never eat meat again, so that I might not cause one of them to fall.” It’s not that truth isn’t important. And it’s not that Paul doesn’t value his freedom. It’s that love trumps all of that.

And what Paul is focusing on here is our need to nurture and protect the faith of our brothers and sisters. In this country, churches are falling in attendance, steadily, pretty drastically. And people aren’t just rejecting the practice of going to church; they are turning their backs on faith itself, Christian faith in particular. There are a lot of reasons for this, but we can’t lay the whole blame on things like our godless culture. Some people – a lot of people – too many people – have left the church because they have found it to be a place of being right instead of a place of being love. I see this so often with young people. How many of our children and grandchildren have been driven away by the church’s failure to love? How many tender faiths have been wounded by the church’s need to be right? This is what Paul is talking about here.

Healing will never happen by us standing on our rights, and healing will never happen by us being right, and healing will never happen by us proving that we are right. The truth is that being right doesn’t bring us any closer to God and being wrong doesn’t separate us from him. But we have the responsibility to nurture and nourish the faith of our brothers and sisters, by obeying our Lord’s one commandment, to love them as Jesus Christ loved us, loving with self-giving love, loving with self-denying love.