6Your boasting is not good. Don't you know that a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough? 7Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. 8Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth.
9I have written you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— 10not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. 11But now I am writing you that you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or a slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler. With such a man do not even eat.
12What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? 13God will judge those outside. "Expel the wicked man from among you."
Dig Deeper
If you ask most people when the American slaves were freed, many, if not most, will answer that it was when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by President Abraham Lincoln. This is the standard line that most American school children are given. Yet, it is not really true. The Emancipation Proclamation freed virtually no slaves. What it did was to declare any slaves in states that remained in rebellion against the United States to be free. This made for a great political move but Lincoln did not have any authority over the southern states during the war and so the Proclamation was toothless. Judgment and authority can only be exercised where one has the power to do so.
In this section of his letter, Paul continues to deal with his example of the Corinthian arrogance and pride as demonstrated in the way that they have handled the immoral brother among them. He has stated already that the man should be expelled from the congregation, and now he will delve further into the concept of why they need to deal with sin in the Church, but also why they should not judge sinners outside of the Church. Like Lincoln, they can only reach the areas over which they truly have authority.
Paul begins verse 6 as bluntly as he possibly could, saying, your boasting is not good. In displaying pride over their free-wheeling attitude towards immoral behavior in the Church they have shown that they don’t get the point of the Christian life at all. They have been called to demonstrate for the world what the age to come will look like. They will hardly announce that the life of the age to come is available now through God’s Kingdom and His Church if they fail to live up to even the moral standards of the pagans. This is not about legalistic standards, it is about demonstrating for the world what a people reconciled to the Creator of the universe look like.
To make this point clear, Paul uses the imagery from the Passover. The Passover was the meal celebrated yearly by the Jews to commemorate the night of the original Passover in Egypt when God freed the descendants of Abraham from their life of slavery in Egypt. The Passover lamb was not a typical sacrifice but was the means through which God marked out His people, keeping them from destruction. Paul’s use of this imagery, then, is not some example he has pulled haphazardly out of the air. His point is a very important and specific one. He reminds them that at the very heart of Christianity is Christ, the real Passover lamb that had made the protection of the lamb available to the whole world. If they would only remember this, they would realize that the entire Christian life is one continuous Passover celebration. In the traditional Passover meal all yeast would be removed from the house. During the original Passover the bread was made without yeast because they had to flee without waiting for the yeast to rise in the bread, but since then it had come to signify sin as well. Just as yeast must be completely removed from the Passover celebration, so it must all the more be removed from the ultimate and eternal Passover celebration, the life of the Christian community.
In fact Paul calls on them to get rid of the yeast of their old life and calls them to live a life worthy of the one to which they have had made available when they entered into the life of Christ. He wants them to live freed from sin and freed for godly lives because God has already acted in Christ to make provision for the reality of them living a life of the age to come in the present age. In calling them to the bread of sincerity and truth, Paul is reminding them that at the heart of all immoral behavior is the lie that goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden; it is the lie that we can do things our own way without obeying God.
In verse 9, Paul references an earlier letter (one that has apparently not survived history) that he wrote to them about not associating with sexually immoral people. We don’t know for sure whether this was an honest misunderstanding or a deliberate attempt to disregard his instructions (see 4:18). He now makes it very clear for them. Not only would it be impossible for them to not associate with non-Christians who are immoral (and Paul then gives many representative examples of worldly immorality that are not just limited to the sexual type), it would make no sense. This is a further development of what Paul alluded to in in verse 5. The fact is that the Church is responsible for judging behavior (which is different from the type of value judgments that Paul referred to in the previous chapter) within the Church, but outside the Church it is God’s responsibility. In calling for them to not eat with this type of individual, Paul is directly alluding to the table fellowship of communion but this is, most likely, a figure of speech that would mean that they should not associate with him at all. Not eating with someone was a significant act in this culture (see Galatians 2:12-13). Paul doesn’t yet fully explain why Christians should not be joined together sexually with non-Christians but he will get to that in the next chapter as he explains that it has everything to do with the Resurrection.
Because it is their responsibility to judge those in the Church they should “expel the wicked man from among you.” This is a loose quote from Deuteronomy 17 and Paul’s point is this: because the Church has failed to be humbly responsible in executing their duty, they need to send him back to the realm of the world where God is solely responsible for judgment. Because the Church had failed both God and this man in this situation, the only hope was to return him to the world, where God alone would be his hope. When seen in the proper light, surely the Corinthians have nothing in this situation that should puff them up, rather they should be humbled and ashamed by their arrogance and lack of true wisdom of the age to come.
Devotional Thought
Do you see your life as one long Passover celebration? Do you apply Paul’s principle of removing all of the yeast from your life so that you can properly honor the ultimate Passover lamb? Spend some time thinking about that today, then go share your faith by explaining the Passover to someone, how Christ became the ultimate Passover, and how our lives are to reflect the understanding and gratitude of that monumental event.
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