Lawsuits Among Believers
1If any of you has a dispute with another, dare he take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the saints? 2Do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if you are to judge the world, are you not competent to judge trivial cases? 3Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life! 4Therefore, if you have disputes about such matters, appoint as judges even men of little account in the church 5 say this to shame you. Is it possible that there is nobody among you wise enough to judge a dispute between believers? 6But instead, one brother goes to law against another—and this in front of unbelievers!
7The very fact that you have lawsuits among you means you have been completely defeated already. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated? 8Instead, you yourselves cheat and do wrong, and you do this to your brothers.
Dig Deeper
It didn’t take me very long in teaching at an inner-city high school to notice that the administration wasn’t particularly concerned with small details like in what areas the teachers were actually licensed. Sometimes out of necessity teachers were asked to teach classes in areas outside of their field of expertise. At other times, teachers were allowed to teach outside of their field simply because they wanted to and thought a particular class would be fun to teach. It always seemed a bit odd to me to let people do something for which they were not really qualified, especially when teachers qualified in those subjects could have taught it.
This is more or less the way Paul sees the situation that he now turns to. In a sense, this is a continuation of his continuing argument against the arrogance of the Corinthians. In this section he will discuss the arrogance of not living in a manner worthy of the ‘age to come’, a life that was made available to them by Christ, the Passover lamb. In essence, this was a result of their arrogance and their complete lack of love, something that Paul will make quite clear in chapter 13.
It would appear that some of members of the Corinthian community had taken other members to the Roman courts. Two of the ongoing characteristics of the Roman legal system were that lawyers were extremely expensive and that it massively favored the wealthy. This would indicate that some well-to-do members of the congregation had evidently tried to exploit a situation to their advantage.
This was a clear indication to Paul that they were not understanding or behaving like people who had entered into the ‘age to come’. Rather than being a light to the world and demonstrating what it looked like to be a community of true humanity living in concert with God, they were snubbing that and trying to exploit the system of the present age. Why, Paul wants to know, would they turn to worldly judges who are incapable of exercising God’s true justice and who have no access to the life of the ‘age to come’, rather than dealing with the situation themselves? Paul assumes that they should know that they will judge the entire world one day. This does not contradict what he has already said in the previous chapter. In the present age, Christians are not to engage in judgments that are God’s to make, but in the ‘age to come’ that will be part of the Church’s responsibility. Paul believes this based on Old Testament passages like Daniel 7:27 (as well as extra-biblical Jewish literature like 1 Enoch 1:9 and Wisdom 3:8) which says that the saints will be set in authority over the whole world. They need to become now in the present age, the people they actually are in the Messiah. In a sense, this is what this entire letter is about. They need to become who they really are in Christ.
The whole purpose of the Christian community is to model the life of Christ (the life of the ‘age to come’), which is the genuine human existence apart from the plague of sin. If they weren’t doing that, then what was the point? The fact is that because of their own arrogance and selfishness, they weren’t pointing to the time when God’s justice would rule the entire earth, rather they were turning to the inferior Roman brand of justice. Why would they do this when they were to rule over and judge the entire creation one day? The rule that they had been given in the Church was practice for the future age, and to this point, they were blowing it.
Paul is clearly trying to shame the Corinthians who are responsible for this situation. In verse 5, he asks if it is possible that there is nobody among them that is wise enough to judge a dispute between believers. This is an obvious shot at those in the congregation who are puffed up and think so highly of themselves. In this honor-shame culture, shaming them was a powerful motivator. In our culture we tend to think more in terms of success and failure than we do honor and shame. Thus if Paul were writing to us he might say, "I write this to show that you are failures." However we word it to apply to various cultures, the point is that they have failed to live up the genuine human life to which they had been called.
Paul has two points to make concerning this situation. First, If they are going to engage with one another in disputes, then they should at least keep them in house where God’s justice rather than the world’s can be exercised. Second, it would be better if they didn’t sue one another at all. Paul believes that it would be better for them to get ripped off than to harm their witness the way they have. Those who insist on asserting their individual rights at the expense of other Christians and at the expense of the image of the body of Christ, are really demonstrating that they don’t have a clue of what the life of Christ is all about. This kind of quibbling amongst Christians says to the world that they are really no different than the rest of humanity. They have presented a shameful image to the world outside of the Church and badly damaged their witness to those who so desperately need hear the message of the gospel so that the exile between them and God can be brought to an end. This is the precise message that Paul explains in Philippians 2:14-16: "Do everything without complaining or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like stars in the universe as you hold out the word of life—in order that I may boast on the day of Christ that I did not run or labor for nothing."
Devotional Thought
How quick are you to forfeit what you feel may be your personal rights in order to demonstrate the life of the ‘age to come’ for the world around you? Are you prepared to be wronged or cheated in order to further the cause of the Kingdom of God and shine like a star in the world?
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