1 Corinthians: Day 55
SCRIPTURE
1Now concerning the collection for the saints: you should follow the directions I gave to the churches of Galatia. 2On the first day of every week, each of you is to put aside and save whatever extra you earn, so that collections need not be taken when I come. 3And when I arrive, I will send any whom you approve with letters to take your gift to Jerusalem. 4If it seems advisable that I should go also, they will accompany me.
5I will visit you after passing through Macedonia -- for I intend to pass through Macedonia -- 6and perhaps I will stay with you or even spend the winter, so that you may send me on my way, wherever I go. 7I do not want to see you now just in passing, for I hope to spend some time with you, if the Lord permits. 8But I will stay in Ephesus until Pentecost, 9for a wide door for effective work has opened to me, and there are many adversaries. (1 Corinthians 16:1-9, NRSV)
WHAT
Imagine you are a young Jewish boy or girl living in Palestine during the first century A.D. As such you would have learned to hate Gentiles while on your mother’s knee. It was in your mother’s milk and in the air your breathed.
· You would have learned how the Gentile Egyptians had enslaved your people for four hundred years, making them work under the threat of the whip while building pharaoh’s great monuments until God rescued your people in a great Exodus. But even then, the Gentile pharaoh tried to chase after your people and end their new God-given freedom. You celebrate this great event – and are reminded of your hatred of Gentiles -every year at Passover.
· You would have learned about how the Gentile Canaanites had resisted your people’s possession of the land, a land which had been promised to them by God after their Exodus from Egypt.
· You would have learned about how the Gentile Assyrians had attacked the ten northern tribes of your people and carried them off into exile, never to be heard from again. They replaced them with people from other lands who brought their own gods to pollute the land of Israel. The descendants of these despised foreign immigrants are the Samaritans, a people your mom says you still cannot trust.
· You would have learned how the Gentile Babylonians attacked and destroyed Jerusalem, including the beautiful and holy temple built by King Solomon. The horror of it was unfathomable as God’s own house was destroyed and God’s people carried off to exile in Babylon.
· You would have learned how the Gentile Persians and Medes, followed by the Gentile Greeks under Alexander the Great, had all conquered your land and subjugated your people.
· You would have learned how when Gentile Alexander died unexpectedly at age 33, his empire was divided among his Gentile generals, and how your people had then been subject, first to the Gentile Ptolemaic Greeks of Egypt, then the Gentile Seleucid Greeks of Syria. This would have included the hated Gentile king, Antiochus Epiphanes, IV, of Seleucid Syria. He had forbidden worship of Yahweh and keeping of the law of Moses. He even profaned the rebuilt temple in Jerusalem by sacrificing a pig on its altar and allowed the temple courts to be used as a brothel. Thank God, your mother said, for Judas Maccabeus and his brave warriors who defeated Antiochus’ troops and reclaimed and purified the temple. Israel was then a sovereign nation once again for the first time in nearly half a millennium! Your mother would have explained to you that this is why you celebrate Hannukah every year.
· And, of course, you would have learned about how the hated Gentile conquerors of your own day, the Romans, had once again ended Israel’s sovereignty (which, though you wouldn’t know this, lasted until 1947). You would have first-hand experience with how the Romans taxed and bled your people dry, and with their brutality, not to mention their pagan worship. You would have seen for yourself their despised crosses used as warning billboards which screamed, “Cross us and we will ‘cross’ you.”
Through all these stories from your mom and dad, you would have learned, like all Jews, to thoroughly hate and despise Gentiles, i.e., non-Jewish people. Not only were they not “God’s chosen people,” but even worse, Gentiles were like a whole different species, and an inferior one at that.
And, of course, while your mother wouldn’t teach you this, somewhere another little boy or girl was being taught by his or her Gentile mother and father to hate Jews. “They are like a whole different and inferior species,” this little child would be told. “They are immoral atheists; they don’t even worship the gods!”
So there was intense and widespread hatred between Gentiles and Jews. And it had been that way for centuries.
Along the way, your family had become followers of the Jewish rabbi, Jesus. You came to believe he was the promised Messiah who, upon rising from the dead, inaugurated the rule of God in a new kingdom. A missionary of this Jesus, a Pharisee named Saul (a good Hebrew name) had astonishingly converted to faith in Jesus as the Christ, started going by his Roman name, Paul, and travelled widely among the Gentiles. Outrageously, he started bringing Gentiles into this Jesus movement!! Gentiles! Can you imagine a Jew doing such a thing!?
There were some, of course, who tried to stop him. They pointed out that God had not chosen these Gentile people but rather Abraham and his descendants for favor and blessing. God had given his people the law of Moses and commanded them to keep it. These Gentiles, if they were to join the Jesus movement, therefore needed to follow that law. They needed to become Jews first, in other words. Once these Gentiles start keeping the law of Moses, then we’ll talk about them becoming Jesus followers.
Paul strongly disagreed. He even called those who went along with this “fools” (Galatians 3:1). Because of all this debate, it was decided to hold a big meeting in Jerusalem to discuss the issue. Luke had written about it in chapter 15 of his second book, the one called “The Acts of the Apostles.” At that big meeting, attended by Paul and his supporters, Jesus’ disciples of the Pharisaic sect, along with Peter and James and all the elders of the Church, it was discerned that Gentiles did NOT need to become Jews first. They needed only to confess faith in Jesus and obey the most basic of ethical laws, such as marital purity, not eating meat sacrificed to idols, and so forth.
That should have settled the issue of Gentiles and Jesus, but it didn’t. Hardliners continued to insist that Gentiles MUST become Jews first before they could be disciples of Jesus. “Jesus is a Jewish Messiah!” they continued to insist. “God commanded Abraham and all his household to be circumcised, so to belong to Abraham’s family, naturally you also need to be circumcised.” Again, you wouldn’t know this in the first century but a group of these hardliners would live on for decades in a group of Jewish followers of Jesus known as the Ebionites, still insisting their way was right and Paul was dead wrong.
Reconciling centuries of Gentile and Jewish hatred and mistrust for one another, even within the Church, was a hard pill to swallow. But Paul insisted it was core to the gospel of Jesus. He had written in a letter to the Gentile disciples in Ephesus:
But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off [i.e. Gentiles] have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. (Ephesians 2:13-16, NRSV)
To the Gentiles in the region of Galatia, who had fallen for this “must become Jews first” malarky, Paul wrote:
There is no longer Jew or Greek [another word for Gentile], there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise. (Galatians 3:28-29, NRSV)
It was in such an environment of mutual mistrust and hatred between Gentiles and Jews – even among the followers of Jesus – that Paul began a project that was near and dear to his heart. He firmly believed that the ONENESS of Jewish and Gentile believers within the Church as the body of Christ – representing all the ways human beings divide ourselves and play “us vs. them” -- was a core part of the gospel of Jesus. He didn’t know it, of course, but it would be this project that would lead to his arrest in Jerusalem a few years later, followed by his long imprisonment in Caesarea Maritima, and eventual journey to Rome and imprisonment there (Acts 21-28).
That project which was so near and dear to Paul was to collect money from the Gentile churches he had established and to deliver that money to the Jewish disciples of Jesus in Jerusalem.
The Jewish brothers and sisters in Jerusalem were suffering terribly. First, there was the persecution that had broken out after the stoning of Deacon Stephen, a persecution which according to Luke, drove all except the apostles to be scattered throughout the countryside of Judea and Samaria (Acts 8:1). The church in Jerusalem had tried pooling its resources and living communally, but that had ended disastrously (Acts 5:1-11). All this was in the midst of an empire wide famine during the reign of Claudius due to repeated wheat crop failures in the empire’s bread basket, Egypt.
When the decision had been made that Gentile converts did not need to convert to Judaism first, Paul had promised the Jerusalem leaders that he would “continue to remember the poor,” which Paul said he was most eager to do (Galatians 2:10). We see that eagerness in today’s passage. Why he was so eager, we’ll see in a moment.
As Paul closes out this first letter to the Corinthians, he has three purposes:
1) Discuss the details of this relief project which was so near and dear to him (vv. 1-4)
2) Share some information about his upcoming travel plans, which included a trip back to Corinth (vv. 5-12), and
3) Send final greetings (vv. 13-24).
We’ll consider the first two today and the third one in the next commentary.
Now concerning the collection for the saints: you should follow the directions I gave to the churches of Galatia. On the first day of every week, each of you is to put aside and save whatever extra you earn, so that collections need not be taken when I come. And when I arrive, I will send any whom you approve with letters to take your gift to Jerusalem. If it seems advisable that I should go also, they will accompany me. (1 Corinthians 16:1-4, NRSV)
Paul instructs the Corinthian church to put aside whatever extra funds they can earn (interestingly, not their “first fruits”) so that when he comes – in the company of other disciples from Macedonia with their collection we soon learn – the relief money will already be collected. He won’t have to subject the Corinthians or himself to the embarrassment of having to take up a collection then. This is the first New Testament reference, by the way, to Sunday as a special day in the Church. It doesn’t necessarily say that they worshiped on Sunday, but it sure implies it.
Jews in Paul’s day who lived outside Jerusalem still paid the annual temple tax. In a world where there was no way to “wire the money,” or mail a check, they would appoint carriers to bring the money, probably during Passover, to the temple to pay the tax. Paul continues this tradition by telling the Corinthians to identify some carriers who will bring their collection to Jerusalem. If it seems advisable to them, Paul will accompany these carriers. Paul was going out of his way to avoid allowing any mistrust among the Corinthians even a chance of leading to a charge of fraud.
Paul may be known to us today as a skilled theologian, even if hard to understand sometimes, but we can see here he was also a skilled administrator, concerned with the details and even about how things look.
Why is Paul so devoted to this money-for-Jerusalem project? What better way is there to demonstrate the ONENESS of the Church of Jesus, the demolition of dividing walls which Paul proclaimed as central to the gospel, than to have formerly despised Gentiles contributing their hard earned cash for the relief of formerly despised Jewish believers in Jerusalem? That dividing wall has been torn down in Christ Jesus. He has made Jew and Gentile ONE in his body the Church. In fact, all the ways we have historically played “us vs. them” have been destroyed in Christ’s body. Money is a tangible sign of this ONENESS; it is putting your money where your theology is. Giving it is action, not simply talk.
After arranging for the financial collection – which he’ll address again in 2 Corinthians 8-9 – he tells the Corinthian church of his travel plans. Recall that he was in Ephesus as he wrote this, arriving there after he had left Corinth:
I will visit you after passing through Macedonia -- for I intend to pass through Macedonia -- and perhaps I will stay with you or even spend the winter, so that you may send me on my way, wherever I go. I do not want to see you now just in passing, for I hope to spend some time with you, if the Lord permits. But I will stay in Ephesus until Pentecost, for a wide door for effective work has opened to me, and there are many adversaries. (1 Corinthians 16:5-9, NRSV)
So Paul is in Ephesus, in western Asia Minor. It must be spring for Pentecost, the Jewish festival, is right around the corner. Paul says he will stay there through the festival because a door for effective gospel work has been opened wide. Paul not only wants to return to Corinth, but he wants to spend significant time with them – his letter has revealed that they have need of his teaching and presence! So he plans to leave Ephesus after Pentecost and head east and south, stopping in Macedonia to visit the churches in Thessalonica, Philippi, and probably Beroea as well. These churches, too, had been instructed to take up collections for Jerusalem. By the time he arrives in Corinth, it would be fall. Ship passage in the waters around Corinth had to close down as the shifting winds of the approaching winter made maritime traffic dangerous. So Paul will probably spend the winter with the Corinthians until maritime travel became possible again.
That was his plan. “If the Lord permits.” Unfortunately, the Lord did not permit this plan to unfold we will learn in 2 Corinthians. Paul’s plans had to change, which apparently fueled the fire of opposition among some of Paul’s detractors in Corinth. “See, we mean nothing to him. That’s why I follow Apollos.” But we must save that for another book.
In the next commentary, Paul will say something about Timothy and Apollos. Then he will send final greetings and close out this letter.
Until changing circumstances dictated he must write again.
APPLY
What do my financial contributions say about my action vs. my theology or talk?
PRAYER
Gracious God, in this letter Paul has shown himself to be a skilled theologian and Bible scholar, the consummate pastoral leader of a congregation, and now, also a skilled and careful administrator. But most of all, he demonstrated putting your money where your theology is. May that also be true of me. In Christ. Amen.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. How did the history of the Jewish people, including Jewish Christians, contribute to their hatred of Gentiles? Why did Gentiles hate Jews?
2. Why was this collection that Paul talks about in this passage (and in 2 Corinthians 8-9) so important to him? What do we learn about Paul, his theology and administration, from his attention to all the details of the money’s collection and delivery?
3. What do your financial contributions say about your action vs. your theology or talk?
4. How do you feel knowing that even faithful Paul, who made the best of plans, experienced the Lord changing those plans?
How can you apply these insights in your life?