1 Corinthians 5:6-13

 In the first five verses of this chapter, Paul introduces the specific problem in Corinth—the problem of a sinner living within the church—and urges them to take disciplinary action against him. In the rest of chapter 5, Paul lays out a more general statement on this problem of connivance.

Paul begins with a cold dose of truth. “Your glorying is not good.” This goes back to what we said in the previous section—the Corinthians were very proud of themselves. And Paul tells them, in essence: This is no time to be sitting around talking yourselves up; this is no time to be pinning medals on your own chest. They may have been ignoring this problem as something important, but it was a big issue and had the possibility of undermining everything good that the church legitimately did have going on.

Paul then gives the main proposition for this section: “Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump?” The word leaven comes from a Latin word meaning to lift and refers to substances added to dough to make it rise. Leaven is what gives most breads their distinctive puffy look and consistency; it is why most breads are bigger after baking than before. As far as I can tell, the type of leaven used in Bible times would have been similar to modern-day yeast.

Paul's point is that yeast has a dramatic effect, an effect disproportionate to its amount. You don't put a ton of yeast into a recipe. For example, one recipe I looked at had 5 ½ cups of flour to only one tablespoon of yeast. All that flour can be affected and raised by just a tablespoon of yeast. A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.

And just so, a single sinner can affect the whole church. He can affect the reputation of the church. So long as this church had a member who was living in open and public sin, all the people of Corinth would judge the entire church (and the entirety of Christianity) through the lens of this knowledge. To some extent, this would skew everyone's perception of what the church was. They would hold the actions of this man as indicative of the character of all Christians.

This is something we still see today—there are still people today who judge Christianity as a whole because of the actions of a few individual Christians. Paul's warning to the Jews still applies to the Christian church today: “Thou that makest thy boast of the law, through breaking the law dishonourest thou God? For the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles through you, as it is written.” (Romans 2:23-24)

But there is another sense in which a little leaven affects the whole batch. The action and example of this one man would affect the whole church. If this man was accepted as a member of the church and was known to be living in sin, that unconsciously sent a message to everyone in the church that such actions weren't really wrong.

There's an interesting thing here. Some commentators suggest that those in the church were actually twisting their doctrine to justify this sin. But there's really nothing in the text to suggest that. So far as we can tell, there was no theological debate about the nature of incest or the exact meaning of fornication. Most likely, for all the problems Corinth had, their preaching on this topic was perfectly orthodox. But even if it was, even if this was a point the preachers hammered away at every Sunday, this man's presence would always be an unspoken counter-doctrine.

There's a song that says that the Christian is a sermon-in-shoes—our life, our attitudes, and actions do preach a message both to the world and to other Christians. But it is not merely individual Christians, but the church as a collective whole. And that is why an issue of open sin was such an issue—that is why connivance is a problem. Because it ends up corrupting that message, both to the world and to the church.

That is why Paul tells them to exercise discipline regarding the man: why he says: “purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened.” The bulk of the church was unleavened—that is, they were Christians; for all their faults and ignorance and immaturity and even carnality, they were still Christians. They were still on the right road even if it hadn't been a very smooth trip. But they would be corrupted if they did not take action. This fragment of yeast had to be removed.

This idea of purging out the leaven is probably a reference to the feast of the Passover. Exodus 12:15 gives this commandment concerning the Passover: “Seven days shall ye eat unleavened bread; even the first day ye shall put away leaven out of your houses: for whosoever eateth leavened bread from the first day until the seventh day, that soul shall be cut off from Israel.” Not only were they to avoid eating yeast during this time, but they had to get rid of it from their houses. Barclay says the Jews would go through their houses with a very careful, thorough cleaning to make sure there was no leaven anywhere—and some believe this to be the origin of Spring Cleaning.

And as the Jews were careful to remove physical leaven, the church must be careful to remove spiritual leaven.

But there is a caveat to all this, a caveat which may have been a misunderstanding. Though the Bible has two letters to the Corinthians, Paul actually wrote at least two more, which God did preserve. Here Paul mentions having sent them a letter before 1 Corinthians which including this warning—not to company with fornicators, “not to associate with sexually immoral people” as the NET Bible translates it.

Paul told them not to associate with fornicators. By the same logic, they were not to associate idolaters or with the covetous and the extortioners—that is, the greedy, those who always want more and are never satisfied and will do whatever they can to get regardless of the cost to others. “Yet not altogether.”

Maybe I'm wrong, but I wonder if some in the church had misunderstood Paul's letter—because in a place like Corinth, “avoid all fornicators” would be impossible. You couldn't live in Corinth—any more than in an average American city today—without, in some way, rubbing shoulders with fornicators, idolaters, coveters, or extortioners. Paul himself admits that in verse 10: “Then must ye needs go out of the world.” Perhaps some in the church ignored Paul's message because they thought it was an impossible ideal they could never keep, so put it aside.

Whether or not that is true, the point is that the church shouldn't keep company with sinners. Paul said that before, and he is saying it again here. To the list of vices he mentioned before, he adds drunkards and railers. Barnes defines a railer as “A reproachful man; a man of coarse, harsh, and bitter words; a man whose characteristic it was to abuse others; to vilify their character, and wound their feelings.”

That doesn't mean that, as Christians, we will never meet such people. The issue here is one who is living such open, blatant sin and is also “called a brother”--that is, someone who professes to be a Christian. Paul advocates for a distance from such people; it must be made clear that the church does not receive or recognize them. He goes so far as to say: “with such an one no not to eat.” Some think this refers to communion or to the love feast (which was practiced as part of the church worship in Corinth as we will get to later). Others think this means that they weren't to have any sort of social interaction with such people.

At the very least, it means such a man—a man living in definite sin—cannot be received as a member of the church, can't be treated in a way that implies that he is a part of the church. As Paul says quite pointedly, “Put away from among yourselves that wicked person.” We can't fix every problem in the world—we cannot punish every sinner in the world. Only God can do that. But we can—with God's authority—try our best to keep the church pure. We cannot exercise universal discipline, but we can at least try to exercise church discipline.

But this isn't because of some sense of pride or self-righteousness. This isn't so the church can look at itself with satisfaction for being so pure.

We mentioned that Paul spoke of the church cleaning out leaven as a reference to the Passover. The central idea of the Passover was that a lamb was sacrificed to remember the Israelites being delivered from the Angel of Death during the last plague in Egypt. In verse 7, Paul sees Jesus as our Passover lamb—He was sacrificed to bring us life, to deliver us from judgment. 

And just as the Israelites celebrated the Passover feast to remember their salvation, so the church should remember our salvation. When Paul speaks of keeping the feast, he may be thinking specifically of communion—which is a feast of remembrance like Passover and is basically the Christian version of Passover. Or he may be thinking in a more general, symbolic sense. In any case, as Christians, we should remember the sacrifice of Christ and live our lives as a remembrance of that. And as the old feast was to be without leaven, so this new feast should be without leaven—without the corruption of sin. Yet this is still a feast, not a fast—a feast of sincerity and truth.

That is the goal of all this—church discipline isn't simply an exercise of power for the church or a chance to see someone get in trouble. The goal is for the church to be able to worship and serve God in purity and truth.

You can take this part with a grain of salt since it is largely just my thoughts. I really started wondering: why did God command the Jews to cleanse their houses of leaven for Passover—why was this so important? Obviously, it's symbolic, but what does it symbolize?

So, let's go back and talk about the first Passover. As you remember, the Israelites were slaves in Egypt; after a number of plagues, Pharaoh still refused to let the people go. God told Moses that there would be one final plague, leading to their deliverance. During that plague—the destruction of the firstborn—the Israelites were to sacrifice and lamb, put its blood on the door, and eat a feast. And this is how they were to eat it: “And thus shall ye eat it; with your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and ye shall eat it in haste: it is the LORD'S passover.” (Exodus 12:11) The picture is of preparation; they were to be ready for the exodus that was soon to occur.

Later in the same chapter, we read of how the Egyptians reacted after this final plague: “And the Egyptians were urgent upon the people, that they might send them out of the land in haste; for they said, We be all dead men. And the people took their dough before it was leavened, their kneadingtroughs being bound up in their clothes upon their shoulders.” (Exodus 12:33-34) When God moved to deliver the Israelites, they were forced to leave immediately. They weren't just allowed to leave Egypt; they were thrown out. If you are at all familiar with baking bread with yeast, you are aware that it is a lengthy process; you have to let the dough rise for a period of time before you can even begin to bake it. This is something they didn't have time for. This is mentioned later on: “And they baked unleavened cakes of the dough which they brought forth out of Egypt, for it was not leavened; because they were thrust out of Egypt, and could not tarry, neither had they prepared for themselves any victual.” (Exodus 12:39)

Do you see the point? The reason they ate unleavened bread during the Passover was that they didn't have time to prepare ordinary bread because God was about to deliver them. So what would it have meant if they had leavened their bread and started the process of letting it rise? That would have, in effect, been saying that they didn't believe God was actually going to deliver them, that they didn't really believe God's promise. 

That was why, in memorial, they had to remove all leaven from their house, because yeast was a symbol of doubt. Unleavened bread represented trust that God would keep His promise and deliver them.

And the point of the comparison is this: when the church refuses to act according to God's directions, that is usually a sign of doubt—it means we don't fully trust God's promise. Perhaps the sinner in Corinth was a wealthy or influential man, and the church was worried about how the church would survive without him, and that was why they didn't take disciplinary action—in other words, they didn't fully trust God to take of the church. They were letting their bread rise just in case the exodus didn't happen. 

But that brings us back to verses 7-8—God has provided salvation for us just as He did for the Israelites. We can trust in Him for salvation (and, by implication, for the protection of the church), and so we must rid out all leaven of doubt and attempts at self-promotion apart from His way. The foundation of the church must be truth and sincerity, not doubt and self-reliant scheming.