Today, I am reading and commenting on  1 Corinthians 1-4.

I am always amused by Paul writing about not baptizing anyone in Corinth, except for a couple of people.  I imagine him dictating the letter to someone in a room with several other people and one of them interjecting about someone else he baptized and Paul going, “Oh yeah, them too, better say that I don’t remember baptizing anyone else in case someone comes back with, ‘what about so-and-so, didn’t you baptize them?'”  It is not really important. It just amuses me.  However, the point which Paul was making is important.  Paul did not baptize anyone in his own name, and would have objected to anyone else baptizing someone in his name.  His point was that we should follow Jesus in unity.  We should not allow ourselves to become divided by differences between the ways in which different people preach the Gospel.

Paul points out that he was not sent out to baptize, but rather to preach the Gospel.  Further he writes that he did not preach the Gospel with wisdom or eloquence because doing so might have diminished the power of the cross.  Paul explains that the cross is foolishness to those wise in the ways which humans call wisdom and common sense.  I recently heard Tom Holland (the historian, not the actor) expound on what Paul meant by what he writes here.  I want to note that Tom Holland is an atheist, but I think he got it pretty close.  Mr. Holland explained that to the Romans and Greeks, the strong ruled over and dominated the weak and did what they pleased.  Not only did they view that as “the way things are”, but the “way things ought to be”.  In behaving in that manner, the Greeks and Romans (and for that matter, Tom Holland says, so do all other non-Christian belief systems) felt that the strong were merely imitating the gods.  Paul said that, yes indeed we should imitate God, but that’s not how God behaves.  Rather, Paul tells us that God came down and served the poor and powerless, allowing Himself to be killed in order to model the behavior He wishes us to follow.  So, Paul teaches that the strong should serve the weak, not the other way around.  Paul tells us that this is the point of Jesus’ life.  This idea that individuals had value and that the purpose of being strong, of having power, was to serve those who were weak and powerless transformed the world, and that is at least part of the power to which Paul is referring when he writes about the power of the cross.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.