Word to the Wise
Monday, September 9, 2024 - Monday in the 23th Week in Ordinary Time
[1 Cor 5:1-8 and Luke 6:6-11]Do you not know that a little yeast leavens all the dough? Clear out the old yeast, so that you may become a fresh batch of dough, inasmuch as you are unleavened. For our Paschal Lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us celebrate the feast, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. [1 Corinthians]
SEPTEMBER 9 ST. PETER CLAVER, sj
In a port city like Corinth in the first century A.D., it would not be an exaggeration to say that morality could be described as "anything goes." In today's passage, St. Paul is addressing an incident of incest occurring in the Christian community he had founded in his second missionary journey. In doing so, he reveals his basic "theological anthropology," the whole meaning of conversion and salvation. Faith in Christ means a completely new orientation in one's life. The old way in Corinth, the leaven of malice and wickedness, could not be allowed once one has been baptized into Christ. [cf. Romans 6]. He uses a particularly Jewish image from the Exodus to color his message. The Paschal Lamb at Passover was to be eaten with unleavened bread. Deliverance from slavery to sin means a whole new way of life. Apparently the Christian Corinthians had lapsed into old ways of living because St. Paul addresses a number of problems, including the celebration of the Eucharist and marriage.
The image of leavening can be, in the New Testament, both positive and negative. On the negative side, we have today's image from St. Paul which might be summed up in the old adage that one bad apple can spoil the whole barrel. On the positive side, Jesus used leavening as an image of the way the Kingdom of heaven can take hold in the world. [Matthew 13:33-37] St. Paul's words are used on Easter Sunday to describe the new way of life that the death and resurrection of Christ should bring about in the believer.
Baptism is meant to inaugurate the new way of life and not simply "take away" the status of original sin. When we become members of the Body of Christ, we are challenged to get rid of ways of seeing and doing things contrary to the teachings of Christ. It is not a past event but a present power and way of being. Pope St. Leo the Great said it wonderfully cesnturies ago: "Christians! Remember your dignity!" AMEN