Going on, Paul writes, “Clean out the old yeast so that you may be a new batch of dough---you are, in fact, without yeast. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed” (5:7). This terminology presumes that this church has been well-instructed in the history of Israel, so as to see themselves as a part of that continuing narrative, as apart from an understanding of the exodus the talk of Christ as Passover would fall on ignorant ears. At a meal, with the messianic feast of the Lord’s Supper and what it communicates about the church and its role as emissaries of the kingdom of God in view, the recipients of the letter go on to hear “So then, let us celebrate the festival (whether the actual Passover or simply the Lord’s Supper in recognition of the messianic feast in which the Passover is consistently called to mind to provide the messianic-banquet-informed communion with its depth of meaning) not with the old yeast, the yeast of vice and evil, but with the bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth” (5:8).
Not only does the talk of yeast and bread indicate that a meal is taking place, and not only does the mention of yeast and bread serve as additional references to the Passover in particular, but it is also the case that such talk calls to mind that which would have been part of the oral traditions concerning Jesus that were then in circulation---specifically, Jesus’ reference to the yeast of the Pharisees and Herod, which would certainly produce thoughts of the two great feasts over which Jesus presided (found in Mark, which may have been the earliest and most widely know thread of Jesus traditions within the orally oriented church community). With this foundational context in place, we now go on to let Paul speak for himself at length, as we have properly situated ourselves at a meal (with symposium not far from our thoughts) together with this particular Christian body and read, “I wrote you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people. In no way did I mean the immoral people of this world, or the greedy and swindlers and idolaters, since you would then have to go out of the world. But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who calls himself a Christian who is sexually immoral, or greedy, or an idolater, or verbally abusive, or a drunkard or a swindler. Do not even eat with such a person. For what do I have to do with judging those outside? Are you not to judge those inside? But God will judge those outside. Remove the evil person from among you” (5:9-13).
When we attempt to consider how this is to be interpreted first by its recipients, and then by the later church (throughout the centuries) that should make every effort to hear and understand as a first century listener so as to make proper application to practice in an attempt to live out what it would mean to be a Christian in their own situation (place and time), we cannot read this apart from a comprehension of the social forces that were at work and in place in that time. Just as the celebration of the Lord’s Supper would be a microcosm of all that was intended for the kingdom of God, so too would a celebratory meal and attendant symposium be a microcosm of the larger society in which such are taking place. Additionally, this section demands to be heard as a whole, without division or isolation of independent thoughts, and it also demands, because of the mention of not eating with such people and with the dis-association list given here that is repeated and expanded upon in the sixth chapter, to be heard in the context of a meal. It also demands to be heard in the context of what the meal says about the body of believers; and for our purposes here, because of his mention of judging, it must be heard with mindfulness of what Paul says about eating and drinking without careful regard for the body and the eating and drinking of judgment that such would entail.
Yes, we must read this letter as the mounting argument that it is. We do violence to the text and to Paul’s thesis when we carelessly isolate statements to use them as aphoristic-truth clubs with which to beat people over the head in an effort to reinforce our own previously arrived at conclusions. While we recognize that Paul deals with a variety of problems, failing to see that there is a substantial progression, based upon an underlying movement with a particular point of reference, is a wanton abuse of the Apostle’s work that might lead us into all sorts of erroneous conclusions while missing the larger point altogether. That substantial progression appears to be closely related to Paul’s concerns with “the body.”
Speaking of the body, as Paul stresses the importance of the movement of the whole of the church body---with individual practice subsumed to its relevance to the church body as it attempts to live as a microcosm of the kingdom of heaven while also being an ambassadorial light to the world that speaks boldly of the reign of God and the coming together of heaven and earth that is accomplished through the death and resurrection of Jesus (which is what is stressed at the communion table)---and though the topic is different than that which is addressed in the fifth and sixth chapters, when we move to the tenth chapter we see Paul again taking up and operating within the motif of the meal, with Paul again stressing the body (eyeing this in the light of the mention of the need for a careful regard for the body in 11:29) when he writes “Is not the cup of blessing that we bless a sharing in the blood of Christ? Is not the bread that we break a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all share the one bread” (10:16-17). Here, we do not overlook the Abrahamic covenant pretensions that are present with the mention of blessing in conjunction with the sharing of the cup and the breaking of the bread, and we must affirm that there is something of grand importance in the breaking of the bread that speaks to the body of Christ---the church---and its role to be a blessing for the world. This role is communicated to an on-looking world through meal practice.
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