A little over nine years ago my family and I walked around the site of the city where the letter we’ve been studying these past few weeks was addressed. The archaeological site of ancient Corinth is fascinating largely because so much is preserved. One gets a marvelous sense of walking where saints actually walked. There is the long line of shop stalls in the Agora seen here below the temple of Apollo. There is the road on which Paul very likely entered the city.
There is the Bema where Paul was brought before the proconsul Gallio in Acts 18. And there’s even some stone toilet seats making it plain that real people lived there.
The stone construction of Corinth was done well enough that we can visit and learn from what was built even 2,000 years later. It was good work. Paul had something like it in mind in our text for this Sunday, I Corinthians 3:10-23, as he writes to the church at Corinth exhorting them to consider the quality of what is being built in their lives. “Each should build with care,” says verse 10. The foundation is Jesus Christ and those who lead and participate in the church build on that foundation with various qualities of material.
As C.S. Lewis pointed out in an essay to which I’m always returning (“The Weight of Glory”), that which lasts in this world is what we build into each other’s lives. You and I are the only eternal constructions in sight. We are to live in the church in such a way that we build each other up with the spiritual equivalent of precious metals and precious stones, material that will last even through trials that feel like fire.
The text is complex, moving to reflection on being together the temple of God in verses 16 and 17, and then pulling in themes from chapter 2 about wisdom and foolishness in verses 18-20.
The last three verses seem to sound yet another note, but they also carry forward the wisdom and foolishness theme and relate it back to the business of what is built by leaders in the church. It was a common sentiment in Greek philosophy that the wise “possess all things.” Wisdom was a virtue that gave one ownership of the life and the world around one. The Corinthians were claiming to be wise and so Paul accedes to their claim while putting it in its place.
Yes, says Paul, you are wise, you possess everything. But quit your division and your boasting about this leader or that. They are all yours. All the good which is built up in the church, no matter who does it, belongs to you all. So “Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future–all belong to you. . ..” Then comes the clincher in verse 23, “and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.”
The keen thing about the clincher is that not only does it preclude boasting by humbling us all together as the possession of Christ in whom we are saved (nicely tying back to the Christ as the foundation of the Church), but it shows us even Christ humbling Himself to the Father in the closing phrase, “and Christ belongs to God.” Ultimately we are to be what Jesus is, people who submit and give ourselves away to God in each other in love. That’s the material for buildings that will stand in the fires and last forever.