The church at Corinth was a very divided community, it was full of different factions. And people were very conscious of which group they belonged to – some said they were following Paul, others said that they preferred to be identified with Apollos and yet others said their hero was Cephas (better known to us as the apostle Peter). We don’t know much about the details of the differences between the groups, but that doesn’t matter, because each generation has its own divisions, factions and camps. And the fact that we don’t know their detailed differences means that we cannot escape Paul’s point by saying “well our differences today are not what he was talking about”. Paul was spelling out a principle that remains good for all times and about all differences. Today our church, the Church of England, remains divided over a number of factors: issues about women in leadership of the church, issues of gender and sexuality, questions in relation to what we should be doing about reaching net zero, and big questions about money – where it should come from and what it should be spent on, and those are just four of the matters that divide our church today, as you can see clearly on social media.  

In the part of the letter that comes immediately before what was read to us in our second lesson Paul has been saying that no one has anything that they had not been given and if what they have is a gift what have they got to boast about? It is not anything they have achieved or earned – it is all gift.   

And from there he launches into a strong criticism of them and their attitudes. He says that each group keeps on about their own particular gift saying that because we’ve got this we’ve got everything. To which Paul says with a heavy dose of irony – you do indeed have everything! You are exceedingly rich! As rich as kings! And you can imagine them as they hear that being read out, revelling in it, puffing themselves up more and more, in what they see as their splendour and spiritual affluence.  

At which point Paul draws a contrast with himself and the other apostles, saying that they are at the other end of the line. 

The line he has in mind is one his readers would have been familiar with. What he says would bring to their minds images of the emperor returning from a military campaign. A great triumphal arch would have been erected at the entrance to the city and the emperor or king would then pass through the arch in triumph with his victorious army following behind. The soldiers would be carrying all the booty they had captured. Then at the end of the line would come the bedraggled and weary prisoners, awaiting execution or sale into slavery. This was of course before the age of any Geneva Conventions!

Paul says that just as you see yourselves and your group as kings at the front of the line, we apostles know that we are at the back. We are seen by all as foolish, as weak, and we are held in disrepute. He says his own daily experience is of being hungry, thirsty, poorly clothed, beaten and homeless. 

But he says that against that daily experience of being rejected and persecuted, his response and that of other true apostles is always to respond in ways that are truly countercultural. When they are reviled, he says they bless their revilers; when they are persecuted, he says they go on and on and do not give up; and when they are slandered, he says they speak back kindly. Although he knows that they themselves will always be seen and regarded as just rubbish. 

So what is this all about? What does it mean for us in our day when we don’t need such processions to know that our army has been triumphant; today we see the outcome of wars on our screens as it is happening. 

What this is all about is how we see ourselves, and how we relate to other people. And those two things are always connected to each other. 

Right at the heart of our reading Paul says about himself that he is a fool for the sake of Christ. In other words, his attitude to himself and others is dictated by his being a follower of Jesus Christ. And after all it is Jesus whom we follow not Apollos, Peter, Paul, or any of our twenty first century faction leaders. It was Jesus, who was himself reviled, beaten, spat upon, and crucified. And Paul had no expectation that in following Jesus he could expect anything different; he expected to be treated as Jesus had been treated. But the flip side was that when he Paul was abused, like Jesus, he would never give like for like, but would respond as Jesus had responded. 

And so for us – we are unlikely to experience the sort of opposition and persecution that Paul did as he travelled round the Mediterranean. We know that he was shipwrecked, beaten with rods three times, flogged five times with thirty nine stripes, in and out prison, and more.  

We may not get anywhere near that, but we do and will have people who tease us, criticise us, or put us down. And our natural response is to want to hit back in some shape or form. But if we are primarily following Jesus then we are learning a different way of responding – namely by being kind, saying good things about other people, and hanging on in there through all that we are on the receiving end of. 

Is that weakness? It may sound like it. Far from it! It takes determination and courage to live like that. And we cannot do it in our own strength, but only by the grace of God and in the power of the Holy Spirit. 

And that kind of living is to be applied in all our relationships with other people – those closest to us in our families, our neighbours, those we work with and socialise with, as well as those we worship alongside and those from whom we differ on any particular issue. 

In all those situations we will be tempted, I imagine on almost a daily basis, to retaliate in some way in response to what others say or do to us. But as those who are now living our lives walking alongside Jesus Christ, we will be modelling our walk and our talk on the pattern of His life. 

 And when you begin to live like that it plays right into our divisions and factions. They are of course real and sometimes there are real issues of truth and error. However, when we recognise that as followers of Jesus everything we have has been given to us, we have nothing that enables us to say we are better than anyone else. And so we should always speak well of one another and to one another. That is what shows we are truly following Jesus Christ. And that pattern of relating builds the kind of communities that our world so desperately needs and that leads to peace and justice. 

Amen