The factions are dealt with; now the specific cases begin, and the first is the worst. Paul has been building for four chapters toward the charge that the Corinthians are inflated — pephysiōmenoi, puffed up — and here he shows what they are inflated about.
What happens
"It is widely reported that there is immorality among you, and immorality of a kind not found even among pagans — a man living with his father's wife. And you are inflated with pride. Should you not rather have been sorrowful? The one who did this deed should be expelled from your midst." Paul, "absent in body but present in spirit," has already passed judgment: the assembly is to gather and "hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the master." Then the Passover image: "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, Messiah, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us celebrate the feast… with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth."
What to notice
The offence is real and the law is clear — Leviticus 18:8 forbids a man his father's wife, and so, as Paul points out, did Roman practice. But watch where his sentence falls: "And you are inflated with pride."What he cannot get past is not the man's conduct but the congregation's posture about it. They are not defending him exactly; they are proud — most likely of their own broad-mindedness, their freedom from small scruples, the gnōsis Paul thanked Theos for in chapter one. He says the correct emotion was penthēsate, mourning. Not outrage. Grief. Then the yeast: Paul writes to a largely Gentilechurch and reaches for a Jewish household ritual — before Passover the leaven is searched out and removed, crumb by crumb. And his grammar puts the indicative before the imperative: "clear out the old yeast… inasmuch as you ARE unleavened."Become what you already are. One word to keep: eilikrineia, "sincerity," whose likeliest etymology is heilē, sunlight, plus krinō — what survives being held up to the light.
A morning prayer — "at dawn I bring my plea and watch" (Psalm 5:4) — from someone with enemies, asking to be led straight because the way ahead is not obvious.
The selected verses
Psalm 5:5–6."You are not a Theos who delights in evil; no wicked person finds refuge with you. The arrogant may not stand in your presence; you hate all evildoers." Psalm 5:7."You destroy those who speak falsehood; the bloodthirsty and the deceitful Yahweh abhors." Psalm 5:12."But let all who take refuge in you be glad and forever shout for joy. You shelter them, and those who love your name rejoice in you."
What to notice
Psalm 5:5 begins lo el hafetz resha attah — "not a Theos delighting in wickedness are you." The verb hafetz is a pleasure word: to take delight in, to be pleased by. The psalmist is not saying Theos punishes wickedness; he is saying it gives him no pleasure, which is a different and more personal claim. The psalm's argument for confidence is a statement about what Theos enjoys. And the word for the arrogant in Psalm 5:6 is holelim, from a root meaning to boast or, in some forms, to rave. The lectionary set it beside a reading whose charge against a whole church is that they are inflated.
The second sabbath controversy in two days. Saturday's was about hunger and grain; today's is about a disability and a room full of people waiting to see what will happen. Immediately after this, Luke has Jesus spend the night on a mountain in prayer and choose the Twelve — so this scene is the last thing before the church gets its shape.
What happens
On another sabbath he is teaching in the synagogue, and a man is there "whose right hand was withered." The scribes and Pharisees watch "to see if he would cure on the sabbath, so that they might discover a reason to accuse him." Jesus knows what they are thinking and says to the man: "Come up and stand before us." The man rises and stands there. Then Jesus asks the room: "I ask you, is it lawful to do good on the sabbath rather than to do evil, to savelife rather than to destroy it?" He looks around at them all and says, "Stretch out your hand." The man does, and his hand is restored. "But they became enraged and discussed together what they might do to Jesus."
What to notice
Luke alone specifies that it was the right hand — hē cheir autou hē dexia. In a world of manual labor that is the working hand, the trade, the livelihood: a physician's detail and an economic one. Then the staging. Before arguing anything, Jesus tells the man to stand in the middle, eis to meson. He puts the human being in the centre of the room and only then asks the legal question. Nobody there gets to debate the abstraction; the case is standing in front of them with his hand at his side. And the question is not the one they were waiting for. They wanted to know whether healing counted as work; he asks whether it is lawful agathopoiēsai ē kakopoiēsai — to do good or to do harm, to save a life or destroy it. He has reframed doing nothing as an option with moral weight. Their reaction is one of the best words in Luke: eplēsthēsan anoias, they were filled with anoia — literally un-mind. Not anger exactly; the state of a mind that has stopped working.
How They Fit Together
Two congregations with their outrage pointing the wrong way
A withered hand in the room, which nobody proposed to do anything about
Two congregations, and both have their outrage pointing the wrong way. Corinth has an actual scandal — Paul says it is a kind of thing the pagans do not do — and the church has metabolized it into a credential. Nobody appears to be defending the man on the merits; what appalls Paul is that they are puffed up, apparently pleased with their own capacity to accommodate. The synagogue in Luke has the opposite malfunction: presented with a man whose working hand is dead, they are watching not the man but the healer, and what they are watching for is a violation. One community cannot be shocked by anything; the other is shocked by the wrong thing. Both are failures of proportion, and both end in a decision about a person: expel him, or find a way to charge him.
The Gospel supplies the diagnostic the first reading needs. Is it lawful to do good or to do evil? — a question that becomes unanswerable only if you have decided in advance that inaction is safe. Corinth thought inaction was safe. They were not participants in the man's sin; they simply did nothing about it, and Paul's charge is that the yeast does not require your participation to work. A little yeast leavens all the dough. It only requires that it be left in the house.
Which is why Paul reaches for Passover rather than a legal code. The removal of leaven is a search — deliberate, domestic, undertaken by lamplight in corners nobody normally looks at. It is not the same act as punishing an offender, and Paul's stated purpose is not punitive: "so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the master." The point of the search is the house, and the point of the expulsion, as he frames it, is the man. And Psalm 5 keeps the day from becoming a lesson in vigilance. You are not a Theos who delights in evil. The reason to clear the leaven is not that Theos is watching for infractions — that is exactly the posture of the people in the synagogue — but that he takes no pleasure in the thing itself. The scribes were monitoring for a violation; Jesus was looking at a hand.
A Question to Sit With
He made the man stand in the middle of the room before he asked the legal question, and that changed what kind of question it was. I do most of my deciding the other way round — I settle the principle first, at a comfortable distance, and only then look at who it lands on. It is far easier that way, and the answers are cleaner. What decision am I currently holding at arm's length, and what would happen if I asked the person it concerns to come and stand in the middle of the room first?