In this passage, Paul calls for the excommunication, the breaking of fellowship, with a man unapologetically sleeping with his father’s wife.
Christians and Jews had a generally higher sexual ethic than the pagans around them. In this case, Paul calls out an instance of a situation where this is not the case. Note, though, that this is not the aspect of the sin that prompts Paul to call for excommunication.
Instead, there are three things that bring it to this level – first, it is a sin that is damaging the church itself; second, it’s being done in an ongoing way without any repentance or remorse; third, it’s being done by a professing Christian. These things bring the sin to a different level, one that requires exclusion.
This reaction is still out of love, rather than as punishment or vengeance. In 1 Thessalonians, Paul addresses this, noting that it is about warning him as a brother, not attacking him as an enemy.
Why does it come to this level? Why expel rather than rebuke? We get a sense of this from Paul’s metaphor of yeast. This one sin, like yeast, infects the whole church and can work through the whole body. The nature of sin is to spread.
There’s another implication here – the moral standards within the church are clearly higher than those outside of it, and Christians themselves must be morally superior to the outside world. The nature of being a Christian will result in more moral behavior. This is why the “immoral brother” must be exiled. There is an evangelical aspect to this as well. The church is called to be a light, and sin clearly dims that light.
Typically, when we think of prideful Christians, we tend to think of overly moralistic and legalistic Puritans. The pride of the Corinthian Christians, on the other hand, was a very different kind. It’s a pride of acceptance and tolerance, a pride that sees God’s law as something they can edit and distort for their own purposes. While the pride of the Pharisee sees God as an equal with whom a bargain can be made, the pride of the Corinthians sees God as in fact a subordinate whose words and instruction are less important than their own desires.
This is certainly something we deal with in our Christian culture. We are terrified of seeming legalistic or works-focused. This leads us to diminish the value of our own efforts against sin. Paul does not have this issue. He does not tell the Corinthians to ask God to take the sin away, he tells them to knock it off.
Satan is flanking us – rather than pushing us to focus on working our way to God, in our culture here, he is clearly pushing us the other way, towards abandoning our standards in favor of cheap grace.
Much of this comes from an image, at minimum, of humility. But the self-deprecation that deprecates the work of Christ is not actually humility.
It is easier to lower our collective standards than it is to individually attack the sin within our own lives. This is why Paul calls this out as yeast that works through the dough. If we see other Christians relaxing their own standards, it becomes far easier to relax our own.
There are some important differences between this kind of excommunication then and now. With only the single church in a city and with Christians having given up so much to join the church, there were major material implications to the breaking of fellowship.
The spiritual consequences of this are the same, though. We are today much more likely to excommunicate ourselves, to end our fellowship with Christ’s church and to hand ourselves over to Satan. Don’t do that.
When this does have to happen, remember that this is actually evangelism. Ongoing unrepentant sin is a sign that the Holy Spirit is not present, and the breaking of fellowship is perhaps the only way to bring this truth to light. Whether it comes as a corporate act of a church body, or within our personal relationships, what seems like a harsher action than most are comfortable with is in fact an act of love that may well save someone’s soul.
– Sermon Notes, James Mallory, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA
1 Corinthians 5
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