Do not bring another Christian to court
1 When you have a complaint against a brother, how dare you bring it before pagan judges instead of bringing it before God’s people?
2 Do you not know that you shall one day judge the world? And if you are to judge the world, are you incapable of judging such simple problems?
3 Do you not know that we will even judge the angels? And could you not decide every day affairs?
4 But when you have ordinary cases to be judged, you bring them before those who are of no account in the Church!
5 Shame on you! Is there not even one among you wise enough to be the arbiter among believers?
6 But no. One of you brings a suit against another one, and files that suit before unbelievers.
7 It is already a failure that you have suits against each other. Why do you not rather suffer wrong and receive some damage?
8 But no. You wrong and injure others, and those are your brothers and sisters.
9 Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the Kingdom of God?
Make no mistake about it: those who lead sexually immoral lives, or worship idols, or who are adulterers, perverts, sodomites,
10 or thieves, ex ploiters, drunkards, gossips or embezzlers will not inherit the kingdom of heav en.
11 Some of you were like that, but you have been cleansed and consecrated to God and have been set right with God by the Name of the Lord Jesus and the Spirit of our God.
Sexual immorality
12 Everything is lawful for me, but not every thing is to my profit. Everything is lawful for me, but I will not become a slave of anything.
13 Food is for the stomach, as the stomach is for food, and God will destroy them both. Yet the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord is for the body.
14 And God who raised the Lord, will also raise us with his power.
15 Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? And you would make that part of his body become a part of a prostitute? Never!
16 But you well know that when you join yourselves to a prostitute, you become one with her. For Scripture says: The two will become one flesh.
17 On the contrary, anyone united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him.
18 Avoid unlawful sex entirely. Any other sin a person commits is outside the body but those who commit sexual immorality sin against their own body.
19 Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, given by God? You belong no longer to yourselves.
20 Remember at what price you have been bought and make your body serve the glory of God.
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Comments 1 Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 6
• 6.1 “We carry treasures from God in vessels of clay” (2Cor 4:7). How far is our daily life from what we pretend it is: children of God reborn in the Spirit! What do the members of our own family think about this! What do our near neighbors think of us!
Paul points out the contradiction between the contempt of believers for the false “justice” of the world, and the fact of lawsuits among them. What should they do? Settle their differences in the way indicated by the Gospel (Mt 18:15), in so far as there is a real community. How beautiful it would be to follow the letter of the Gospel (Mt 5:40)!
• 12. Everything is lawful to me, but not everything is to my profit. People without conscience quoted the first part of this sentence to justify their immoral behavior.
Food is for the stomach.… the body is for the Lord (v. 13). Paul contrasts what is purely bio logical in our body with what makes up our whole person. To eat and drink are requirements of the stomach (modern language: body). In sexual union the body is given (mod ern language: person). This is why the believer who belongs to Christ cannot give himself to a prostitute.
Paul finds himself with the same problem that had led him to intervene in 1Thes 4. For the Jews, all the criteria for morality were in the commandments of the Law. It was not usually questioned to what degree these commandments were the expression of an eternal order or depended on the beliefs and the culture of past time. Whatever the Law condemned – interpreted by the religious community – was a sin. Yet the Greeks and the pagans were ignorant of this law. Paul recalls the commandments on sexual matters (5:11and 6:10; Eph 5:3), as Jesus had done (Mk 7:21), but he is careful not to make it the only criterion of what is good and bad. For him what obliges Christians to control and even strongly curb the practice of sexuality is their life in Christ. They want to respond to a call from God rather than satisfy the demands of nature.
Paul’s way of responding is of particular interest for us today in the universal moral crisis. For centuries and through necessity, sexuality was seen above all as the means of procreation; and from there began the search for the natural law ordering sex, pleasure and procreation. Today, union is no longer, primarily, for procreation even if procreation is desired. The cultural evolution and feminine promotion have made of sexual union, for an ever-increasing number of couples, the occasion of an exceptionally deep human exchange.
At the same time, personal liberation – and the liberation of women who carry all the weight of maternity –
has thrown doubt on former moral laws, seen as belonging to a certain time and culture. Almost all countries that are considered “developed” have had to take into account pre-marital sex, homosexuality, abortion on the mother’s decision, the choice of maternity without marriage. Christians get in touch with these questions with religious references their contemporaries lack. Yet if they don’t have other motivation than a natural law valid for all, limiting sexuality to procreation and only within marriage, they will probably get bogged down in endless discussions that are scarcely convincing.
So they must do what Paul did. Without forgetting the laws in the Old Testament, recognized by the apostles and the tradition of the Church up to our day, it must be said that the sexual conduct of a Christian obeys, first of all, a logic of faith in Jesus Christ. It is less a matter of defining what is “good” or “evil” than showing where the practice and the experience of love and sexuality should lead us. To proclaim moral principles of sexuality, without first highlighting the eminent dignity of our humanity created in the likeness of God, and then consecrated to Christ by baptism and conversion, is wanting to gather the fruits without having planted the tree.