The Greek City of Corinth at the time of the apostle St. Paul was a place of extravagant variety. Located on a narrow isthmus between the Eastern Mediterranean and the lower Adriatic, it was the faster transport route for goods and travelers moving between Rome and the province of Asia. The City possessed one of the most important pagan shrines in Greece, a site notorious for its thousand temple prostitutes. It was a melting pot of cultures, a hang-out for sailors and riffraff, and a center of Greek culture. It was a place where the partying never stopped.
About 50 A.D. St. Paul came to Corinth and across the next three years succeeded in assembling a small Christian community. Its members were a mixed lot. Some had been observant Jews who had come here from different parts of the empire. Others were local Greeks, rooted in a culture that favored eloquent speaking skills, accustomed to minute logical distinctions. In their world constant debate and factional intrigue was taken for granted, almost a form of entertainment. If ever a community had reason to be culturally divided, it was Corinth.
Not surprisingly, within a few years after St. Paul’s departure, the community that he had so painstakingly assembled was divided into factions, and it was in these circumstances that he wrote two letters to the Church of Corinth that we have today.
The Corinthians had aligned themselves under the names of different church leaders. In his First Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul tells them: “Let no one boast about human beings: Paul or Appolon or Cephas.” You all belong “to Christ, and Christ to God.”
Describing himself as a “fool for Christ,” he re-minds the community that verbal skills or knowl-edge of philosophy does not confer holiness: “If anyone among you considers himself wise in this age, let him become a fool to be wise, for the wisdom of this world is foolishness in the eyes of God.” It is in this context that St. Paul’s great an-them to love appears: “If I have all the eloquence of men or of angels, but speak without love, I am simply a gong booming or a cymbal clashing….
Love is always patient and kind; it is never jeal-ous…it is never rude or selfish…it is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure what-ever comes.”
In his Second Letter he argues against “intrigues, backbiting…and disorder,” but rather to “love one another, live in peace,” so that “the God of love and peace lives within you.” He ends with the familiar prayer: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”
Nearly two thousand years have passed since Paul wrote to his fractious community, reminding them that the person of Christ was the source of their foundation as Christians, and that whatever differences existed among them were subsumed by deeper truths that bound them. It is a message that still resonates today.