The Meat of the Matter

Propers: The Fourth Sunday After the Epiphany, AD 2024 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“No idol in the world really exists. There is no God but one.”

In our epistle this morning, St Paul writes to the Christian congregation at Corinth, an ancient Grecian city with an opulent reputation, which Rome nevertheless had burnt to the ground, then refounded as a provincial capital, a colony of Romans, Greeks, and Jews. In Corinth, as throughout the Empire, religion could not easily be extricated from civic and social life. Indeed, religion was understood as part of public obligation. Private belief and pious family practice would be considered more a philosophy than a religion.

Most people, even in urban areas, would’ve been largely vegetarian, or at least pescatarian, because meat remained rare and expensive. One exception proved to be the temples. Greco-Roman priests regularly held elaborate public sacrifices. And it’s not as though the gods would then descend to eat the flesh. Rather, temples shared this sacrificial meat in civic festivals. Corinthian sanctuaries, such as those dedicated to Asclepius, Demeter, and Kore, either abutted the marketplace or had dining rooms of their own. They functioned as public eateries, religious restaurants.

So imagine that you’re a Christian who typically cannot afford to eat meat, yet on holidays your city hall holds an ox roast for the entire community. Finger-lickin’ good. Should it bother you that the cooks aren’t Christian? Or can your family feast, in good conscience and good health? Such is the problem St Paul would here address.

We might not think it particularly relevant to our own situation. It’s been rather a long time since we used to slit the throats of bulls and goats, to hang them upside-down from yew trees in honor of Thor and Odin. Yet Paul discerns division within the Body of Christ. And it wouldn’t be the first time. The Corinthians are a troublesome congregation, imposing hierarchies of wealth and privilege, treating fellow Christians as second-class members in the Kingdom of God. The rich, for example, enjoyed a finer, fancier Eucharist.

Some of the Corinthians in question have no problem at all tucking into a nice T-bone at the Asklepeion, whilst their coreligionists wrestle a troubled conscience. So what’s it going to be, Paul? Can we all join the party or not?

St Paul begins diplomatically. Concerning idols, he writes, we all possess knowledge. We’re all educated people here, are we not? Thus “we all know, we all understand, that no idol in the world truly exists, and that there is no God but one.” Indeed, he continues—and here it gets interesting—“there may be many so-called gods in heaven and on earth,” many gods, many lords, “yet for us there is one God, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.”

What is he saying? The simplest, most fundamentalist interpretation would be that idols are make-believe, that only our God exists, the exclusively Christian God, so what does it matter whether someone dedicates our daily bread to an imaginary being? If the mayor thanks a unicorn, does that cause us theological qualms? Yet that’s not Paul’s belief, not his take. Paul follows up immediately by affirming that “there may be many so-called gods in heaven and on earth, as in fact there are many gods and many lords.”

Paul, you see, believes in spirits, in angels and elementals, powers and principalities. He’s not saying, then, that idols are all in our heads. These are the spirits that men call gods, and here Paul affirms that they’re real. He warns us not to be in thrall to them. For Christians to participate in pagan rites, he will tell us two chapters from now, is for us to sacrifice to demons. We ought to know better, for we have seen that there is but one God, one Lord, one Father of us all, in whom we all live and move and have our being.

Think to the book of Acts, when Paul is in Athens, praising the Athenians for their many temples, many shrines. “I see that you are very religious in every way,” he tells them, and holds it to be a virtue, immensely to their credit. He then sees a shrine dedicated “to an unknown god,” and this he uses as his in: “What you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.” Paul, in Athens, presents Christianity not as negating their native religion but as fulfilling it, revealing it, opening it up.

St Paul quotes philosophers and poets as readily as he does the Hebrew Scriptures. When he says that God is one, he doesn’t mean that faith can be reduced to some multiple choice test on which you’d better pick the proper divinity. Rather, he affirms that all true religion, all true devotion, however unenlightened, however misguided, points toward the One God, the True God, beneath and beyond them all.

Paul, in other words, appears to believe that all of us, in some sense, worship the One God whether we know it or not; and that this One God, of all peoples and places and ages and worlds, has now been fully revealed, fully unveiled, in the person of Jesus Christ. Everything else we perceive as through a glass darkly. Christ at last is the true face of God, the God beyond all gods. C.S. Lewis, Martin Luther, and Benedict XVI all agree that other faiths do worship God. They simply do not know Him in the way we do through Christ.

We cannot go backward. Paul tells us such would be to sacrifice to Satan. Yet we can affirm the presence of God in every human life, and bring our Lord to others through our own.

So when St Paul says that no idol exists, that there is no God but one, he isn’t denying the reality of other spirits, other so-called gods. Rather, this sacrificial meat, offered up in ignorance to Kore, is offered in some real way to God—because there is only One God. It’s a middle path, but a common one. He doesn’t say that all religions are the same; he is a Christian, after all, and willing to die for his faith. Yet St Paul sees a value in his neighbor’s faith as well: a value he would offer unto Jesus, by offering Jesus to all.

Eat, in other words: because all of it comes from God to us; all of it is offered to God by us; and all of us are returning to God in one way or another. All things exist through Jesus. And you know this, Paul writes. You’re sharp enough, mature enough in your faith, to have this knowledge, to possess this richer, more nuanced understanding. Alas, there’s one thing you’ve forgotten: and that’s the fact that knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.

There are those in your community, St Paul says, who do not have your strength of faith, who cannot look to a statue of Zeus and see some reflection of Christ, however dim. They need the simple milk of faith before the solid food. Such believers aren’t ready for philosophy. They see you eating at a pagan temple, and they think you’ve left the faith. They see you as apostate, betraying Jesus Christ. They won’t eat with you. “For one believes he may eat all things, yet the weak eat only vegetables,” as he writes in Romans.

Your mind, Paul pens to the carnivorous Corinthians, is in the right place. I agree with you in theory. But where is your heart? Where is your love lived out in practice? “Take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak.” You have the proper knowledge, he says, but in scandalizing your brethren, you thereby sin against Jesus Christ. You wound His Body—not by the eating, but by your callousness towards their concerns, by dismissing a Christian conscience not yet fully formed.

This is a pastoral problem, not a theological one. What good does our freedom in Jesus do if we misuse it so that others fall away? Basically, Paul tells the intellectual Corinthians that they’re right in the head but wrong in the heart. If it bothers your neighbor, don’t do it, he writes. What is freedom for, if not to love our brethren? Jesus doesn’t care about the meat. But He cares about the person by your side.

Anno Domini 2024, we haven’t many pagan temples left—though we seem to be building some more. Yet the heart of Paul’s concern, the Christian division at Corinth, boils down to the fact that Christians would often rather be right than shut up and love our neighbor. And that’s as much an issue today as ever it was in our past. May Christ, who frees us from sin and death, and is with us wherever we go, enlighten both our hearts and minds alike.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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