“Is Christ Divided”
8th Sunday after Trinity Sunday/Pentecost
1 Corinthians 1:10-18; Matthew 14:14-22
I would like to draw your attention to The First Epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians, an excerpt from which has been read today during the Divine Service.
Corinth is a large Greek city by the sea, a rich trading centre since ancient times. We know historically that Corinth was founded in 1350 BC. Paul, after preaching the faith of Christ in Thessalonica, Philippi, and Athens, arrived at the commercial port of Corinth, where about the year 52 after the birth of Christ he founded a large Community of Christ, staying there for two years. The Corinthian Community in this trading port was famous for its spiritual and material wealth. The members of the Church were mostly Greeks or people of Greek culture.
After two years, Paul, having prepared his successors, departed, but kept in constant contact with the Corinthian Church. However, diverse peoples continued to come to the port of Corinth, and various preachers of the faith of Christ arrived, too. Paul received information that the Corinthian Christians were divided into groups, and these groups--although they were not hostile towards each other as are the followers of different Christian faiths in our times—competed amongst themselves, different groups took different names: some called themselves Paul's, others - Cephas’s (that is, - Peter's), others – Apollos’, and the fourth - Christ's.
From this it is apparent that the believing Corinthian Christians patterned themselves according to the philosophical groups that were common in various Greek cities. Each philosophical grouping, adopting the name of its favorite philosopher, competed with the other. Newly converted Christians, as can be seen from the apostolic account, wanted to turn their confession of Christ into a wise philosophical system. They shared by name the preachers of the faith of Christ who were either there or who sent their followers. This is how the Christian groups of Paul, Cephas (Peter), Apollos and Christ were formed...
It is quite clear that when Paul founded the Church there, his personal admirers were there: Cephas’ (Peter’s) followers were those who cared about the preservation of Jewish customs in Christianity, Apollos was a learned Jew of Alexandria who received the faith of Christ from Paul's disciples Aquila and Priscilla in Ephesus (TheActs of the Apostles 18:35), and who then preached in Corinth. He fully adhered to Paul's gospel about Christ; Paul speaks about him thus:
“I planted, Apollos watered, but God made it grow.” (1 Corinthians 3:6)
But Apollos was, as it seems, a good speaker, and a group was formed in his name from those people who loved perhaps the greatest eloquence, and not the truth.
The last group, which called itself Christ's, was a kind of opposition to the first three groups, but they, too, did not stand above the other groups; they only shielded themselves with Christ, making the Lord the head of their group.
Such a division struck the Apostle Paul profoundly; he considered it an exasperating misinterpretation, and he appeals to all groups, to the entire Church with a sincere supplication, with questions:
“Is Christ divided?
Was Paul crucified for you?
Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?” (1 Cor. 1:13)
Paul even says that he personally baptized a few people,
“lest anyone should say that I had baptized in my own name.”
He says that he had another main commission from the Lord:
“For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of no effect.”
That is, we should understand correctly: all those who accepted the faith of Christ were baptized, but few were directly baptized personally by the Apostle Paul—they were baptized by his assistants, while the Apostle first attended to the preaching of the Gospel in order to bring the teaching of Christ to the consciousness of people (1 Cor. 1:15,17).
The Apostle Paul was very struck by the division of the Corinthian Christians according to the names of individual preachers, and he reminded the Corinthians that they had all accepted one faith in Christ the Saviour, Who alone for all gave Himself to be crucified on the cross (1 Cor. 1:23).
In the light of those declarations of the Apostle Paul, it is good for us to recognized the division of Christians in our time into different groups, which in many cases are already hostile to each other. Starting from the 15th century, in the western countries of Europe, the struggle against injustices in the Roman Church, against papal oppression, began. This struggle took on the characteristics of a strong religious movement, especially in the 16th century under the leadership of Martin Luther in Germany.
But a second extreme developed; instead of departing from Rome and returning to the Universal Apostolic Church with the Orthodox doctrine, with the preserved Sacraments, the priesthood, and independent administrative life in each country, the protesters against Rome divided by the names of their leaders: Lutherans, Calvinists, Zwinglians, Mennonites, Evangelicals (similar to the Corinthian “Christ’s”). They rejected, outside of baptism, almost all the Sacraments, rejected the Holy Liturgy, and later entered not only with Rome, but also among themselves, into a stubborn struggle. People have differed and are different in understanding the will of God, the Holy Scriptures, and because of this difference in understanding, they are constantly dividing, forming different religious groups.
In fact, most people now divided themselves into those Christian groups through their human wisdom, about which Ap. Paul expresses himself through an ancient prophecy:
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.” (1 Cor. 1:19).
Through the application of human wisdom in the confession of the teaching of Christ, it has come even to the denial of the image of the cross. It is common knowledge that many modern Protestants reject the image of the Lord's cross--for them it is only a gallows-tree... The Apostle Paul clearly testified about such people:
“For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” (1 Cor. 1:18).
In the same way, following the Apostle Paul, we accept that truth. But the truth about the cross of the Lord, as well as the truth of The Gospel of Christ, is unchangeable; we confess them, because they are a manifestation — not “of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power”. (1 Cor. 2:4)
And we are also aware that neither at the time of the writing of The Epistle to the Corinthians, nor in our times--Christ was not divided, no one can divide Christ. It is only people who can separate themselves, withdraw from Christ.
Amen.
Very Rev. Fr. Taras Slavchenko
Taras Slavchenko was born on March 8, 1918 in Nikopol, Dnipropetrovsk region in Ukraine. After graduating from school and the Pedagogical College, he entered the language and literature faculty of the Scientific Pedagogical Institute. Having successfully completed it in 1938, he served as a teacher in a secondary school.
