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Twelve Months of Sundays: Reflections on Bible Readings, Year B


Proper 1


Isaiah 40:21–31
1 Corinthians 9:16–23
Mark 1:29–39


Nobody in Corinth had seen it before. Nobody had thought of it. It wasn’t on their mental map, any more than it is in our world. So when Paul wanted to tell them that as Christians, working out how to live in a pagan environment, they might face times when they should voluntarily forgo something to which they had a complete right—an intricate but vital principle—the only example he could give of what this might look like was his own.
Hence this bit of autobiography, providing a fascinating glimpse of both Paul’s practice and his theory. The underlying point (chapters 8, 10) concerns food offered to idols. Christians, believing in the creator God, are free to eat whatever is sold in the market. But because they believe in this God through the crucified Jesus, their freedom is further defined by the gospel’s confrontation with evil, and by the conscience of fellow-believers. They must not give offence.
The equivalent point in Paul’s regular practice is poignant in context: he has refrained from charging the Corinthians financially for his services as an apostle. He claims the right to such support, but voluntarily does without it, in order to spread the gospel as widely as possible. The same rule has governed his [behavior] when faced with different groups in society: he will voluntarily submit to their social customs while among them, not because his own salvation depends upon it but because theirs may. Those who today take the gospel into fresh territory, geographical or social, will need to work out the equivalent in each case.
They may also need to think out answers to the inevitable charge of inconsistency. Being loyal to the gospel seems to mean being prepared to appear disloyal from time to time to what seem to others like principles. Distinguishing this position in turn from currently fashionable relativism may be one of the great moral challenges of our time.
The flurry of activity on a single busy Sabbath in Capernaum no doubt raised similar questions both for the townspeople and for Jesus’ initial disciples. What was going on? Where would it lead? Was Capernaum now to be the [center] of a new movement of healing and teaching? Everybody was looking for Jesus; a few more days, and the whole town would have been on his side. But he had to move on. Other places needed to hear. The gospel took precedence over human success and even human stability. Another hard lesson, now as then.
Underneath the hard lessons we find the [unshakable] trust of both Jesus and Paul in the purposes of the one true God. Human traditions and structures were as nothing compared to the sovereignty and supremacy of this God. Isaiah’s majestic vision of God, dwarfing both the stars of the heavens and the princes of the earth, remains an excellent starting-point for living in God’s presence, and for pondering what the gospel demands of, and assures to, those who announce it.


N. T. Wright, Twelve Months of Sundays: Reflections on Bible Readings, Year B (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2002). 28-29.

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