The Gift Nobody Wants
1 Corinthians 5:1-2 “It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father’s wife. And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you.”
Dr. Paul Brand spent decades treating people with leprosy, first in India and later in a hospital in Louisiana, and what he learned there rewrote what doctors thought they knew about the disease. Leprosy attacks the nerves. The wounds and the lost fingers everyone pictures with it come later, and they trace back to one terrible fact: these patients feel no pain. A man steps on a nail and keeps right on walking. A woman leans her hand on a hot stove and never pulls it away. An injury you or I would yank back from in half a second, they will sit in for hours, because nothing inside them is sounding the alarm. Brand spent his life arriving at a conclusion that sounds backward: pain is a gift. The very thing we spend our lives trying to escape is part of what keeps us alive.
Paul saw something just as backward taking root in the church at Corinth, and it frightened him. Word had reached him about a man in the congregation living in an ongoing relationship with his own stepmother. This was no secret being whispered, and no single bad night he was trying to climb out of; it was a settled arrangement, carried on in the open by a man who still turned up on Sunday and sang along with everyone else. Paul notes that even the pagans around them wouldn’t stomach this, and that Roman law itself forbade it. The scandal is bad enough by itself. But notice where Paul actually aims his shock.
His very first rebuke skips past the man and lands on the church. “And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn?” The word translated arrogant means puffed up, swollen, full of air. Mourn is no softer a word: it’s what you do standing at a graveside. Paul is telling them there’s been a death in the room, and they’re throwing a party.
Why would anyone be proud of something like this? The likeliest answer is that they had found a way to feel good about how broad-minded they were. Look how accepting we are. Look how much grace we have, that we can welcome anything and flinch at nothing. They had turned their own tolerance into a trophy. And here is where Brand’s patients come back to mind. A church that can look at sin in its own body and feel nothing hasn’t become more gracious. It’s gone numb. The capacity to grieve what is wrong is a kind of pain, and like all pain it hurts, and like all pain it is a mercy, because it means the nerve is still alive. It means you can still feel the wound, which is the only reason anyone ever tends to one.
The most unsettling thing in this chapter may be the quiet around the man, a congregation so used to the wound that nobody even winces anymore. Grief for such an offense feels unbearable when we imagine the whole repair resting on us. The gospel cuts the wire on that fear: Christ has already gone to a cross for the very sin we’re tempted to stop grieving. The wound has been carried. So we can let the nerve stay alive and let the ache do its honest work, knowing the One who took the sin away is the same One holding us steady while we look at it.
Today: Find a few quiet minutes today and ask the Lord one plain question: is there anything I have stopped grieving? Think of a habit you once fought and now simply manage, or a compromise you’ve made so much peace with that it no longer stings. Let yourself feel the grief again, and bring it honestly to the God who has already paid for it.
Prayer: “Father, I confess that I can easily grow comfortable with things that once broke my heart. Thank You that the wound I’m afraid to feel was already carried to the cross by Your Son. Wake the nerve in me again, and give me both the courage to grieve what grieves You and the comfort of knowing You hold me while I do. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”
-PK