1 Corinthians 5King James Version
It is reported that there is fornication among you. A man hath his father's wife. Paul tells them to remove him from their fellowship. Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump? Purge out therefore the old leaven.
Paul confronts a specific case of sexual immorality: a man in the congregation is living with his father's wife, a relationship forbidden under both Jewish law and Roman custom. The church has done nothing about it and apparently feels proud of its tolerance. Paul is furious. He commands them to expel the man formally, using the language of a judicial assembly, so that his spirit might be saved and the community not be corrupted by leaven.
Tolerating open sin in the name of acceptance is not grace; it is negligence. A church that celebrates its own permissiveness has confused freedom with abandonment.
"Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump?" (5:6) Paul reaches for the Passover image of removing all yeast before the feast, arguing that unchecked sin spreads through a community the way leaven spreads through dough.
Roman households were complex, with stepparents common after death or divorce. The Corinthian congregation likely included members of this family, making the situation not an abstract case but a living tension in the room every Sunday. Paul is in Ephesus, writing at a distance, but the emotional weight in his language suggests this news hit him hard.
The unnamed man committing incest is the presenting case but not Paul's main target. Paul is more concerned with the congregation's passive complicity, their puffed-up tolerance. The father is not mentioned as part of the congregation. Paul invokes Christ's Passover sacrifice as the frame for how the church should understand purity.
Roman law actually prohibited the specific relationship described here (a man with his stepmother). The church was permitting something that even pagan Corinth condemned. Paul's urgency is pastoral and theological: the church is supposed to embody new creation, not mirror the surrounding culture's worst patterns. Expulsion is not punishment for its own sake but a boundary that maintains both the community's integrity and, Paul hopes, the possibility of the offender's eventual repentance.
Paul's grief is palpable, and his anger is clean: not personal but protective. He grieves that no one in the church mourned this. The word he uses implies funeral lament, a tone that reframes permissiveness as a failure of love.
1It is reported commonly that there is fornication among you, and such fornication as is not so much as named among the Gentiles, that one should have his father's wife.
2And ye are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he that hath done this deed might be taken away from among you.
3For I verily, as absent in body, but present in spirit, have judged already, as though I were present, concerning him that hath so done this deed,
4In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when ye are gathered together, and my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ,
5To deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.
6Your glorying is not good. Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump?
7Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us: is sacrificed; or, is slain
8Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
9I wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators:
10Yet not altogether with the fornicators of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or with idolaters; for then must ye needs go out of the world.
11But now I have written unto you not to keep company, if any man that is called a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner; with such an one no not to eat.
12For what have I to do to judge them also that are without? do not ye judge them that are within?
13But them that are without God judgeth. Therefore put away from among yourselves that wicked person.