NOTES for Co2 6:18

Today's reading contains the apostle Paul's well-known words: “What accord has Christ with Belial?... What agreement has the temple of God with idols?” These words convey to us something very important which God fostered in His people for centuries and which is not at all obvious to those of us who did not inherit that formation: the rejection of mixture. For centuries the Law fostered this trait among the Jews by forbidding not only the mixing of faiths but even the mixing of linen and woolen threads in one fabric.

In the twentieth century (and in the nineteenth too), agreement between the temple of God and idols was a popular idea. The new religious movements of the past two centuries are almost always a vinaigrette of finely chopped Christianity and all manner of religions. Alas, however much we may wish otherwise, reconciliation and accord with one another are possible only in the Truth. Showing mercy to one another makes sense not because it makes no difference which gods we worship, but because this is what the one true God expects of us.

Continuing the discussion of the Kingdom and the life of the Kingdom, Paul again reminds the Corinthian brothers that spiritual life requires definiteness of choice and an unambiguous spiritual and moral assessment of both righteous and sinful human actions (vv. 14-18). These words clearly echo the Savior's own words about the impossibility of serving two masters, words that in turn summed up the teaching, traditional for Yahwism and Judaism, about the two ways: the way of sin and the way of righteousness.

But Paul does not confine himself merely to reminding them of things the Corinthian Christians should have known no worse than he did. For him, the main problem becomes not a moral problem as such, but a spiritual one. Here too, however, Paul follows the tradition: from the point of view of the Torah, the most terrible thing about sin is not that it is immoral, but that it separates the sinner from God, raising a wall between them that cannot be destroyed without repentance and renewed turning back. The apostle, as we can see, shifts the emphasis from the relationship between a person and God to the relationship between inhabitants of the Kingdom, though those relationships can hardly be considered apart from their relationship with God.

He tells his Corinthian brothers that because of the sins they commit he finds himself cramped in their hearts, while his own heart and the hearts of his companions are widened so that there is no narrowness in them (vv. 11-12). But, the apostle adds, "as to children, a corresponding recompense will be extended to you" (v. 13), so that those whose hearts are narrow will not be able to experience the breadth of heart they might otherwise find in Paul. Even after becoming an inhabitant of the Kingdom, a person subject to the action of the evil in which our still untransformed world remains until the Savior returns receives into his heart only that measure of the life of the Kingdom that is determined by his resolve to resist that evil. Then a person's indecision on the spiritual path, the attempt to serve two masters, not only deprives him of the fullness of the life of the Kingdom, but also deprives others of the possibility of full communion with such an indecisive Christian.

That is why Paul feels cramped in the hearts of some of his Corinthian brothers. And he tells them this directly, perhaps wishing to remind them of the time when nothing hindered their spiritual unity. A time when they no doubt breathed in the breath of the Kingdom with full lungs, as Christians should.