NOTES for Co1 3:1-9

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¹And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ.

²I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able.

³For ye are yet carnal: for whereas there is among you envying, and strife, and divisions, are ye not carnal, and walk as men?

⁴For while one saith, I am of Paul; and another, I am of Apollos; are ye not carnal?

⁵Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man?

⁶I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.

⁷So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase.

⁸Now he that planteth and he that watereth are one: and every man shall receive his own reward according to his own labour.

⁹For we are labourers together with God: ye are God's husbandry, ye are God's building.

“Who is Paul? Who is Apollos? They are only servants.” How often we forget this... How often we put human, fleshly things first. We choose a community, a parish, a Church on the basis of “I like it”—and then declare that only here, among us, is everything genuine and correct, while everything unlike us is wrong and worthy of every condemnation, if not immediate destruction. But what matters to God is not who plants and waters His field, or by what means. Only one thing matters to Him: our unity with Him and with one another.

Other notes

For Co1 3:1-9

¹And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ.

²I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able.

³For ye are yet carnal: for whereas there is among you envying, and strife, and divisions, are ye not carnal, and walk as men?

⁴For while one saith, I am of Paul; and another, I am of Apollos; are ye not carnal?

⁵Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man?

⁶I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.

⁷So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase.

⁸Now he that planteth and he that watereth are one: and every man shall receive his own reward according to his own labour.

⁹For we are labourers together with God: ye are God's husbandry, ye are God's building.

Returning to the divisions that had arisen among the Corinthian Christians, Paul, as... Read more

Returning to the divisions that had arisen among the Corinthian Christians, Paul, as we can see, is not at all trying to decide which of the parties opposed to one another in the Corinthian church is closer to the truth. It is clear to him that all of them are equally far from the truth. For the apostle, the only truth is the Resurrection and the life of the Kingdom, to which he bears witness, and he sees the disputes that have arisen in the church of Corinth only as an obstacle to this life. Paul is not trying to persuade anyone of anything; he is only trying to set the accents correctly. He tells the Corinthian Christians directly that all their disagreements and disputes, which, as we can see, also provoke envy and mutual hostility (v. 3), have nothing to do with spiritual life. The disputants themselves may have thought otherwise, but that only meant that they had confused spiritual life with the life of the still untransformed world, which Paul calls "fleshly" and by which the Corinthian Christians, as we can see, had become very carried away, completely forgetting about the Kingdom (vv. 1-4).

Of course, "fleshly" in the apostle's mouth did not mean "base" or "unworthy." Paul was far from the idea of considering the body ("flesh") a container of evil or sin. He was speaking only of the fact that in the life of fallen humanity it is not the spiritual that predominates over the natural, as God intended, but the natural over the spiritual. And these consequences of the fall had to be overcome, otherwise it was impossible to enter the Kingdom. This is precisely the task the apostle sets before the Corinthian Christians, calling them to remember that all those whose followers they considered themselves to be, and whose merits they argued about, were servants of one God and were doing one work (vv. 5-7).

As we can see, Paul is trying to convey to his readers a simple but very important truth: arguments about primacy make sense only in our world, which has not yet been transformed. For the Kingdom they are not relevant. And the point is not that there are no differences there and that all servants of the Kingdom are the same. They differ just as people differ in our world, which has not yet been fully transformed, and their ministries are also different, perhaps even unique (vv. 8-9). But no one is left without a reward. And in this respect there can be no question of competition among servants in the Kingdom, because each receives precisely his own reward, intended precisely for him and suited to him. In the Kingdom no one is deprived, and therefore the question of primacy, of chasing the chief reward, loses all meaning there. But this can be understood only when one looks at events through the eyes of an inhabitant of the Kingdom. This is exactly how Paul invites the Corinthian Christians to look at the situation in their own church.

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