Monday of the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time
Paul was a pastor who fretted over his flock, like a worrywart parent who can’t let go of the kids. I Corinthians (our first reading today) was composed by the Apostle just five years after he founded the Church of Corinth, writing with great anxiety from Ephesus. Paul is like so many who realize that parenting never ends, even when the children are technically adults. And the neophyte Corinthians greatly need supervision.
For Pastor Paul it is evident that they were still wet behind the ears. They’d become boastful and inflated with pride — extremely dangerous as Corinth was a tough town where pagan rites flourished. Paul’s small community had fragmented — an early version of what some today describe as parish “parking lot conversations” — brought on by rumor, gossip, and innuendo. Sadly, such divisions are still with the church all these many centuries later.
Does this sound in any way like any Catholic institutions you know or have known?
Paul’s solution rings as true for us as it did in the mid-first century. He beautifully offers the image of unleavened bread begging his Corinthian flock to clear out the old yeast so that they might become a fresh batch of dough. The old yeast is wickedness and malice. The new yeast wasn’t yeast at all, but unleavened bread.
The Eucharist is the great sacrament of unity. May the “bread of angels,” as Saint Thomas Aquinas called it, transform and unify us as surely as Paul hoped it would the Corinthian church two millennia ago. May we be the fresh batch of dough the world so sorely needs.
—Timothy J. Cronin