The Free Slave

The eighth chapter of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians ends like this:

Therefore, if food makes my brother stumble, I will never eat meat, lest I make my brother stumble. (1 Cor. 8:13)

That is very categorical and very radical. Paul does not say “I’ll try to be more considerate” or “I’ll be more careful at shared meals,” but “I will never eat meat.”

My first reaction to those words was, honestly, this: “Oh really? What else?” I don’t want to accept them. If Paul is so spiritual, let him not eat meat, but nobody is taking away my right to eat it. Who cares what someone else thinks about meat; it has nothing to do with me. Because if you follow that thought all the way through, look what happens. Someone in the church doesn’t like what I eat, so I stop eating it. Someone doesn’t like that I don’t wear a tie, so now I always have to wear a tie? Someone doesn’t like the music I listen to, so I can no longer listen to it or play it? And where is the limit? Am I supposed to run a survey and ask everyone what I may eat, what I may drink, and what music I may listen to? And if the opinions contradict each other, whom do I obey? The one who is more difficult and shouts the loudest? If someone else’s taste gets to decide how I live, I stop being a free person and become a hostage to someone else’s conscience.

And then I asked myself why I have such a strong negative reaction to this thought of Paul’s. Maybe you had the same reaction. The answer turned out to be in the very wording of my objection: “nobody has the right to tell me how to live.” I love my freedom, and we all love our freedom and independence. We live in a society where freedom has become the highest value and an untouchable sacred thing. You can argue about almost anything, but the moment a person says “that’s my personal business,” the argument is over. Our society is obsessed with personal freedom, and often that obsession runs to open extremes.

But Christians value freedom too. We call it freedom in Christ: Christ has freed us from the power of sin and from the power of the law, we are no longer under law, and it seems that we owe nobody anything anymore. And then in chapter eight Paul says something that by definition contradicts freedom: if your freedom can lead another person into sin, that freedom must be limited. “If my brother stumbles, I will never eat meat.” Which, of course, means that this is no longer freedom at all.

The first oddity

But if you read further in the letter, an interesting detail turns up. Paul most likely did eat meat. How do we know? A chapter and a half later he tells the Corinthians:

Eat whatever is sold in the meat market without raising any question on the ground of conscience. (1 Cor. 10:25)

He is of course talking about meat. And the meat in the Corinthian market was mostly temple meat: livestock was slaughtered at the sanctuaries, part went to the priests, and the rest went to the market. And Paul says: don’t investigate where it came from, buy it and eat it. Even in chapter eight there was a similar thought:

Food will not commend us to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do. (1 Cor. 8:8)

How are we to understand this? In one place Paul promises never to eat meat, and in another he eats it himself and tells others to do the same.

The second oddity

And it gets more interesting. In the very chapter we are reading now, Paul describes himself in a way that makes you uncomfortable:

To the Jews I became as a Jew… to those outside the law I became as one outside the law… I have become all things to all people. (1 Cor. 9:20–22)

That is, in Jewish company Paul behaved like a Jew: he ate kosher food, kept the Sabbath, and so on. But with Gentiles he behaved like a Gentile, which could well mean that he didn’t inquire into the kosher status of what he was served and ate whatever was put in front of him.

I have always wondered what would have happened if these two groups had met and talked to each other about Paul. With one group he ate kosher, with the other he didn’t. With one he went to the synagogue, with the other he sat at a pagan table. Both groups would have felt deceived. Isn’t Paul behaving like a chameleon here? Isn’t this hypocrisy?

Context

The turn

Chapter nine opens with four questions in a row:

Am I not free? Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? Are not you my workmanship in the Lord? (1 Cor. 9:1)

In Greek each of them is constructed so that only one answer is possible: “yes, of course.” Yes, he is an apostle; yes, he is free; yes, he has seen Jesus; yes, he founded the church in Corinth. Paul is not in doubt here and is not looking for advice. You could say he is indignant in roughly the same way I was indignant when I read his words in the previous chapter.

Which of these questions matters most? “Am I not free?” Yes, of course he is free. The man who has just said “I will never eat meat” opens the next chapter with a declaration of his own freedom. He is not going to prove to us that freedom is a bad thing; he is going to prove that he has far more freedom than you and I do.

One word

At first glance it might look as though the subject changes abruptly. Chapter eight was about meat and the weak brother, and here we get apostleship, wages, oxen, and temple servants. Many people read it that way: Paul got distracted, complained about not being paid, got it off his chest, and then went back to food offered to idols in chapter ten. But the text contains words showing that all of this, chapters eight through ten, is one single thought.

Chapter eight, verse nine:

But take care that this right of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak. (1 Cor. 8:9)

The word translated here as “right” is in Greek ἐξουσία, exousia: a right, an authority, a power. And now listen to chapter nine:

Do we not have the right to eat and drink? (v. 4)

Do we not have the right to take along a believing wife? (v. 5)

Or is it only Barnabas and I who have no right to refrain from working for a living? (v. 6)

If others share this rightful claim on you, do not we even more? Nevertheless, we have not made use of this right. (v. 12)

…so as not to make full use of my right in the gospel. (v. 18)

Six times in one passage, and twice in verse twelve alone, we meet the same word. It is one and the same word in chapter eight and in chapter nine. So for Paul this is one thought; he never breaks it off but illustrates it from his own life.

The weak

There is a second thread as well. In chapter eight a weak brother appears, the one whose conscience stumbles over meat. Paul talks about him for nearly the whole chapter, and then the word “weak” disappears and comes back exactly once, at the very end of our passage:

To the weak I became weak. (1 Cor. 9:22)

This again points clearly to one thing: Paul is continuing his argument from chapter eight.

“Forgive me this wrong”

So where did this subject of money come from? In this letter Paul doesn’t explain the connection. But he will return to the same conversation in his second letter, and there he says it openly:

Or did I commit a sin in humbling myself so that you might be exalted, because I preached God’s gospel to you free of charge? (2 Cor. 11:7)

And a little further on, with open bitterness:

For in what were you less favored than the rest of the churches, except that I myself did not burden you? Forgive me this wrong! (2 Cor. 12:13)

Forgive me this wrong. The fact that he took no money from them was genuinely held against him.

Corinth

To us that seems absurd, since you would expect praise for such a thing. But historians who study Corinth of that period explain that the city was a Roman colony: a wealthy trading center with a culture of honor and shame, where it mattered enormously who you were and what you were worth. Professional orators known as sophists traveled from city to city. A sophist would arrive, deliver a course of lectures, collect his fee, and move on, and the fee was a mark of quality: a good speaker cost a lot.

But Paul, while he lived in Corinth, fed himself by making tents together with Aquila and Priscilla (Acts 18:3), and for his preaching he deliberately took money from no one.

The Corinthians drew a simple conclusion: if he doesn’t charge, then he isn’t worth it. Then he’s no apostle at all, just a traveling craftsman who says a few things in the evenings. Remember the first four chapters of this letter: the arguments about eloquence, the comparing of preachers with one another. They measured ministers the way the world did, by the size of the fee, and by that measure Paul came out at the very bottom.

You would think that now he has to explain why he took no money. But Paul does something else entirely. First he spends twelve verses proving that he had every right to take it. Let’s see how he does it.

1. An ironclad right (vv. 1–14)

Three pictures

Paul gives obvious examples from everyday life:

Who serves as a soldier at his own expense? Who plants a vineyard without eating any of its fruit? Or who tends a flock without getting some of the milk? (1 Cor. 9:7)

Three pictures, and all three are clear without explanation. A soldier doesn’t buy his own food and weapons with his own money. A man who plants a vineyard eats the grapes from it. A shepherd drinks the milk of his own flock. Nobody needs to prove or explain this, because it is obvious to everyone that whoever works is fed by his work.

The ox

Then Paul turns to the Old Testament:

For it is written in the Law of Moses, “You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain.” (1 Cor. 9:9; cf. Deut. 25:4)

Threshing worked like this: the ox was driven round and round over the spread-out ears of grain, and its hooves knocked the kernels loose. The owner was tempted to put a muzzle on the ox so it wouldn’t eat what it was threshing, but the law forbade that. Even an ox has a right to eat from what it labors over.

And Paul asks whether it is for oxen that God is concerned, or for us. For us, of course. If God took care of an animal, how much more does he think of the people who labor for him.

Sowing

Then Paul turns to the Corinthians themselves:

If we have sown spiritual things among you, is it too much if we reap material things from you? (1 Cor. 9:11)

In other words, Paul is saying that they have invested far more in the Corinthians, and it only makes sense for them to be grateful. We gave you the greater thing, we sowed spiritual things. Would it be so terrible if we received the lesser?

For Paul money is that lesser thing. But even so, he says his labor as a pastor of this church deserves compensation. That is obvious, because it works that way everywhere.

The altar

You might think the arguments were sufficient already, but Paul adds two more:

Do you not know that those who are employed in the temple service get their food from the temple, and those who serve at the altar share in the sacrificial offerings? (1 Cor. 9:13)

That was true both in the temple in Jerusalem and in the pagan shrines, of which Corinth had plenty. Whoever serves at the altar lives from the altar, and everyone knew it.

And a final argument to finish it off:

In the same way, the Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel. (1 Cor. 9:14)

Paul is referring to the words of Jesus recorded by Luke: “the laborer deserves his wages” (Luke 10:7). This is no longer Paul’s reasoning or an example from agriculture, but a direct command of Christ.

Case closed

That’s a lot of arguments and a lot of examples, so let’s take stock. All of them make the same point: work is compensated. Ordinary life, the law of Moses, the logic of sowing and reaping, temple practice, and the direct word of the Lord Jesus all say the same thing. Which means Paul had the right to receive support from the Corinthian church.

2. And he never used it (vv. 12, 15–18)

“Nevertheless”

But verse twelve turns everything upside down, and it is the center of the whole passage:

Nevertheless, we have not made use of this right, but we endure anything rather than put an obstacle in the way of the gospel of Christ. (1 Cor. 9:12)

Wait a moment. What was the point of building a long argument that Paul had every right to material support, and then immediately saying that he refuses it? He assembled a strong, unanswerable case for his right to be paid, and then tore it up in front of our eyes. Paul had the right, and he never once made use of it.

Do you see what happens in verse twelve? Everything before it was written for the sake of this verse, to show from his own example how Paul limits his rights for the sake of others and for the sake of the gospel. In the previous chapter he said that if his freedom and his rights lead a brother into sin, he will give up those rights, however legitimate they may be. Here he shows from his own life how that principle worked. He had every moral right to receive money from the Corinthians, but knowing that it could harm the gospel in Corinth, he gave up the salary.

The obstacle

In verse twelve he says it plainly: “rather than put an obstacle in the way of the gospel of Christ.” An obstacle is something laid across the road so that a person stumbles or cannot get through.

And Paul’s reasoning goes something like this. If I take their money, someone will look at me and conclude: ah, this is just another orator, another sophist, who speaks beautifully and works for a wage. People won’t hear the sermon, they’ll be counting somebody else’s money, and the money will stand between them and Christ.

Four paths

Historians count four ways a traveling teacher could support himself at that time.

The first was to charge for instruction, like the sophists. Respectable and profitable.

The second was to find a wealthy patron. Also honorable, except that the patron became your master: you lived in his house, ate at his table, and said only what wouldn’t anger him.

The third was to beg, as the Cynic philosophers did with a bag over the shoulder. Not lucrative, but familiar; nobody was surprised by it.

And the fourth was to feed yourself by a trade. Paul chose the fourth, the very one for which the Corinthians despised him.

Now look at the second path, because in Corinth it was the most dangerous. To accept money from a wealthy man meant becoming his man. Historians say that in that city money signified not help but belonging. And this in a church where people were already saying “I follow Paul,” “I follow Apollos,” “I follow Cephas.” Paul would have stopped being an apostle to the whole church; he would have become the voice of one faction, and every argument he made would afterward be weighed on the scales: and who is paying him? So the money would have stood between these people and Christ twice over. And Paul made a simple decision: there will be no money.

Not a rule

Here it is important not to overcorrect. Paul is not saying that a minister should not be paid, since he has just spent fourteen verses proving exactly the opposite. And he did accept money himself, just not in the city where he was working at that moment.

I robbed other churches by accepting support from them in order to serve you. And when I was with you and was in need, I did not burden anyone. (2 Cor. 11:8–9)

The church in Philippi sent him help more than once (Phil. 4:15–16). It was specifically from the Corinthians that Paul would not accept money.

“I would rather die”

And then Paul speaks very sharply:

But I have made no use of any of these rights, nor am I writing these things to secure any such provision. For I would rather die than have anyone deprive me of my ground for boasting. (1 Cor. 9:15)

Notice what he inserts in the middle: “nor am I writing these things to secure any such provision.” In other words, don’t think I am asking you for money.

And then:

For if I preach the gospel, that gives me no ground for boasting. For necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel! (1 Cor. 9:16)

“Necessity” here means something you cannot get around. Paul did not choose preaching as a career; Christ himself stopped him on the road to Damascus and appointed him to this work. And he says that the fact that he preaches gives him nothing to boast about, because he cannot do otherwise.

One dollar

A hundred years ago, a diagnosis of diabetes in a child was a death sentence. There was no treatment at all, and the only thing doctors knew how to do was to put the child on a starvation diet. That way the body held out not for months but for a year or two, and the parents watched their child slowly waste away from hunger, because there was simply no other way to prolong his life.

In 1921 in Toronto, a young surgeon named Frederick Banting and a student named Charles Best isolated from the pancreas the substance we today call insulin. In January of 1922 it was administered to a human being for the first time. That was fourteen-year-old Leonard Thompson, who was dying in a Toronto hospital and weighed less than thirty kilograms. The boy survived and lived another thirteen years, and doctors now had a medicine capable of defeating diabetes.

Such a medicine would have made its creators fabulously wealthy, and that was obvious to everyone. Do you know what the scientists sold the patent for? One dollar. The university opened production to every factory that could make insulin, so that the medicine would reach everywhere as quickly as possible. Banting is credited with saying that insulin did not belong to him but to the world.

Banting could have become one of the richest men of his time, and he had every right to. But he gave up that right so that nothing would stand between a sick child and the medicine.

Paul does the same thing. He gave up his salary and material support so that nothing would stand between the gospel and people. Which means that freedom is not a treasure to be guarded; freedom is something you spend on people.

3. Freedom spent (vv. 19–23)

Free and a slave

Verse nineteen is the summit of the whole argument:

For though I am free from all, I have made myself a servant to all, that I might win more of them. (1 Cor. 9:19)

How did Paul begin this chapter? “Am I not free?” And how does he end it? “I have made myself a servant to all.” At the start of the chapter he is as free as an apostle of Jesus Christ can possibly be, and at the end of the chapter he is everyone’s slave. One chapter, one man, eighteen verses in between.

The word “made myself a servant” here is very strong, with the same root as the word “slave.” And the verb is reflexive: he enslaved himself, and no one forced him. A slave is a person who has no time of his own, no schedule of his own, no home of his own; he doesn’t decide where to go or what to do, because others decide for him. And here is Paul, a free Roman citizen, an apostle, a man with rights, saying that he became this by his own will, for everyone.

Why does he do it? “That I might win more of them.” “Win” is a merchant’s word; it’s about profit. The man who has just refused money suddenly starts talking about profit, but he isn’t talking about money.

The piggy bank

I remember that as a child my father gave me pocket money. I took it and put it in a piggy bank. I liked knowing it was in there, and sometimes I would take it out and count it. My father looked at this once and said to me: “Why are you hoarding it? I give it to you so that you will spend it. Money is for spending, not for saving up and admiring.”

That was probably bad financial advice. But I understood something then: money is not a treasure but a means, and it isn’t given to you so you can admire it.

And exactly the same thing happens with freedom. It seems to us that there are only two options: either to fret over our freedom or to go wild with it. But Paul shows a third way to handle it. He spent his freedom, all of it down to the last coin, and he spent it not on himself. He spent it on Jews, on Gentiles, on the weak, on people he would otherwise never have reached.

Four groups

To the Jews I became as a Jew… To those under the law I became as one under the law… To those outside the law I became as one outside the law… To the weak I became weak. (1 Cor. 9:20–22)

He comes to Jews and lives as a Jew: eats kosher, goes to the synagogue, keeps the feasts. He comes to Gentiles and eats what is served without asking extra questions. He meets a man with a tender conscience and adjusts to his conscience. And he sums it up: “I have become all things to all people.”

At the beginning I said this looks like the behavior of a chameleon. But that isn’t quite right.

Not a chameleon

Look at what Paul inserts right into the middle of the list. It is as though he heard our question in advance and answers it:

…not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ. (1 Cor. 9:21)

That is, he changes his behavior, but he is not a man without a law. He has a law, and it is the law of Christ; that is his center, and it does not move anywhere.

A chameleon changes color so as not to be noticed, so as to survive. Paul does exactly the opposite: he changes his behavior in order to be noticed, only not himself, but Christ. And he repeats the goal in every line: that I might win, that I might win, that I might save.

We know for certain that Paul always had one Master and one reference point. He never changed his theology or his gospel according to circumstances. In the letter to the Galatians he tells how in Antioch the apostle Peter stopped eating with Gentiles when the men from Jerusalem arrived, and Paul rebuked him in front of everyone, to his face (Gal. 2:11–14). The very same concession about food that Paul practices here turned out there to be a betrayal. Why? Because in Antioch that concession meant that Gentiles were second-class Christians, and that meant the gospel itself was at stake.

Yes, Paul adjusted to the weak conscience of the weak, but he did it in such a way that the gospel never changed. A chameleon would have said nothing to Peter and would have hidden so as not to irritate anyone. But that is not what Paul is about; his goal is to win people for Christ.

That I might save

I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. (1 Cor. 9:22)

He puts it modestly: not “that I might save everyone,” and not “that I might have results,” but “that by all means I might save some.” He simply removes from his own side everything that could get in the way.

“To the weak I became weak.” The weak man is that same brother from chapter eight, whose conscience stumbles over meat. We have come back to where we started, and the circle is closed.

And the meat

Which means our first question has its answer too. Did Paul eat meat? He did, and he told others to. So what about “I will never eat meat”?

Look at the first half of that sentence: “if food makes my brother stumble.” That is a condition, and it kicks in when there is a person nearby for whom this costs his soul. Paul did not give up meat; he gave up the right to eat it without regard for the person next to him. He didn’t get rid of his freedom, he simply stopped considering it his own.

And the last verse of our passage:

I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings. (1 Cor. 9:23)

That is what all of this is for: not for the sake of a principle and not for the sake of a reputation, but for the sake of the gospel.

Conclusion

Free from all

At the very beginning I said that we are afraid of becoming hostages to someone else’s conscience. If everyone else gets to decide for me what I eat and what I listen to, what kind of free man am I?

Paul answers it like this:

For though I am free from all, I have made myself a servant to all. (1 Cor. 9:19)

He says it outright: free from all. Paul did not submit to Corinthian tastes or to anybody’s whims, and he asked no one’s permission about what to eat. He himself, by his own will, gave himself over into slavery, but not to people: he enslaved himself to the work of the gospel. He has one Master, and it is not a brother’s opinion but the gospel of Jesus Christ.

What for

Eight times Paul repeats it in chapter nine:

…rather than put an obstacle in the way of the gospel of Christ (v. 12);

…that I might win more of them (v. 19);

…in order to win Jews… that I might win those under the law (v. 20);

…that I might win those outside the law (v. 21);

…that I might win the weak… that by all means I might save some (v. 22);

I do it all for the sake of the gospel (v. 23).

Eight times in six verses. He spends his freedom on one thing: that people who are now outside would end up inside.

Two questions

Paul differed from us in one habit. We usually ask ourselves one question: do I have the right to this, am I allowed to do it or not? Paul answered that question and spent fourteen whole verses on it, and he had the right. But he didn’t stop there; he asked a second question: will this keep anyone from reaching Christ?

These are entirely different questions, and we ask the second one far less often.

Who is outside

Paul is talking about two people, and we need to see both. The first is the brother who is right beside you, that same weak brother from chapter eight who stumbles over me. The second is the person who has not yet come to Christ: a neighbor, a person at work, a grown son who no longer goes to church.

It is for the sake of the second that Paul became “all things to all people.” He ate what wasn’t his, went where it wasn’t comfortable, and lived not as he wanted, in order to reach the people he would otherwise never have reached.

An imitator

This is not easy, and I think it was not easy for Paul either. An intelligent, educated man with great prospects had to give up comfort and put his life in danger for the sake of people who often didn’t even appreciate it. Where did Paul get the strength to live like that?

Paul is driving this argument toward chapter eleven, where he will say:

Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ. (1 Cor. 11:1)

And what did Christ do?

For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich. (2 Cor. 8:9)

He was rich and became poor for our sake. He had every right to stay where he was, but he spent that right completely, on us. And only because of that do we have anything to spend today.

Freedom is not a treasure to be guarded. Freedom is something you spend on people.