What Business Is It of Mine to Judge Outsiders?

Content note: This post includes frank discussion of sexual exploitation and abuse. Please take care of yourself as you read.

We're in a series on 1 Corinthians that we've been calling Hot Takes. It's a mix of Paul's hot takes, the church's hot takes on Paul, and Corinth's hot takes on itself. And this week Paul drops one that, honestly, flips the script on everything the church has become famous for.

"What business is it of mine to judge outsiders?" (1 Corinthians 5:12)

Sit with that for a second. The church has become, unfortunately, known for judging outsiders. We're the ones telling the world how it ought to act, what it ought to wear, who it ought to love. All the while, we're not dealing with the poop in our own house. Yes, I said it. Not dealing with what's happening in our own house churches and small groups and big communities.

So here's the big idea, and I'll say it up front so you can hold onto it: God's kingdom is already among us. Therefore, we hold our own accountable, and we stay open to the world.

To get there, we need to walk through 1 Corinthians 5 slowly, almost verse by verse. Paul is responding to a real situation in a real church, and the details matter.

A Church Split Into Fan Clubs

First, a quick bit of review. In 1 Corinthians 1–4, Paul is writing to a church that has split into fan clubs. I belong to Paul. I belong to Apollos. I belong to Peter. I belong to Christ. It's a congregation where most people are not well born, wealthy, or powerful by the world's standards. Paul reminds them that God has chosen exactly those people, the nobodies (1 Corinthians 1:27–28).

But there are a few in the church who do fit those definitions, and there's real class conflict going on. In chapter 4, Paul gets wonderfully sarcastic: "Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! Quite apart from us you have become kings!" (1 Corinthians 4:8). Remember who's writing this. Paul is a man on the run from the empire, writing to people who are either already high-status or desperately trying to climb there, spiritually or practically. He's telling them that's not what the kingdom is about.

"For the kingdom of God depends not on talk but on power" (1 Corinthians 4:20). Chapters 4, 5, and 6 are framed by this conversation about kingdom and power, and about what power actually looks like from God's perspective.

One more piece of background. The Corinthian church didn't meet in one big building. It met in a network of house churches (the Greek word is oikos, household) scattered across the city. In chapters 1–6, Paul is responding to reports from "Chloe's people." Chloe seems to be a woman of some standing and leadership in that network. Later, in chapters 7–16, he responds to a letter the church wrote him directly.

I love this detail. The report Paul is responding to comes from a woman, about what's happening to another woman. Women be talking. And these women are talking to protect each other. Two thousand years later, that's still how most accountability starts.

So let's look at what they reported.

Porneia Was Never Just About Sex

"It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not found even among pagans; for a man is living with his father's wife." (1 Corinthians 5:1)

Let's slow down on that phrase "sexual immorality," because how we translate it changes everything.

The Greek word is porneia. It has a root that means to sell, so it's rooted in economic exchange. It's related to pornē, the word for a woman in the sex trade. In the first-century world, that was almost always a woman who had been exploited or failed by a patriarchal, male-dominated society. Outside of Jewish and Christian writings, porneia meant commercial sex: sex that was bought and paid for. Jewish and Christian writers then expanded the definition to any sex that objectifies or exploits a person, whether economically, emotionally, or socially.

Porneia never just means sex. It's about using a person not as a person, but as an object.

Somewhere between the King James Version and now, English translators imported Victorian and Edwardian morality into that word. Suddenly porneia was about the chronology of when you did what with whom, or whether you made it to third base. That framing would have been foreign to Paul. He was thinking about exploitation, money changing hands, and power being used against someone.

It also helps to remember that in the first-century world, sex was tangled up with what we'd now call religion: the things you did at a temple to get the gods on your side for your harvest, your business, or your family. Sex, money, and trying to win over the powers were all knotted together. So when Paul says there's a kind of porneia in the church that even the Gentiles won't tolerate, think exploitation. Think money. Think power.

Now look at what the man is actually doing. He "has" his father's wife. In Greek, as in Hebrew (which doesn't even have a separate word for marriage), "to have" or "to take" a woman could mean marrying her. It's also the idiom for exploitative sex, abusive sex, and rape. You can hear the patriarchy built right into the language: the woman is human, but she's treated as something to be owned.

So we have to read between the lines. "His father's wife" isn't his mother, or Paul would have said so. She's a stepmother, maybe a second wife, maybe a widow. And whatever this relationship is, a few things are clear:

It's ongoing. The tense is present. This isn't a one-time thing.

It's forbidden everywhere. It's prohibited by Torah (the Jewish law), by Roman law, and by Greek law. Even the empire would call this wrong.

There's likely money involved. Taking her could keep her dowry and inheritance in his hands. Many commentators also assume he's a patron, one of the wealthy members the church depended on. When Paul lists sins in chapters 5 and 6, porneia keeps showing up right next to greed and fraud.

Only he is held responsible. Every word for the offender is "he." She's never disciplined, and Paul never blames her.

And notice this: she never speaks. She has no voice in the text. Feminist readers of Scripture have said for a long time what other commentators are now coming around to: this is very likely a non-consensual, abusive relationship. Our job as readers is to notice her silence and not skip past it.

The First Step Is Grief

Here's what surprised me most. Paul addresses the church before he addresses the man.

"And you are arrogant! Should you not rather have mourned, so that he who has done this would have been removed from among you?" (1 Corinthians 5:2)

"Arrogant" can also be translated "puffed up," and it's a word Paul keeps using with this church. In 1 Corinthians 4:18, some of them are puffed up because they assume Paul is never coming back, so they can do whatever they want. (Spoiler: Paul is coming back.) And in the famous love chapter, he says love is not puffed up (1 Corinthians 13:4).

The church's problem isn't only that this is happening. It's that they're proud of how tolerant they're being about it. Paul says the first step should have been grief: tears, anger, everything that comes with mourning. Before any policy, before any statement, before any strategy, there should have been grief.

We see the opposite play out over and over. Just this past week, the headlines were full of another institution that responded to a sexual assault with minimal consequences and a carefully worded statement. Charges came only after public outcry, and only because the woman at the center of it found the courage to come forward. What's missing in those responses is any sense of grief.

Then Paul gets practical. Even though he's absent in body, he says he's present in spirit, and he has already pronounced judgment. "When you are assembled, and my spirit is present with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord" (1 Corinthians 5:4–5).

Notice the word power again. The kingdom isn't just words. It's power, and that power shows up when the church gathers.

The kingdom of heaven is not some future, far-off thing. It's happening in the room when we gather. And when it shows up, it has to give consequences to those who would harm people who have no power.

Handed Over, But Not Thrown Away

Now, "hand this man over to Satan" sounds terrifying. That's partly because we live after Dante's Inferno and after centuries of medieval imagination, which is basically fanfic about Satan. All those images have seeped into our assumptions about who Satan is and what Satan does.

The first century was in the middle of a transition in how it thought about this figure. In the Hebrew Scriptures, ha-Satan means "the accuser," and the figure is something like a prosecuting attorney on God's payroll. Ha-Satan made the case for why a human might be guilty, and was sometimes sent to carry out consequences. Over time, that figure developed into an adversary of God's own self. In Paul's day, both images were floating around, and it's not always easy to pull them apart. (I have a whole sermon called The History of Satan on our website if you want to go deeper.)

What matters here is the purpose clause: so that his spirit may be saved. Removing this man from the community isn't the end of his story. For Paul, it's the beginning of a restoration process. Get him out, let him face real consequences, and hope for his redemption.

Then Paul reaches for a Passover image. "Do you not know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough? Clean out the old yeast so that you may be a new batch, as you really are unleavened. For our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed" (1 Corinthians 5:6–7). At Passover, Jewish households removed all yeast and ate unleavened bread, remembering their liberation from slavery. Paul is saying the church's response to abuse can't be "boys will be boys." It has to be a community that's safe and trustworthy. People with little or no power need to know they'll be protected, and people with a lot of power need to know they'll face consequences.

Here's the part I find fascinating. When Paul says, "Drive out the wicked person from among you" (1 Corinthians 5:13), he's quoting Deuteronomy. In its original context, that phrase comes from laws about sexual sin, where both the man and the woman were to be driven out and stoned to death (Deuteronomy 22:22–24).

Paul takes that principle and twists it toward mercy. Instead of both, it's only the man. Instead of death, it's removal, with the hope of salvation. The woman, who was most likely the one exploited, is protected rather than punished.

Not retribution, but restoration.

Getting It Exactly Backward

This brings us back to the hot take. Paul clarifies that in an earlier letter (call it Zero Corinthians), he told them not to associate with sexually exploitative people. They misunderstood him, so he clarifies. He didn't mean people outside the church. If you tried to avoid every greedy, exploitative person in the world, "you would then need to go out of the world" (1 Corinthians 5:10).

He meant people inside the church: anyone who carries the name of brother, sister, sibling, or Christ-follower and who is exploitative, greedy, or a swindler. Notice the same trio again: sex, money, and religion. "God will judge those outside," Paul says. "Are you not the judges of those who are inside?" (1 Corinthians 5:12–13).

The church has gotten this exactly backward. We sweep our own problems under the rug with a vague appeal to grace: well, isn't God merciful? Meanwhile we save all our fire for the people outside.

Now, I know some of us hear "high standards" and feel our shoulders tense up. Some of us came from communities where legalism and perfection were the expectation. But in my experience, legalism is usually the cover that hides the actual exploitation and abuse. So The Table Church is not about to become a legalistic church. What it does mean is that you need a clear set of values about what you're protecting. Ours are about centering the margins and protecting people without power.

If I'm going to lean too hard into legalism, it's going to be that sort of legalism: the legalism that protects those who have no protection. That's where the church has to grow up and learn to say, "No. Not here you won't."

We Are the Bread

Here's how I want to close.

Every week at The Table Church, we come to the communion table, where we share bread and cup to remember Jesus's broken body and poured-out life. It reminds us of a reality that's so easy to forget: according to Jesus, we are the bread and we are the cup. We've been incorporated into the body of Christ. Where we move and how we act in the world is how Christ moves and acts in the world.

So when people are exploited and used, when they tell their stories and those stories are ignored, and the people with power and resources get lifted up anyway, we're giving Christ a bad name. We worship a God who was crucified and buried. Yes, resurrected; yes, ascended. But the resurrection came after the crucifixion and the lowering into the earth.

We are the lowly people. "Just as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me" (Matthew 25:40). Every week we identify with bread that is broken and grapes that are crushed, and that has to shape how we show up in the world.

So here's my invitation. Stop spending your energy policing people outside your community. Start asking hard questions about the people inside it, especially the powerful ones. And when someone tells you what's really happening, don't call it gossip. Treat it like Chloe's people: someone loving enough to tell the truth.

This is part one, and the story keeps going in chapter 6. For now, keep the feast "not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth" (1 Corinthians 5:8).