'Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old
leaven ... but with the unleavened bread of
sincerity and truth.'--1 COR. v. 8.
There had been hideous immorality in the Corinthian Church. Paul had
struck at it with heat and force, sternly commanding the exclusion of
the sinner. He did so on the ground of the diabolical power of
infection possessed by evil, and illustrated that by the very obvious
metaphor of leaven, a morsel of which, as he says, 'will leaven the
whole lump,' or, as we say, 'batch.' But the word 'leaven' drew up
from the depths of his memory a host of sacred associations connected
with the Jewish Passover. He remembered the sedulous hunting in every
Jewish house for every scrap of leavened matter; the slaying of the
Paschal Lamb, and the following feast. Carried away by these
associations, he forgets the sin in the Corinthian Church for a
moment, and turns to set forth, in the words of the text, a very deep
and penetrating view of what the Christian life is, how it is
sustained, and what it demands. 'Wherefore,' says he, 'let us keep
the feast ... with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.'
That 'wherefore' takes us back to the words before it, And what are
these? 'Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us'; therefore--because
of that sacrifice, to us is granted the power, and on us is laid
imperatively the obligation, to make life a festival and to purge
ourselves. Now, in the notion of a feast, there are two things
included--joy and plentiful sustenance. So there are three points
here, which I have already indicated--what the Christian life is, a
festival; on what it is sustained, the Paschal Sacrifice; what it
demands, scrupulous purging out of the old leaven.