Sunday, January 25, 2015: 1 Corinthians 7:29-31
Paul isn’t asking us to avoid the world. But if the form of the world is passing away, the everyday is becoming a step into promise.
I often wonder what the Saturday after Jesus’ crucifixion was like for the disciples. For years they had come to know him—to work and sleep alongside him, eat and pray with him, travel with him in and out of so many people’s lives. They walked in wonder and confusion each day, believing a new world was being ushered into existence. And then it wasn’t. They woke up Saturday morning without him to greet them. They ate their first meal not hearing his voice blessing their fish and bread. Mourning soaked their steps that day, each mundane act crying out what was not and what would not be.
Paul’s exhortation for “those who mourn” to live “as though they were not mourning” seems cruel, even delusional. I lost both my parents to cancer, my father when I was 17 and my mother when I was 25. Those empty days after their bodies had been rolled away still pit my stomach; they remain deep crevasses I peer into, knowing that if I enter, I won’t return without darkness, pain, and struggle. Surely Paul is not asking me to pretend that there is no gap? No absence in the day or in the days to come?
This 1 Corinthians passage shows how even the ordinary is made new because of Christ. To buy as though they have no possessions, for those who have wives to be as though they have none, to deal with the world as though they have no dealings—these everyday practices are not to be resisted. Paul is not asking us to avoid the world. But if the form of the world is passing away, the mundane, too, is undergoing a metamorphosis. The everyday is becoming not a mark of absence but a step into promise.
