Most of us know a housing-society WhatsApp group that can argue for three hundred messages about parking spaces and the colour of the new gate — while something genuinely wrong goes on in one flat and nobody says a word. Silence can feel polite, even broad-minded. Paul has heard about exactly that kind of silence in Corinth, except it is worse: the church is not merely quiet, it is proud of itself. A man is living with his stepmother, and the congregation treats its acceptance as a mark of spiritual maturity. Paul refuses to be polite about it. This chapter is short, blunt and uncomfortable, and it is meant to be.
Where it sits in the story: Act 5 — the church learning to be a distinct people inside the Roman world. Having dealt with pride in chapters 1–4, Paul now turns to reports of specific problems, beginning with the most shocking. The chapter uses Israel's Passover imagery — unleavened bread, the lamb — to say that Christ's death calls the community to be cleansed, and it sets a principle Paul will lean on: the church judges itself, not the wider world.
What this chapter is doing: To confront a case of sexual immorality the church was tolerating with pride, to instruct them to remove the unrepentant man from fellowship in hope of his final rescue, and to clarify that this discipline applies inside the church, not to outsiders.
- 5:1–2 — Paul says it is openly reported: a man has his father's wife — very likely his stepmother — something, he says, not tolerated even among the pagans. Worse, the church is arrogant about it when it ought to be grieving.
- 5:3–5 — Though absent, Paul has already judged the matter. When they are assembled with the power of the Lord Jesus, they are to hand this man over to Satan — put him outside the church's protection — for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.
- 5:6–8 — Their boasting is not good: a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough. Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed, so they should keep the feast with the new bread of sincerity and truth, not the old yeast of malice and evil.
- 5:9–13 — In an earlier letter he told them not to associate with sexually immoral people — but he meant fellow believers who live that way, not everyone in the world, which would mean leaving the world altogether. God judges outsiders; the church is to judge those inside and expel the wicked person.
Key verse: 1 Corinthians 5:6 · So what: This chapter has sometimes been used harshly, and it still unsettles. But its target is a church congratulating itself while harm went unaddressed, and its stated goal is the man's rescue, not his destruction. It also sets a limit many Christians forget: the church's discipline is for its own members, not a licence to police or condemn the surrounding society.