God’s Word for You

1 Corinthians 4:11-13 The scum of the earth

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Thursday, December 15, 2022

11 To this very moment we are hungry and thirsty, we are poorly clothed, we are harrassed and homeless, 12 and we work hard, laboring with our own hands. When we are cursed we bless; when we are persecuted we endure it. 13 When we are slandered, we speak kindly. We have become like the scum of the earth, everyone’s garbage, to this very day.

In the well-known phrase in verse 13, “the scum of the earth,” Paul turns to the noun perikatharma (περικάθαρμα). This word was sometimes used by the Greeks for “redeeming sacrifice” (in a pagan sense) of (animal) victims sacrificed as a sin offering to the gods for the guilt of the people, and sometimes “even to criminals who were maintained at the public expense, that on the outbreak of a pestilence or other calamity they might be offered as sacrifices to make expiation (reparation) for the state” (Thayer’s Greek Lexicon, p. 503). This is the sense of the Greek translation of Proverbs 21:18: “The wicked becomes a ransom for the righteous.” But Paul only means trash, garbage. The grossest part of the trash heap is the cruddy scum either on the top or at the very bottom, take your pick. But either way, that’s how Paul sees himself in the way the Corinthians think of him and treat him.

Paul suffered a lot for the sake of the gospel. I have likewise been hungry and thirsty in my lifetime, poorly clothed (though never in rags), I have been harrassed, and I have even been homeless. I have worked hard doing manual labor of many different kinds. I have been cursed and slandered. But I was not homeless on account of the gospel. I have never suffered anything as a pastor except rejection, slander and cursing, and then only as a missionary going door to door, neighborhood by neighborhood, and a few times by former Christians who chose to follow the world and became angry with Christ and the doctrine of his holy Scriptures.

Paul, on the other hand, suffered all of these things on account of Christ. “Three times,” he writes, “I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a day and a night in the open sea. I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my own countrymen, in danger from Gentiles, in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea, and in danger from false brothers” (2 Corinthians 11:25-26).

Why does Paul talk this way? Why does he condemn the Corinthians for their attitude and not simply preach the gospel of Jesus Christ to them? He does it for the same reason a house painter scrapes and sands a peeling window before he does anything else to it. If he just paints it, he will be doing nothing but color old paint that’s already peeling. It does no good at all. It would be worse than useless, because the owner would have had to pay him for his shoddy work, and the old peelings would fall away with the first strong wind, and the window would still need painting. No, he must scrape the old paint away, sand the surface clean, and brush or blow away the dust, and then the surface is ready to be primed and painted. This is like the preaching of the law. The law must scrape away false opinions and the dreadful self-righteousness that people feel about themselves. The law scrapes away everything and leaves a man bare, exposed and helpless.

This is the way the Word of God must be preached: The law to afflict those who are comfortable in their sins, and the gospel to comfort those who are afflicted by their sins. The great Missouri Synod founder C.F.W. Walther applied 1 Timothy 1:8-10 by saying: “The Word of God is not rightly divided when the Law is preached to those who are already in terror on account of their sins or the Gospel to those who live securely in their sins.” The law breaks down and the gospel lifts up. Only when the law has done all of its fierce work and stripped away whatever man has tried to cover up his guilt with, then the gospel of Christ’s forgiveness can be preached to a broken, aching heart; to a shamed mind that needs forgiveness and peace.

So Paul doesn’t care what snobbery the Corinthians may throw at him. He has done all sorts of things for the sake of Christ. His days of being a Pharisee are long over, and now whatever needs to be done for Christ is exactly what Paul will do. Hard work? He did it. Hardship? Paul endured it. Hard nights in the cold open fields, in the high mountain passes of Galatia? Hard terror when overboard from a ship already sunk, “the waves turn(ed) minutes to hours,” hours to days, and days to what seemed like weeks? Paul knew what it was to tread water and cling to a piece of flotsam in the Aegean or the Eastern Mediterranean. But to those who suffer for the Gospel, God promises deliverance: “Everyone who acknowledges me before men I also will acknowledge before my Father,” Jesus said (Matthew 10:32). And Luther says: “Thus the apostles and martyrs finally were glorified before God and before the whole world. These the world before had regarded as most contemptible people, as Paul says, ‘the scum of the earth.’ Now they are remembered with benediction, like John Hus and all those who suffered persecution and death for the glory of God. Their memory, which for a long time had been in the shadows, has now been revived, but the memory of the wicked decays.”

Even if Paul and the apostles and all the pastors of the Christian church are looked at as the scourings and scrapings of the dog food dishes of the world, it doesn’t mean that Christ doesn’t work his glorious miracle of faith through them; through us. The humble, the lowly, the needy, and the frightened people of God’s creation need the message of Jesus, crucified, died, and risen again, to tell them that their sins are wiped away forever. Paul’s old-fashioned noun, perikatharma, may only have meant slaughtered animals and condemned convicts to the Greeks. Paul used it on himself to preach God’s wrath. But Christ became the scum and the sacrifice for our sakes. That’s the gospel of hope and life in a single act, the act that only Christ could do. And he did it, for you.

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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