Christ Our Passover

“And he will himself bring to light the hidden things of darkness” — and he will do it through Christ, since he promised that Christ would be a Light, and declared that he himself is a lamp, “searching the hearts and the kidneys.” And it is from him that “each man will have his praise” — from the one who, sitting as judge, hands out the opposite of praise as well. [a]

But here, you say, Paul takes “the world” to mean the god of the world, when he says, “We have been made a spectacle to the world, and to angels, and to men.” For if by “world” he had meant the people in it, you argue, he would not have gone on to name “men” separately afterward. To keep you from making an argument like that, the Holy Spirit took care to explain what the sentence means: “We have been made a spectacle to the world” — that is, “both to angels,” who do their work in it, “and to men,” who are the ones they serve.

Naturally — a man of our apostle’s noble courage, to say nothing of the Holy Spirit, was afraid to speak plainly about the god of the world when he was writing to children he had fathered in the good news! There was no way he could have seemed to say anything against that god except right out in the open.

I freely grant that under the Creator’s law the man “who had his father’s wife” was an offender. No doubt Paul was following the principles of natural law and of public law. But when he sentences the man “to be handed over to Satan,” he becomes the herald of a God who avenges. Never mind that he also said, “for the destruction of the flesh, so that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord” — in the destroying of the flesh and in the saving of the spirit alike there is judicial process on God’s part. And when he ordered that “the wicked man be put out from among them,” he was only repeating a sentence the Creator passes again and again.

“Clean out the old leaven, so that you may be a new lump, since you are unleavened.” So the unleavened bread, in the Creator’s own ordinance, was a figure of us. “For Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us.” But why is Christ our Passover, unless the Passover was a type of Christ — in the likeness of the blood that saves, and of the Lamb, which is Christ? Why does the apostle dress us, and Christ too, in the symbols of the Creator’s solemn rites, unless those rites had to do with us all along?

Again, when he warns us against sexual immorality, he uncovers the resurrection of the flesh. “The body,” he says, “is not for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body” — just as the temple is for God and God for the temple. A temple, then, will perish along with its god, and its god along with the temple. You see, then, how it is that “the one who raised up the Lord will also raise us up.” He will raise us in the body, because the body is for the Lord and the Lord for the body. And he fittingly adds the question, “Do you not know that your bodies are parts of Christ?”

What has the heretic to say? That these parts of Christ will not rise again, because they are no longer our own? “For,” he says, “you were bought with a price.” A price! Surely no price at all was paid, since Christ was a phantom and had no bodily substance he could hand over for our bodies. But the truth is, Christ had something to redeem us with; and since he has redeemed at a great price these bodies of ours — the bodies against which sexual immorality must not be committed, because they are now parts of Christ and not our own — then surely, on his own account, he will keep safe what he made his own at such cost. And how are we to glorify God in our body, how are we to lift him high in it, if the body is doomed to perish?

Now we have to face the subject of marriage, which Marcion — more consistent than the apostle — forbids. For the apostle, though he prefers the grace of self-control, still allows a marriage to be contracted and enjoyed, and advises staying in one rather than breaking it up. “Christ plainly forbids divorce; Moses unquestionably permits it.”

Now when Marcion forbids all sexual relations to the faithful — we will say nothing about his catechumens — and when he requires every engagement to be broken off before it becomes a marriage, whose teaching is he following, Moses’ or Christ’s? Yet even Christ, when he commands here that “the wife is not to leave her husband, or if she does leave, she is to remain unmarried or be reconciled to her husband,” both permitted divorce, which in fact he never absolutely forbade, and confirmed marriage — first by forbidding its dissolution, and then, where a separation had already happened, by wanting the bond taken up again through reconciliation.

But what reasons does the apostle give for self-control? That “the time is short.” I had almost thought it was because there was another god in Christ! And in any case, the one from whom this shortness of time comes will also send whatever suits so short a time. Nobody makes provision for a stretch of time that belongs to somebody else. You demean your god, Marcion, when you let him be hemmed in at all by the Creator’s time.

And certainly, when the apostle rules that a marriage is to be “only in the Lord” — that no Christian is to marry an outsider — he is upholding a law of the Creator, who everywhere forbids marriage with foreigners. But when he says, “although there are those that are called gods, whether in heaven or on earth,” his meaning is clear: not that there really are gods, but that there are some who are called gods without truly being gods. He opens his discussion of food offered to idols with a statement about idols themselves: “We know that an idol is nothing in the world.” Marcion, however, does not say that the Creator is not God. So the apostle can hardly be thought to have counted the Creator among those who are called gods without being gods — since even if such beings had been gods, still “for us there is one God, the Father.” Now who do all things come to us from, except the one to whom all things belong? And what, please, are these things? You have them earlier in the letter: “All things are yours — whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come.” So he makes the Creator the God of all things, the one from whom the world and life and death proceed, none of which can possibly belong to the other god. From him, then, among the “all things,” comes Christ too.

When he teaches that everyone ought to live off his own work, he begins with a whole string of examples — soldiers, shepherds, farmers. But divine authority was missing. And what use would it have been to bring forward the Creator’s authority, which he was destroying? It would have been pointless — his own god had no such authority to give. The apostle says, “You shall not muzzle the ox that treads out the grain,” and adds, “Is God concerned about oxen?” Yes — about oxen, for the sake of men! For, he says, “it was written for our sakes.” So he showed that the law had a symbolic reference to us, and that it gives its backing to those who live by the good news. He showed as well that those who preach the good news are for that very reason sent by no other god than the one the law belongs to — the law that made provision for them — when he says, “It was written for our sakes.”

Even so, he refused to use this right that the law gave him, because he preferred to work for nothing. He boasted about that, and let no one rob him of that glory — certainly with no intention of destroying the law, since he had just shown that another man might use it.

For look at Marcion, in his blindness, tripping over the rock our fathers drank from in the wilderness. Since “that rock was Christ,” it was of course the Creator’s, and so was the people. But why fall back on a sacred sign that belongs to an outsider god? Was it not to teach this very truth — that ancient things were the advance sketch of the Christ who was to be traced out of them?

For as he is about to run quickly through what happened to the people, he begins by saying, “Now these things happened as examples for us.” So tell me: were these examples given by the Creator to men who belong to a rival god? Or did one god borrow examples from another, and a hostile one at that? He frightens me toward himself, away from the very one he is transferring my loyalty from. Will his opponent make me better disposed to him?

Suppose I now commit the same sins the people committed — am I to suffer the same penalties, or not? If not the same, how pointless of him to hold terrors over me that I will never have to face! And from whom would I have to face them? If from the Creator: what business does it belong to him to inflict such evils on me? And how could it happen that a jealous God punishes the man who offends his rival, instead of encouraging him? If from the other god — well, he does not know how to punish.

So the whole statement of the apostle has no reasonable footing unless it is meant to bear on the Creator’s discipline. And in fact the apostle’s conclusion matches his beginning: “Now all these things happened to them as examples, and they were written for our warning, on whom the ends of the ages have come.” What a Creator! How far-sighted already, and how considerate — warning Christians who belong to some other god!

Whenever objections turn up like the ones already dealt with, I pass them by; certain others I dispose of briefly. A great argument for another god, they say, is the permission to eat every kind of food, against the law. As if we did not ourselves allow that the law’s burdensome regulations were abolished — but abolished by the one who imposed them, who also promised a making-new of things. So the same God who forbade certain foods restored the use of them as well, just as he had allowed them from the beginning. But if some strange god had come to destroy our God, his very first prohibition would surely have been that his own worshipers keep away from supporting their lives on his enemy’s resources.