1:17. In the first part of this verse
St Paul is giving the reasons for his actions as described in the preceding
verses. The second part he uses to broach a new subject—the huge difference
between this world’s wisdom and the wisdom of God.
“Christ did not send me to baptize but
to preach the Gospel”: this is a reminder that preaching is St Paul’s main
task, as it is of the other apostles (cf. Mk 3:14). This does not imply a
belittling of Baptism: in his mandate to the apostles to go out into the whole
world (cf. Mt 28:19–20), our Lord charged them to baptize as well as to preach,
and we know that St Paul did administer Baptism. But Baptism—the sacrament of
faith—presupposes preaching: “faith comes from what is heard” (Rom 10:17). St
Paul concentrates on preaching, leaving it to others to baptize and gather the
fruit—a further sign of his detachment and upright intention.
In Christian catechesis,
evangelization and the sacraments are interdependent. Preaching can help people
to receive the sacraments with better dispositions, and it can make them more
aware of what the sacraments are; and the graces which the sacraments bring
help them to understand the preaching they hear and to be more docile to it.
“Evangelization thus exercises its full capacity when it achieves the most
intimate relationship, or better still a permanent and unbroken
intercommunication, between the Word and the Sacraments. In a certain sense it
is a mistake to make a contrast between evangelization and sacramentalization,
as is sometimes done. It is indeed true that a certain way of administering the
Sacraments, without the solid support of catechesis regarding these same
Sacraments and a global catechesis, could end up by depriving them of their
effectiveness to a great extent. The role of evangelization is precisely to
educate people in the faith so as to lead each individual Christian to live the
Sacraments as true Sacraments of faith—and not to receive them passively or
apathetically” (Paul VI, Evangelii nuntiandi, 47). (Saint Paul's Letters to
the Corinthians [The Navarre Bible; Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005], 33-34)
