Friday, June 21, 2024

The Navarre Bible on 1 Corinthians 1:17

  

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)