Readings Here

Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

(Isaiah 49:3, 5–6; 1 Corinthians 1:1–3; John 1:29–34)

The Church of God in Corinth must have been alive—noisy, gifted, unsettling. One imagines their gatherings as anything but restrained: women prophesying, voices raised in tongues, prayers flowing faster than order could contain them. The Lord’s Supper was not a symbolic fragment but a real meal, bread and wine embedded in shared food, shared stories, shared tensions. Faith was not yet polished. It spilled.

And yet, alongside this vitality lived deep fractures. Rivalries over authority. Comparisons of spiritual gifts. A troubling tolerance of behavior that contradicted the gospel they proclaimed. It is precisely this mixture—fervor and failure—that makes Paul’s opening words so startling.

He does not begin with correction. He begins with recognition.

To the church of God existing in Corinth… sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints… Grace to you and peace. (1 Cor 1:2–3)

Paul sees something many would have missed.

  1. The Church of God Existing in Corinth

Paul names the community not as a branch, not as a franchise, not as an extension of Jerusalem or Antioch or Ephesus—but as the Church of God existing in Corinth. The phrase is quiet, but radical. God is not visiting Corinth. God is already there.

This local church is not a preliminary version of something else. It is fully Church. Its faith takes shape in its own language, culture, conflicts, and gifts. Unity does not erase difference; it shelters it.

This vision feels distant today. Local communities often experience themselves as administrative units, awaiting decisions made elsewhere. And yet voices like Pope Francis keep reminding the Church that synodality begins locally—that the Spirit speaks not only from the center, but from the edges, from particular places where real people struggle to live the gospel. Corinth mattered not despite its mess, but within it.

  1. Sanctified in Christ Jesus

Paul does something else that slows us down. He addresses the Corinthians not as sinners, but as saints.

This is not denial. Paul knows their failures. He will name them clearly later. But he refuses to let sin have the final word. He speaks first what is truer.

Words shape identity. Repeated long enough, they become destiny. A young Chinese Christian once said, almost casually, “I have always seen myself as sinful and as nobody.” The sentence lingered. One wonders how often the Church has trained people to see themselves only through lack, forgetting that the same Scripture that says all have sinned also insists that we are justified by grace (Rom 3:23–24).

Paul never forgets this balance. Even those who once were wrongdoers are now washed, sanctified, justified—in the name of the Lord Jesus and in the Spirit of our God (1 Cor 6:11). Perhaps holiness begins not in striving upward, but in learning to see ourselves as God already sees us.

  1. Grace and Peace

Paul’s greeting is not polite convention. Grace and peace name a way of inhabiting the world. As John Dominic Crossan observes, these two words gather the heart of Paul’s theology. Peace is not achieved; it is received. Grace is not earned; it is given.

They come from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ—and nowhere else. Not from success. Not from control. Not from moral superiority. Grace steadies our labor; peace holds us when labor fails.

  1. An Unfinished Desire

One is left wishing—quietly, without illusion. Wishing that leaders would speak to communities with the dignity Paul offers Corinth. Wishing that questioning authority would not be treated as disloyalty, but as participation. Wishing that local churches could be united in faith yet free in expression, bound together not by fear, but by trust in the Spirit.

And perhaps most of all, wishing that we might rediscover the divine spark already placed within us: sanctified, justified, called. Not perfect. But real. Existing—here—where God has chosen to dwell.

Scripture Attribution

New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright © 1989, 1993
the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of
Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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