Property Of Jesus

To read these two verses well, it helps me to remember who Paul was writing to. Corinth was a busy Greek port, full of traders and sailors and people passing through, and the church there was a young one that Paul himself had helped to start (Acts 18). By the time he writes this letter he has heard reports and answered written questions, and a good deal of it is him sorting out real disputes: quarrels over which leader to follow, lawsuits between believers, confusion about sex and marriage and food. So 6:19-20 is not a quiet meditation dropped from the sky. It lands at the end of a blunt argument about how these Christians were using their bodies, in a setting where the body was often treated as nobody’s business but your own. Paul is writing to ordinary, muddled, recently converted people who had carried their old assumptions into the new faith. That is partly why I take heart from it. He is not addressing spiritual athletes. He is writing to a church that kept getting it wrong, and he still calls each of them a temple.

There is a phrase here I think we read too quickly: ‘you were bought with a price.’ The verb behind it is ordinary marketplace language, the sort of word used for buying goods in the open square. Corinth knew that world intimately. To be bought was a concrete, public transaction, not a mood. So when Paul says you are not your own because you were bought with a price, he is reaching for an image his readers could see down at the harbour on any given day. What strikes me is the order of the logic. He does not begin with rules and then look for reasons to back them up. He begins with an ownership that has already happened, a price already paid, and the way I live follows on from that. Notice too that he opens with ‘don’t you know?’ It is a gentle rebuke. The truth was already theirs; they had simply stopped living as if it were so. I recognise that in myself. I rarely need new information. I need to remember what I already belong to.

The word ‘temple’ carries real weight, and it ties this passage into a long story. For Israel, God’s presence had a fixed address: first the tabernacle in the wilderness, then the temple in Jerusalem, with an innermost room so holy that only the high priest went in, and only once a year. Everything about that arrangement said: God is here, and you come near with great care. The existing reflection notes that the presence has moved address, and what I want to add is how far it moved. Paul does not only relocate God’s presence into the church as a whole, the way he does in 1 Corinthians 3:16. Here he narrows it right down to the single body. Hold the two halves together and it is a staggering claim. The glory that once filled a guarded sanctuary now indwells ordinary people who belong to Christ. It runs straight back to Jesus, who spoke of his own body as a temple (John 2:21) and whose death tore the old curtain. The dwelling place of God is no longer down a corridor you are barred from entering. By the Spirit, it is the person reading this.

I want to be honest about how this actually bites, because it is easy to keep it abstract. Glorifying God in the body is not only about the dramatic moral failures we tend to file it under. It reaches the tired evening when I numb myself with whatever is nearest. It reaches how I speak to my wife when I am short-tempered, and what I do with my exhaustion, and how I treat a body that is ageing and will not do what it once did. Paul ties body and spirit together at the close, and I find that refusal to split them deeply realistic. I cannot honour God in some inner spiritual room while treating the rest of me as off the clock. Romans 12:1 makes the same move when it asks us to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice, a worship that is physical and daily. And Galatians 2:20, where Paul says he no longer lives but Christ lives in him, keeps me from hearing all this as grim duty. The One who bought me is not a distant landlord doing an inspection. He has moved in, and that changes the whole feel of the obligation.

What rescues this passage from becoming a stick I beat myself with is the direction of it all. I did not buy my way to God; I was bought. The first move is entirely his, and the price was not silver but the blood of Christ. So when I fail to glorify God in my body, and I do, the answer is not to try harder to earn back a presence I was never able to earn in the first place. It is to remember whose I am and turn round. In years of sitting with people who carry shame about what they have done with their bodies, the thing I keep coming back to is that Paul never tells us to scrub the temple clean before God will enter it. The order runs the other way. The Spirit is given first, and holy living grows out of that gift. There is no shame in coming to this late. The surprising news of these two verses is not a demand to make ourselves fit for a guest. It is that the guest is already inside, and means to stay.

• Where in my body and my habits am I still quietly living as though I belong only to myself?
• If the Holy Spirit genuinely lives in me, what one ordinary part of my day might I begin to treat differently this week?
• Do I hear ‘you are not your own’ as a threat or as good news, and what does my answer tell me about how I see God?
• What would tomorrow look like if I lived as someone already bought, rather than someone still trying to earn it?

If you would like to keep going, you could read more of Paul’s letter at 1 Corinthians, or browse verses gathered by topic to find one that meets you where you are today.