Their Story is Our Story

1 Corinthians 10:1-13

Here is Paul at his syncretic finest. Here he retrofits the Exodus story as revelation and participation of Christ. In somewhat a backwards fashion, to my mind, Paul grafts baptism on to the journey through the Reed Sea and deliverance - where it seems clear to me that it was the other way 'round: baptism emulated the deliverance and redemptive act performed in the Exodus. (Crossing the Jordan into Palestine, in fact, was considered reminiscent of the Exodus, and it was this that was re-enacted by desert prophets like John the Baptist.) And Paul identifies the rock that gave sustenance as Christ - following in the footsteps of Philo, a hellenistic Jewish philosopher and contemporary of Paul, who identified the rock as "wisdom." (This would be taken up by Hellenic Christians later in the association of Jesus with Wisdom in ancient philosophy.)

For all of Paul's discussion of immorality and such - certainly a dominant theme of the letter as a whole - it doesn't strike me as the most important thing bubbling up from the text.

For me, what stands out is that Paul is identifying the ancient Hebrews as the ancestors of all of us - signaling a very early identification of Christians with the spiritual history and heritage of the Jews. Even years later, when Jews and Christians went their separate ways, and throughout the centuries of later animosity and violence, our pasts are bound up with each other - their story is our story. Even if we understand it differently, we as Christians ought to remember that ours is a religion rooted in Judaism, in a Jewish figure among Jewish followers to start. I wonder how much suffering in the world could have been avoided by recognizing and honoring our spiritual indebtedness to Judaism. (And how Christianity could have been a model for Islam to follow - instead of a model of barbarism and sectarian violence.)