Everything You Have Is A Gift

Today the Church remembers Saint Teresa of Calcutta, and today Paul asks the Corinthians a question she spent seventy years answering with her hands: “What have you that you did not receive?” (1 Corinthians 4:7). It’s a small question with a blade in it. Because the moment you admit that your intelligence, your health, your faith, your children, your very capacity to receive anything at all came to you as a gift, the whole architecture of comparison collapses. You can’t rank yourself against another person on the basis of something neither of you earned. And yet we do it constantly. We measure our parish against the one across town, our prayer life against the woman who gets to daily Mass, our children against our sister’s children. Paul’s word for that habit is being “puffed up,” and the Greek verb he uses is one he reserves almost entirely for the Corinthians, a caricature of people inflated with air and nothing else. And what he sets against that habit is strange. He points to a hungry man in a grain field.

The Readings

First Reading: 1 Corinthians 4:6b-15

I have applied all this to myself and Apollos for your benefit, brethren, that you may learn by us not to go beyond what is written, that none of you may be puffed up in favor of one against another. For who sees anything different in you? What have you that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?

Already you are filled! Already you have become rich! Without us you have become kings! And would that you did reign, so that we might share the rule with you! For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, like men sentenced to death; because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men. We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute. To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are ill-clad and buffeted and homeless, and we labor, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we try to conciliate; we have become, and are now, as the refuse of the world, the offscouring of all things.

I do not write this to make you ashamed, but to admonish you as my beloved children. For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel.

Gospel: Luke 6:1-5

On a sabbath, while he was going through the grainfields, his disciples plucked and ate some ears of grain, rubbing them in their hands. But some of the Pharisees said, “Why are you doing what is not lawful to do on the sabbath?” And Jesus answered, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God, and took and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those with him?” And he said to them, “The Son of man is lord of the sabbath.”

Scriptural Analysis

Paul is writing to a church that has split itself into fan clubs. Some claim Paul, some claim Apollos, some claim Cephas (1 Corinthians 1:12). He has spent three chapters on it. And now, at 4:6, he tips his hand and tells them what he has been doing: “I have applied all this to myself and Apollos for your benefit.” The verb is unusual, a word that means to change the form of something, and Paul uses it nowhere else in this letter. Raymond Collins argues that Paul employs a recognized ancient rhetorical device, covert allusion, in which a speaker talks openly about one set of people while intending the audience to apply every word to another set. Rhetoricians used it precisely when they had to admonish the powerful without naming them.^[1] So there were no real Paul-parties and Apollos-parties at Corinth. There were factions, and there was disruptive leadership, and Paul held up himself and Apollos as a picture of two men who work the same field without competing, hoping the powerful men in that community would see themselves in the mirror.

Then comes the line about not going “beyond what is written,” which has confounded interpreters for eighteen hundred years. One commentator opened his treatment of it by admitting the phrase is untranslatable.^[2] Some read it as a schoolroom image: a teacher traces letters for a child and tells him to stay inside the lines, and the Corinthians, whom Paul has already called infants (3:1-2), cannot even manage that. Others take “what is written” in its ordinary Pauline sense, a citation of Scripture, since Paul uses that formula thirty more times and always means the Old Testament. Chrysostom read it as a reference to Jesus’ words on humility and not judging one another.^[3] George Montague notes that every Scripture Paul has quoted so far in this letter circles one theme: God’s wisdom set against human wisdom, which is exactly what the Corinthians are inflated about.^[4] Whatever the phrase meant to them, its function is clear. Stay inside the lines God drew. Do not add your own rankings to His revelation.

The three questions of verse 7 land next, and they widen far past Corinth. Who sees anything different in you? What have you that you did not receive? If you received it, why boast as if you did not? Paul uses the verb “to receive” three times in two lines. Montague points out that Paul first thinks of the concrete gifts these people can count: the gift of faith, the charisms he named in his opening thanksgiving (1:4-7), the preachers and teachers God sent them one after another. But underneath that sits his whole theology of grace, which pricks the pride of a humanity that forgets even its capacity to receive is a gift.^[5] Notice what is missing from verses 7 and 8: God. In a section soaked in God-language on both sides, the Corinthians’ boasting has no room for Him at all.^[6] That absence is the diagnosis.

Verse 8 turns the knife with irony. Already you are filled. Already you have become rich. You have become kings without us. Those three verbs, to be satiated, to be rich, to act royally, were stock vocabulary in Hellenistic literature for describing the rich and the powerful, and Stoic writers regularly bundled wisdom, riches, and royalty into one triad about the wise man who reigns over everything.^[7] Some of the Corinthians appear to have believed the kingdom had already arrived in full and they were living in it. Paul concedes the kingship and then exposes it as counterfeit. In baptism they really do share the royalty of Christ. Their behavior is a travesty of it, because Christ came into His kingship through a cross, and if theirs were the real thing, Paul would be reigning alongside them.^[8]

So he shows them the real thing. God has exhibited the apostles “as last of all, like men sentenced to death,” and the image comes from the arena. A victorious general came home in a triumphal procession, and at the very end of the parade, trailing behind the spoils, came the chained prisoners who would die for the crowd’s entertainment.^[9] The apostles are that. A spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men. And then the hardship list: hungry, thirsty, ill-clad, buffeted, homeless, working with our own hands. Paul uses a recognized literary form here: the catalog of tribulations, which philosophers used to show that a wise man could rise above his circumstances. Paul inverts the point. His list puts human weakness on display, and the gospel still achieves everything God intends straight through it.^[10] “Roughly treated” translates a verb Mark uses for the men who struck Jesus at His trial (Mark 14:65). “Homeless” echoes the Son of Man, who has nowhere to lay His head (Matthew 8:20). Paul describes a life shaped exactly like Christ’s.

And that is where the Gospel meets him, in a field, with hungry men.

Luke sets the scene with almost no furniture. Jesus is walking through the grain fields on a sabbath. His disciples pluck the heads, rub them in their hands to strip the husk, and eat. Plucking grain from a neighbor’s field was explicitly permitted: “When you go through your neighbor’s grain field, you may pluck some of the ears with your hand” (Deuteronomy 23:26). The objection is about the day. Rubbing grain in your hands looked like threshing, and threshing was one of the categories of work the tradition had fenced off from the sabbath, in obedience to the harvest-time command of Exodus 34:21.

It would be easy to read the Pharisees here as small men fussing over crumbs, and that reading misses them badly. Pablo Gadenz points out that their zeal came from a conviction with an entire national history behind it: Israel had gone into exile for disobedience, and Jeremiah had said plainly that failure to keep the sabbath holy would burn Jerusalem’s gates and consume her palaces (Jeremiah 17:27). In the first century, the exile was not finished. The tribes were scattered, a Gentile power held the land, and obedience, especially in the observances that marked Israel out as Israel, was how you hastened restoration.^[11] These men were trying to bring the kingdom in. What they could not see was that it had already walked into their grain field.

Jesus answers with a story, and He picks one that has nothing to do with the sabbath on its face. David, fleeing Saul, hungry, went into the house of God at Nob and ate the bread of the Presence, which the Law reserved to the priests, and gave it to his men (1 Samuel 21:2-7). On the surface, the lesson is that human need outranks ritual regulation, and that much is true; the rabbis themselves allowed exceptions where life was at stake. But there is a deeper claim underneath. The bread of the Presence was set out fresh every sabbath, and the old loaves were eaten by Aaron and his sons that same day (Leviticus 24:8-9). So what David did, he did on a sabbath. Gadenz draws the line out: if David could eat the priests’ bread on the sabbath, then Jesus, the Son of David (Luke 1:32; 18:38-39), can do what He is doing on the sabbath. And more than that. Only priests could lawfully eat those loaves, yet Psalm 110 makes the Davidic king a priest as well, after the order of Melchizedek. Jesus unites both dignities in Himself.^[12]

Watch Luke’s verbs. He alters the wording he received and adds one word: Jesus says David “took,” “ate,” and “shared” the bread. Took, ate, gave. Those are the gestures of the feeding of the five thousand and of the Last Supper (Luke 9:16; 22:19).^[13] Luke is pointing at the altar. Saint Cyril of Alexandria read the loaves of the Presence exactly this way, as a foreshadowing of the Eucharist, the bread coming down from heaven to be set on the holy tables of the churches.^[14] The bread David ate because he was hungry prefigures the bread Christ gives because we are starving.

Then the pronouncement: “The Son of man is lord of the sabbath.” This is the second time in Luke that Jesus uses that title, and the first was when He forgave sins (5:24). Both times the title carries divine authority. Who besides God has authority over the sabbath, which God Himself instituted at creation (Genesis 2:2-3)?^[15] Joseph Fitzmyer notes that Jesus leaves the sabbath regulations standing and subordinates them to His own person and mission.^[16] The day was always God’s. It is His still. He is standing in the field.

Both readings, then, say the same thing from opposite ends. Paul strips the Corinthians of every basis for boasting, because they received all of it. Jesus stands in a grain field and says that the Lord of the day has come to feed the hungry with Himself. What you have, you were given. And what you were given, in the end, is Him.

Daily Application

Here is what makes verse 7 so hard to live with. It humbles you, and then it disarms you.

Most of the resentment we carry runs on a hidden ledger. He got the promotion I deserved. She has the marriage I prayed for. That family got the healing, and mine didn’t. The ledger only works if the entries are things we earned, because you cannot be cheated out of a gift. Paul’s question closes the books: what do you have that you did not receive? Not your talent. Not your temperament. Not the parents who happened to have you baptized. Not the faith you are exercising this second in reading a Scripture reflection instead of a hundred other things you could be reading. All of it arrived. And once you actually believe that, comparison loses its fuel, because there is no one to compare with. There is only a Giver to thank.

That is the interior movement today asks for, and it is gratitude of the sort that reorganizes a life, well past the polite kind we perform at the table. Watch how far it goes in Paul. When he is ridiculed, he blesses; when he is persecuted, he endures; when he is slandered, he answers gently. He has stopped defending a position he thinks he earned. A man who knows everything he has is a gift has nothing left to protect. That is where the freedom comes from, and it is why the pagan world, watching these people, garbled the word Christianoi into Chrestianoi, the kind ones.^[17] They could not account for the gentleness.

Saint Teresa of Calcutta lived at the exact junction of these two readings, and it is worth being precise about how. She was a comfortable Loreto sister teaching history and geography to the daughters of the wealthy in Calcutta, and on a train to Darjeeling in 1946 she heard what she called a call within a call: leave the convent and help the poor while living among them. She left. She took a few months of nursing instruction, put on a white sari and sandals because that is what an Indian woman wore, and went into the slums to learn her neighbors’ names. That is Paul’s list, chosen. And notice the other half. She insisted her sisters spend an hour before the Blessed Sacrament every day before they touched a dying man on the street, because she was convinced it was the same Christ in both places. The bread of the Presence that Jesus invoked in the grain field, the bread she knelt in front of every morning, and the man she carried off the pavement were one Lord. That is the logic of Luke 6, followed all the way down, and she followed it with her hands.

Do two things today. First, name three things you have been treating as achievements and say them back to God as gifts, out loud if you can manage it, and thank Him by name for each. Be specific, because vague gratitude changes nothing. Second, find the person you have been quietly measuring yourself against, and do one concrete good thing for them this week. That is how the ledger gets closed, by acting as though the debt was never owed, which it wasn’t.

The Son of Man is lord of the sabbath, and He came into a field to feed hungry men out of what already belonged to Him. Take what He gives you, and then give it away.

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Notes

1. Raymond F. Collins, First Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 7 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), 176. ↩
2. Collins, First Corinthians, 180. ↩
3. George T. Montague, First Corinthians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 85, citing Saint John Chrysostom, Homilies on 1 Corinthians 12.2. ↩
4. Montague, First Corinthians, 85. ↩
5. Montague, First Corinthians, 86. ↩
6. Collins, First Corinthians, 179. ↩
7. Collins, First Corinthians, 187. ↩
8. Montague, First Corinthians, 86. ↩
9. Montague, First Corinthians, 86; Collins, First Corinthians, 188. ↩
10. Collins, First Corinthians, 183-84. ↩
11. Pablo T. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018), 122-23. ↩
12. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, 123. ↩
13. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, 123; Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina 3 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 101. ↩
14. Saint Cyril of Alexandria, Homilies on Luke 6:3, in Commentary on the Gospel of Saint Luke, trans. R. Payne Smith (repr., Astoria, NY: Studion, 1983), 121, quoted in Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, 125. ↩
15. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, 123. ↩
16. Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, Anchor Bible 28 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981), 610. ↩
17. Montague, First Corinthians, 88. ↩

Books Cited

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• Raymond F. Collins, First Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 7 (Liturgical Press, 1999)
• George T. Montague, SM, First Corinthians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2011)
• Pablo T. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2018)
• Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina 3 (Liturgical Press, 1991)
• Joseph A. Fitzmyer, SJ, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, Anchor Bible 28 (Doubleday, 1981)