“Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough? Clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new lump, just as you are in fact unleavened. For Christ our Passover also has been sacrificed. Therefore let us celebrate the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”

If repetition conveys emphasis, then boasting was a core problem for the Corinthians. Of the forty-six times Paul uses the word in Scripture, thirty-four are in his two letters to the Corinthians. In an earlier letter Paul wrote the Galatians that there is a place for boasting, but not in one’s self:

“But may it never be that I would boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” (Gal. 6:14)

The Corinthians, however, got this all wrong. In the context, they seemed to be boasting in immorality in their midst, a man having sex with his step-mother (1 Cor. 5:1-5). Possibly they saw themselves as sophisticated, keeping up with the world or even outdoing the world in the “freedom” of their lifestyle. They took their freedom in Christ to an extreme. Certainly that was the case in chapter 10, where some were flaunting their “freedom” to eat food offered to idols—at the expense of the “weaker” consciences of those who abstained. In their arrogance, they saw themselves as the “stronger” by their freedom to eat. Possibly some boasted that they were “free” to engage in incestuous immorality.

Whether that was the case or not, certainly their self-centeredness blinded them to the gravity of immoral behavior—to the point that they could not see the depravity that even the non-believing pagans around them could see clearly and avoid! One can almost see the rolling of the eyes and the taunts, “We may be sinners, but we are not as bad as those hypocritical Christians.”

The apostle Paul likens this attitude to leaven (yeast in our contemporary language) that affects the entire loaf of bread. Boasting is contagious and destructive. The imagery is from the Israelites celebrating the Passover—the Exodus from Egypt—with bread that had no yeast/leaven in it, symbolic of the Jews leaving Egyptian ways behind. Corinthians should have been known for their high moral standard and integrity (“sincerity and truth”). Why? Because Christ is our Passover. In other words, because we hold to “Christ and Him crucified.”

Lord, let me not boast in myself or even my freedom in Christ. I recommit to boasting only in Christ and Him crucified, my Passover.