Such were some of you, but you were washed. But you were sanctified. But you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and in the Spirit of our God.
1 Corinthians 6:11 (WEB)
in its setting: 1 Corinthians 6:9-11
1 Where we are
The kettle in the office pantry takes about ninety seconds, and Farah has learned to time her tea so that she is alone with it. This morning she is not. Michelle from finance is waiting for the same kettle and asks, friendly, with no edge in it at all, what she was doing before 2023. Farah has a smooth answer ready; she has used it in three interviews. Her mouth is already open. What frightens her is not being sacked. It is that the second she says the true thing, she stops being Farah from admin and becomes a file — someone people are careful around.
2 What the passage is doing
Paul is writing to a church in Corinth that is suing itself in the public courts and boasting about how far it has come. He stops them with a list of the things people do to each other — theft, greed, drunkenness, the lot — and then says, flatly, that some of them used to be exactly that. He names it in front of everybody. He can do it because of the sentence he puts immediately after: washed, made holy, set right, in the name of Jesus.
ἦτε
ēte · you were (and no longer are)
Paul does not soften the list. He says ἦτε — the ongoing past tense, a settled way of living that went on for years. But it is a were, not an are. Then the three verbs that follow are the kind Greek uses for a thing done once and finished: washed, made holy, put right. The old life gets the tense that runs out. The new one gets the tense that stands.
3 Taking it with you
You may not owe anyone your history at a pantry kettle, and there is no law of God that says you must hand it over to a stranger with a mug in her hand. But notice what made Paul able to say it out loud without shame. God had already washed those people before he described them. Not tidied, not excused — washed, and finished. Jesus went to a cross with the whole of your record named plainly, and did not flinch at any line of it. So the truth about your past is not a secret you are managing all day. It is a tense. Whatever you say to Michelle, that is already true of you before nine o'clock.
A prayer you can pray
Father, you know the years I would rather not say out loud. Thank you that you knew them before I did, and washed me anyway, and did not go back on it. Give me courage when speaking is right, and peace when it is not needed. Let me stop guarding a past you have already dealt with. In Jesus' name, amen.
Soli Deo Gloria — to God alone be the glory.
