2 Corinthians 1:1-11
Twentieth Sunday in
Ordinary Time/ 11th September 2015
Something
horrific happened to Paul. We don’t know
the details. Whatever it was it must
have been terrifying. That’s how he
describes it here in this letter to the church in Corinth, a church near and
dear to his heart because he founded it, a church, truth be told, that
frustrated Paul. Let’s just say it had
issues. Still, he wants nothing but the best for them, that they grow, not only
in numbers but also in faithfulness to Christ, grow in their generosity, grow
in their depth of commitment. He wants
them to be mature Christians. It’s okay to start out as an infant, that’s where
we all start, but he expects them to grow up
into Christ, into a faith mature and vital and wise and strong enough to face
anything the world will throw at them.
And the world threw something frightful at Paul. We don’t know what it was or how long it
lasted. We know where it happened: in
Asia, modern day western Turkey. If the
language Paul uses to describe his ordeal is any indication it must have been
intense, awful. Listen again to how he
describes it, “…for we were so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of
life itself” (2 Cor. 1:8). Crushed. Despair.
“We felt that we had received the sentence of death…”(2 Cor. 1:9).
Why was this happening? We don’t know.
Why did God allow this to happen? We don’t know.
Instead of asking “why?” questions—which are often not
very helpful, especially since we’ll never know the answers—Paul tries to makes
sense out of his ordeal from what he knows.
And what he knows from his own personal experience is that God has a way
of showing up in places that look dead, God has a way of appearing in
places closed off from light (such as a grave), God has a way of showing
up in unlikely ways, in unlikely situations; for we know because of a cross
and an empty tomb, God uses even death to display the power of God’s
love. Paul writes, “Indeed, we felt that
we had received the sentence of death, so that we would rely not on ourselves but
on God who raises the dead” (2 Cor. 1:9).
Paul knows. Yes, Paul knows. God in Christ rescued him once from the
forces of death and God will do it again.
Paul discovered that a deeper power was at work in him, a power that did
not belong to him, and it’s that power that he had to learn to rely on through
this nightmare. That is the foundation
of Paul’s hope. And so he draws the
Corinthians into his ordeal. Paul asks
for their prayers. Why? He writes, “So that many will give thanks on
our behalf for the blessing granted us through the prayers of many” (2 Cor.
1:11).
I started with verse 8, about the “affliction” they
experienced in Asia. But that’s not where
Paul starts his letter. After the
initial salutation, Paul begins in verse 3 with thanksgiving, blessing God, which
is where we ended the reading for this morning, “so that others many give
thanks on our behalf.”
Blessing, blessing God
and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Thanksgiving at the beginning of the text, thanksgiving at the end, and
in between “affliction” and “despair.”
Why thanksgiving? Because Paul
wants the Corinthians to know what he came to know. Because he wants the Corinthians to share in
the grace he received. Because he wants them to live from the wisdom he
discovered in this ordeal. And here it is: God
is always faithful to us, no matter what.
After surviving a horrifying ordeal he thanked God. Not because he survived. Although, I’m sure he was thankful for
that. Instead—remarkably—he seems to be
thanking God for the entire experience! He
thanks God because he discovered
something about God that he could only have discovered suffering through this
ordeal. God is the “Father of mercies,”
he says, of compassion, and God is the “God of all consolation” (2 Cor. 1:3). Paul is not saying that God caused the
suffering. Instead, he’s affirming that
God is perhaps most powerfully present in
the midst of our sufferings and afflictions.
Actually, what’s implied here, what Paul doesn’t say (because
his readers know) is why he’s in Asia in the first place: he’s preaching the
gospel. In other words, his affliction
in Asia is the direct result of following his call to preach and teach. It’s the gospel getting him in trouble. Paul actually believes that to be associated
with the gospel guarantees that we are put at cross-purpose with the world.
This is a tough truth for the church to hear. I know.
That’s because the gospel is always.
Paul knew that when we are faithful to the gospel there will be
resistance to it, and challenges, and afflictions, it might even feel like
death. But be of good cheer, for the God
of mercy and consolation promises to meet us precisely there!
It’s not surprising, therefore, that compassion and
consolation permeated Paul’s ministry in Corinth and elsewhere. That’s because this is part of the gospel
itself, that God meets us in our afflictions.
This is part of the good news!
That’s what Paul wants them—and us—to know.
Why is this so important?
Because something of God’s kingdom opens up to us when we discover that
when the God of mercy and consolation consoles us in our afflictions—and Paul
assumes that we will have afflictions—“we may be able to console those who are
in any affliction with which we ourselves are consoled by God” (2 Cor. 1:4). Paul knows, we know, what the church can
truly be like when we are people of mercy, of compassion, of consolation. And all of this—mercy, compassion, sharing in
suffering—is possible—we bear witness to it—because we are, right now, by
virtue of our baptisms sharing in the
life of Christ. Just as the life of God
was pouring out through the sufferings of Christ, all the suffering that we
encounter, our own or others, can become a sharing, a participatin in the life
of God. For Paul, Jesus is more than a
distant historical figure that he believed in, Jesus was, is, a presence he
knows and lives in and shares his life with because Jesus shares his life with
him.
Christ is abundantly present, right now, in the places
that need consolation. God meets human
suffering with mercy. And because we
know that God has and is merciful to us we’re able to respond to human suffering
with mercy, compassion. The word compassion literally means, “to suffer
with.” Compassion allows us to suffer
with those who suffer and rejoice with those who rejoice. Paul even makes a bold, counter-intuitive
claim that our own individual afflictions can actually mean the eventual consolation
or salvation of someone else, because knowing that God has and is meeting me in my affliction means that I can be
prepared and able to meet you more readily in your affliction. It means
that when you are afflicted I will stand with you because I know that God’s
compassion and consolation will be known there, probably through me or through
the community of the church.
This is why Paul has so much hope! “Our hope for you is unshaken; for we know”—we
know, not we think or suspect, we know—“that
as you share in our sufferings [in Asia], so also you share in our consolation”
(2 Cor. 1:7).
I often return to Christian Wiman’s beautiful memoir My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer. A poet, Wiman returned to
the faith just before he was diagnosed with a rare terminal cancer. Almost fifty years old, he knows a lot about
affliction, suffering, excruciating pain, about despair and feeling sentenced
to death. And yet, still, nevertheless—you
know, isn’t nevertheless such a grace-filled
word, a word that describes what grace looks and feels like? Being a realist and never sugarcoating his
life, nevertheless Wiman has come to know and experience God most profoundly as
the God of mercy and consolation. Wiman writes, because he knows from his own
experience, “Christ’s suffering shatters the iron walls around individual suffering…
Christ’s compassion makes extreme human compassion—to the point of death,
even—possible.”[1]
You see, when we share in the suffering of others, even risk
entering into their experience, when we do this with the strength and presence
of Christ, knowing that he goes there with us, do you know what happens? We are
changed. We become different people. And
then we help transform the lives of the people we love. Isn’t this what the church is for?
At the end of his memoir, speaking to his son, sharing some
of the wisdom he has discovered as a Christian, Wiman writes, “Life tears us
apart, but through those wounds, if we have tended them, love may enter
in. It may be the love of someone you
have lost. It may be the love of your
own spirit for the self that at times you think you hate. However it comes though, in all these—of all
these and yet more than they, so much more—there burns the abiding love of
God.”[2]
Life tears us all apart at one time or the
other, but it’s there, in our wounds, if we have tended them, cared for them, there burns the abiding love of God.
2 comments:
Thank you, Ken. I love Wiman's My Bright Abyss. His poems in Every Riven Thing are deeply moving, too:
From a Window
Incurable and unbelieving
in any truth but the truth of grieving
I saw a tree inside a tree
rise kaleidoscopically
as if the leaves had livelier ghosts.
I pressed my face as close
to the pane as I could get
to watch that fitful, fluent spirit
that seems a single being undefined
or countless beings of one mind
haul its strange cohesion
beyond the limits of my vision
over the house heavenward.
Of course I knew those leaves were birds.
Of course that old tree stood
exactly as it had and would
(but why should it seem fuller now?)
and though a man's mind might endow
even a tree with some excess
of life to which a man seems witness,
that life is not the life of men.
And that is where the joy came in.
Thanks, Madeleine. Agree - a beautiful, poignant collection of poems.
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