St Paul’s Second Letter to the Church in Corinth is one of the most unusual documents of the ancient world. It displays a painful vulnerability, a sense of personal betrayal expressed with startling honesty. It dwells on all those things in Paul’s career that have caused him humiliation, admitting that the rival teachers who have gained the affection and admiration of the Corinthians are more superficially impressive than he is. It speaks with bitter clarity of the various ways in which the authentic apostle’s ministry is weighed down with false perceptions, projections, gossip and politicking. It contains one of the most heartbreaking moments in Paul’s entire correspondence, when he describes the sacrifices he has made to spare the Corinthians any financial burden, and ends: “Why? Because I do not love you? God knows I do!” (2 Cor 11.11)
It has all the poignancy of a parent’s helpless, frustrated and embarrassing rage at a sullen and indifferent teenage child: raw, manipulative, candid and pitiful all at once. And it is Holy Scripture: it is the Word of God. That is to say, this testament of humiliating human fragility is part of what God wants us to hear so as to grasp who and what God is. Paul pours out his feelings almost – you might think – so that he can force himself to look at himself, and force himself to accept that his sharing of the good news of Jesus Christ doesn’t depend on his personal success. God is at work whether or not Paul has “got it together”. In the extraordinary 11th and 12th chapters, Paul goes through the heroic sufferings and struggles of his mission, acknowledging at every turn that this is ridiculous behaviour on his part: no one should expose their vanity and egotism like this, he knows quite well. But its climax is his memory of what he has heard from Christ himself: “My power is made perfect in weakness.”
So he winds up his protest and his self-justifications. It’s been essential to let it out, to look clearly at how readily we revert to defensive, selfish thoughts even in the best of causes – to look at the hurt, lonely, angry centre of a self we’d like to be so mature and in control of things. The more we see our own desperate immaturity – the more we face the fact that we have an infinity of growing up to do – the more we should be amazed by God’s freedom to work with and in this messy and embarrassing work-in-progress.
“Treasure in jars of clay,” he says, in one of his most famous and memorable images; “earthen vessels” in the older translation (4.7). Our default setting as humans is apparently to look at things as if human control, planning, smooth operation, fluency and style made all the difference. And that, says Paul, is looking at things “according to the flesh”, looking at things in the framework of the feverish, fearful, power-hungry self that keeps the fallen world turning (towards its own destruction). What makes the difference is God, who is free to act whether or not we are “succeeding”. Yet God has decided to act in and with us in our mess – as if that were the only way we could get the point that God is God, not just an inflated version of us.
This makes sense of the way God makes the supreme divine disclosure in the life of Jesus. We no longer relate to Jesus “according to the flesh,” says Paul (in what’s often been a disastrously misunderstood phrase). We have to let go of any idea that Jesus is going to “work” for us in the way that makes sense to us, by dominating, solving, succeeding. Once we realise that Jesus reveals the divine freedom to bring a “new creation” into being (5.17), we can see beyond the “veil” of routine perception. Glory breaks through the ordinary, “the glory of God in the face of Christ” (4.6). We are gradually being recreated in the shape of Christ, growing from one level of glory to another (3.18).
The whole letter thus weaves together the exhilarating vision of Jesus Christ as embodying the infinite creative liberty of God with the almost ludicrously paradoxical truth that we are likely to see this plainly when we have least reason to trust our own holiness and discernment. The text is perilously balanced between comedy and tragedy – the incongruity of what God does with us, the abiding risk of our being captured afresh by our seductive self-images. But the letter also tells us about the kind of community that this vision gives birth to – a community in which everyone needs everyone else (chapters 8 and 9), because anything given to one is given to be shared with all; a community in which anyone’s loss or failure is everyone’s injury and anyone’s healing and growth is everyone’s gift (11.29).
A favourite book, then, simply because of the way – unique even in Paul’s writings – the entire mystery of the Incarnation and the reality of the Mystical Body are laid out before us in the context of a vulnerable human story, a wounded psyche like yours and mine. A hymn to a new creation that transfigures the old from within.
Dr Rowan Williams is a former Archbishop of Canterbury.
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