2 Corinthians

Second Corinthians is the letter after the storm. Between the two canonical letters lie a painful visit (2 Corinthians 2:1), a tearful letter written "out of much affliction and anguish of heart and with many tears" (2:4), and rival teachers in Corinth undermining Paul as unimpressive, unskilled in speech, and too battered to be a real apostle. When Titus finally brings news that the church has largely turned back (7:6-9), Paul writes the most autobiographical letter we have from him, and it opens not with his defense but with a doxology built on one word, paraklesis (παράκλησις), comfort: "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God" (1:3-4). Comfort in this letter is not a cushion but a supply line, received in order to be handed on; Paul admits he had despaired of life itself in Asia, "but that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead" (1:8-9).

Out of that furnace comes the letter's great picture of what gospel ministry actually is. Paul is not peddling God's word (2:17); he carries a glory greater than the one that shone on Moses' face, the new covenant ministry of the Spirit: "the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life" (3:6), and where Moses veiled a fading radiance, "we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another" (3:18), Jeremiah's promised covenant now written on hearts (Jeremiah 31:33). But the glory travels in unimpressive packaging, and that is the design: "we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us" (4:7). "We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies" (4:8-10). The rivals read Paul's scars as disqualification; Paul reads them as the shape of the message itself, "so we do not lose heart... for this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison" (4:16-17).

Chapter 5 is one of the summits of the New Testament. Facing the tent of this body folding up, Paul walks by faith, not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7), and lives under one motive: "the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised" (5:14-15). Then the announcement: "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation (kaine ktisis, καινὴ κτίσις). The old has passed away; behold, the new has come" (5:17), Isaiah's new-heavens language planted inside a single human life (Isaiah 43:18-19; 65:17). And the commission: "All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation... Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God" (5:18-20). The paragraph closes with the great exchange, stated in one verse with no verbs wasted: "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (5:21), the servant who bore our iniquities (Isaiah 53:6) written as a transaction of substitution.

The reconciliation is not abstract; the letter immediately puts money where the theology is. Chapters 8 and 9 carry Paul's collection for the famine-struck believers in Jerusalem, and they contain the New Testament's fullest teaching on giving without once using the word tithe. The standard is Christ himself: "though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich" (8:9). The manner is freedom, not pressure: "Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver" (9:7), and the supply is God's: "God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work" (9:8). Grace (charis, χάρις) is the word doing all the work in these chapters; giving is simply grace continuing its motion through the people it reached.

The last four chapters turn to the rivals Paul calls, with an edge, "super-apostles" (2 Corinthians 11:5), teachers commending themselves by credentials, eloquence, and strength. Paul answers with the strangest resume in ancient literature, a "fool's speech" he apologizes for even as he gives it (11:1, 16-17). Where they boast in triumphs, he boasts in the beating list: labors, imprisonments, countless beatings, "five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one," three shipwrecks, a night and a day adrift, danger on every road, toil, hunger, cold, "and, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches" (11:23-28). His escape story is not a victory march but being lowered in a basket through a window in the Damascus wall (11:32-33). Even his visions he tells in the third person, a man caught up to the third heaven who heard things that cannot be told (12:1-4), because the only boast he will own in the first person is weakness (12:5).

Then the letter's crown. "So to keep me from becoming conceited... a thorn (skolops, σκόλοψ) was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me" (12:7). Paul never names it, which is why every sufferer since has been able to write their own name on it. Three times he pleaded for its removal, and the answer he received instead of relief is the sentence the whole letter was traveling toward: "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness (dynamis en astheneia teleitai, δύναμις ἐν ἀσθενείᾳ τελεῖται)" (12:9). Not power despite weakness; power completed in it, the pattern of a Messiah "crucified in weakness" who "lives by the power of God" (13:4). So Paul lands where no rival could follow: "For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong" (12:10). The letter closes with a call to self-examination, "Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith" (13:5), and the fullest trinitarian blessing in Paul: "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all" (13:14). For Sanctum of Spiritborn, 2 Corinthians is the ministry lane's honest mirror: clay jars, a thorn that stays, comfort that flows through wounds, and grace that is enough.

Paul, the Figure, the apostle of the thorn and the basket.

Titus, the Figure, the messenger who carried the good news from Corinth.

Timothy, the Figure, co-sender of the letter.

Sanctum 1 Corinthians, the earlier letter to the same church.

Sanctum The New Covenant, the ministry of the Spirit in chapter 3.

Sanctum Grace, the word that carries the whole letter.

Sanctum Suffering, the thorn and the jars of clay.

Bible Reader, 2 Corinthians in Greek and English.