All Paul Fall #9: Second Corinthians
This is Part 9 of a 13-part series of brief reflections on the letters of Paul. These reflections are part of the Saturday Morning Prayer service for St. Stephen’s Episcopal Cathedral’s Facebook Live Ministry.
If a person comes and preaches some other Jesus than the one we preached, or if you receive a different Spirit than the one you had received, or a different gospel than the one you embraced, you put up with it so easily! I don’t consider myself as second-rate in any way compared to the “super-apostles.” But even if I’m uneducated in public speaking, I’m not uneducated in knowledge. We have shown this to you in every way and in everything we have done.
2 Corinthians 11:4-6, 10-15 (Common English Bible)
Since Christ’s truth is in me, I won’t stop telling the entire area of Greece that I’m proud of what I did. Why? Is it because I don’t love you? God knows that I do! But I’m going to continue to do what I’m doing. I want to contradict the claims of the people who want to be treated like they are the same as us because of what they brag about. Such people are false apostles and dishonest workers who disguise themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder! Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. It is no great surprise then that his servants also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their end will be what their actions deserve.
Another Jesus, another Gospel.
In Second Corinthians, Paul is responding to what he sees as a serious threat to the church: outsiders who are coming in with false teachings. Apparently, Paul has gotten word that the church in Corinth was visited by apostles who claim to be Christian but are teaching something different from what Paul taught. Remember that Paul had a life-changing revelation from God — a revelation that changed Paul from a persecutor of Christians to a Christian evangelist. Paul received the Gospel directly from Christ in this revelation — so, naturally, Paul thinks that anyone who teaches something that conflicts with his Gospel is a fraud and a liar.
Paul sees this kind of false teaching as a serious threat to the salvation of the Corinthian believers, and also a serious threat to the unity of the church. In First Corinthians, Paul already warned the church about the risk of disunity when people identify too much with a particular teacher (“I belong to Paul, I belong to Apollos,” etc. in 1 Cor. 3:4-6); now, Paul is warning that competing teachings can have the same divisive effect.
The real Paul.
Paul is so incensed at this development that he lets his mask slip. Usually, Paul has a protean quality about him — he blends in with whatever society or culture he is trying to address. As he wrote in First Corinthians, “I have become all things to all people…that I might by all means save some.” (1 Cor. 9:22-23) So we don’t usually get to see the “real” Paul. But Paul’s anger and indignation is palpable in this letter, and we get a chance to see the “real” Paul behind the mask.
Irony and sarcasm in Holy Scripture.
And the real Paul is absolutely willing to employ irony and sarcasm to carry his point. In this letter, Paul publishes a defense of his own apostleship. He sarcastically refers to these other false teachers as “super-apostles,” and then proceeds to sarcastically diminish his own status. Paul basically says, in the most sarcastic of tones: “Hey, you are right. I’ll never be as good as those super-apostles. Even though God gave me a vision of heaven, and even though I’ve sacrificed everything to give you the gospel, and even though I care deeply for you, I’m really just a fool.”
There are other examples of sarcasm in Holy Scripture, but Paul’s polemic about the super-apostles is, in my opinion, the best and clearest example of the form.
Reading between the lines, it is easy to see that Paul is deeply hurt by the actions of these super-apostles, and he feels a sense of betrayal that some of his Corinthian brothers and sisters have been taken in by these fakers.
Faith and feelings.
And so, one of the lessons that we can glean from Second Corinthians is that all of our feelings can be valid expressions of our faith. Sometimes we find ourselves thinking that we should only have good and positive feelings when we are dealing with religious matters. Paul teaches us that this is not so. It is okay to be angry — one can be angry at the people one cares about, and one can be angry at God. A person might resort to sarcasm and irony and self-deprecation, even when talking to those one loves.
In fact, our relationships with God and with those whom we love the most are the most important relationships in our lives; it is no surprise that those relationships will sometimes engender our strongest and most strident emotions. As long as we continue our relationships in love, there is still a place for strong emotions. So yes: proceed with charity, graciousness, and kindness. But it’s also okay to have moments of anger and outrage sometimes. Paul shows us that a loving relationship has room for all of our feelings — as long as we express them in the spirit of love and caring.
