2 CORINTHIANS 1.1–7
The God of All Comfort
1Paul, an apostle of King Jesus through God’s will, and Timothy our brother; to God’s assembly in Corinth, with all God’s people in the whole of Achaea: 2grace and peace to you from God our father and the Lord, King Jesus!
3Let us bless God, the father of our Lord, King Jesus; he is the father of mercies and the God of all comfort. 4He comforts us in all our trouble, so that we can then comfort people in every kind of trouble, through the comfort with which God comforts us. 5Just as we have an overflowing share of the Messiah’s sufferings, you see, so we have an overflowing share in comfort through the Messiah. 6If we are troubled, it’s because of your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it’s because of your comfort, which comes about as you bear patiently with the same sufferings that we are going through. 7And our hope about you remains firm, because we know that, just as you’ve shared in our sufferings, so you will also share in our comfort.
The weekend I began work on this book was the weekend when Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother died. She had become a unique British institution. She was 101 years old, one of the few people ever to live in three centuries.
The message was flashed around the world in news bulletins. The Queen Mother had been a familiar figure to millions, and had won the affection, admiration and love of people around the world, not least through the comfort she brought to thousands who lost homes, loved ones and livelihoods during the Second World War.
Now it was the turn of her own family to feel the loss, and they felt it keenly. The television showed pictures of them getting together to comfort one another. And the weekend when it all happened was the weekend of Easter. The Queen Mother died on Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter Day, the day when the church quietly and sorrowfully remembers Jesus lying in his tomb. It is an extraordinary moment, poised between sorrow and comfort.
The Queen Mother was known for pithy, and often funny, sayings. But one of her most-quoted lines was from the height of the war. She had made many visits to the East End of London which had suffered most from bomb damage, but finally her own home, Buckingham Palace, was hit by a bomb, causing a good deal of damage. ‘At last,’ she said, ‘I can look the East End in the face.’ She had suffered something of what they had suffered, and the comfort she brought them by her continued presence was all the stronger.
Paul’s theme throughout this letter is the strange royal comfort that comes through the suffering and death, and the new resurrection-life, of Israel’s Messiah, Jesus, the Lord of the world. This is the letter above all where he explores the meaning of the cross in terms of personal suffering–his own, and that of all the Messiah’s people. If in Galatians he is angry, if in Philippians he is joyful, in this letter his deep sorrow, and the raw wounds of his own recent suffering, are very apparent. He is still capable of humour, and some of what he writes here is quite sparkling. But he writes, so to speak, as one who has just emerged from the ruins of his own house after a bombing raid; and he is all the more able to speak of comfort because of what he himself has just gone through.
What has happened? What has caused such intense suffering as to leave a mark not only on his body but, as we shall see, on the very way he writes? How has it affected his relationship with the lively but often muddled church in Corinth? We shall explore all of these as the letter proceeds. But what we have in this opening passage is the lens through which Paul was determined to view all suffering, all the troubles of the world, his own included. It is the lens of the gospel; and here the gospel is turned into prayer.
The gospel, as he summarized it in 1 Corinthians 15.3–8, is about Jesus the Messiah: that he ‘died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures’. It matters vitally to Paul that these were real events which really took place. But it matters just as much that they become the lens through which the whole world can be seen in proper focus, the grid on which all reality and experience can be plotted. And here, turning his thoughts into prayer, we see what that might mean.
The opening greeting (verses 1–2) follows the pattern which Paul adapted from regular letter-writing in the ancient world. But he filled it, of course, with the particular meanings of the gospel. We notice, to start with, that the circle of readers has widened. In his first letter to Corinth (1 Corinthians 1.2) he simply addressed the Christians in Corinth itself–though reminding them that they were part of a worldwide family. But in the short space of time, perhaps at most a couple of years, between the first letter and this one, the gospel has spread out from Corinth to the other towns and villages of southern Greece, known as ‘Achaea’. The very address thus bears witness to the power of the gospel which was still at work. ‘All God’s people in the whole of Achaea’: an increasing number, not many known to Paul personally, but all of them beloved by God, and all of them, sooner or later, in need of the comfort of the gospel.
Paul often begins the main part of his letters with a prayer in which he lays before God the main theme he wants to get across to his readers. There is no problem here in discovering what it is. He repeats the word ‘comfort’ in one form or another ten times in five verses. To say that this is obviously what’s on his mind doesn’t put it strongly enough; it sounds almost like an obsession.
Actually, the word he uses is a bit more many-sided than ‘comfort’. It can mean ‘to call someone to come near’, ‘to make a strong appeal or exhortation’, or ‘to treat in an inviting or friendly way’. The whole idea of the word is that one person is being with another, speaking words which change their mood and situation, giving them courage, new hope, new direction, new insights which will alter the way they face the next moment, the next day, the rest of their life. And when you put all that together in a bottle, shake it up, and pour it out for someone who is in the middle of deep suffering, the best word we can come up with to describe the effect is probably ‘comfort’. If we said ‘console’ or ‘consolation’ that would pick up one aspect of it; but when you ‘console’ someone you simply bring them back from utter despair to ordinary unhappiness. The word Paul uses here, over and over again, does more than that. It meets people where they are, and brings them right on to the point where they are strong enough to see new hope, new possibilities, new ways forward.
At the heart of this prayer, and of the gospel, is the fact that what is true of the Messiah becomes true of his people. This is a central principle for Paul, not simply as a powerful idea and belief but as a fact of experience. The letter returns to this again and again, in what some have called a pattern of ‘interchange’: the Messiah died, so his people die in him, sharing his sufferings; the Messiah rose again, so his people rise again in him, knowing the power of the resurrection to comfort and heal, already in the present time, and cherishing the hope that one day they will be given new, resurrection bodies like the one the Messiah himself now has. This is basic to a good deal of the letter.
But as well as the interchange between the Messiah and his people we also see, here and throughout the letter, a similar interchange between the apostle and the churches to whom he writes. When he suffers, the churches are comforted; when he is comforted, that comfort is passed on to them too. The idea of the isolated individual, living his or her own life in a sealed-off compartment away from the rest of the world, is totally foreign to Paul. Precisely because the gospel is about love, the love of God going out to embrace the world in the Messiah, the love of the apostle going out to the communities ‘in the Messiah’ that have come into being through his work, this pattern of interchange operates in a thousand different ways. What happens to them, and what happens to Paul himself, are intertwined.
And all is from God himself. Paul’s prayer highlights God as ‘the father of mercies and the God of all comfort’, and throughout the letter Paul emphasizes that God himself is at work in and through the strange and troubling things that are happening. What happens in and through the Messiah, and the gospel, is what God is doing. We should not miss the sense, throughout this letter, that Paul’s deep experience of pain and sorrow has led him to a new vision of God. And that vision, shaped by the Messiah, is a vision of light and love. Light enough to see how to move forward from tragedy to glory; love enough to know that one is held in the divine embrace which will not only comfort in the present but remain faithful and victorious into the future.
2 CORINTHIANS 1.8–14
Unbearably Crushed
8You see, my dear family, we don’t want to keep you in the dark about the suffering we went through in Asia. The load we had to carry was far too heavy for us; it got to the point where we gave up on life itself. 9Yes: deep inside ourselves we received the death sentence. This was to stop us relying on ourselves, and to make us rely on the God who raises the dead. 10He rescued us from such a great and deadly peril, and he’ll do it again; we have placed our hope in him, that he’ll do it again! 11But you must co-operate with us through prayer for us, so that when God gives us this gift, answering the prayers of so many, all the more will give thanks because of what’s happened to us.
12This is what we boast of, you see; this is what our conscience is telling us: that our conduct in the world, and in particular in relation to you, has been marked by holiness and godly sincerity, not in merely human wisdom but in God’s grace. 13We are not writing anything to you, after all, except what you can read and understand. And I hope you will go on understanding right through to the end, 14just as you have understood us already–well, partly, at least! You should regard us as your pride and joy, just as we regard you like that, at the day of our Lord Jesus.
You watch from a distance as a friend walks down the street. You see him turn and go into a house. He strides in cheerfully and purposefully. You wait for a few minutes. Then you see him come out again–only now you see, to your horror, that he is limping, staggering along, with bruises on his face and blood trickling from one arm. You are filled with pity and sympathy, but also with puzzlement: what on earth happened in that house?
The historian, particularly the ancient historian, is often in the position of the puzzled spectator. We may have evidence about an early phase of someone’s career, and then again a later phase; but what happened in between is often hidden from us. So it is with Paul. He has gone into the house, striding cheerfully along; we have watched him do so in 1 Corinthians. Now we see him emerge again, battered and bruised. Even his style of writing seems to have changed. But we don’t know what happened inside.
Nor does he tell us. Like many people in the ancient world, he was more interested in what illness or suffering meant than in giving us a detailed account of his symptoms. Most of what we know is in these verses; we can glean a little from things he says later in the letter, but it doesn’t amount to much. He simply refers to ‘the suffering we went through in Asia’ (the Roman province of ‘Asia’ was roughly the western half of modern Turkey, with Ephesus in the middle of its west coast; Ephesus was where Paul was staying when he wrote 1 Corin-thians). What had happened?
Acts doesn’t help at this point, either. Perhaps, if Paul was imprisoned and ill-treated in Ephesus–as seems likely–the author of Acts was anxious not to draw too much attention to it. He has Paul getting into enough trouble as it is. But the riot in the theatre in Ephesus, which Acts describes in chapter 19, may have been part of it. In that passage, things are quietened down by the city officials. But people had woken up to the fact that if the message Paul was announcing was to catch on, their businesses would suffer; so would their civic pride in the great temple of Diana. And the opposition may well have continued in new and nastier ways, leaving Paul feeling, as he says here, that he’s received the sentence of death.
In fact, his description sounds much like what we would call a nervous breakdown. The load had become too heavy; all his natural human resources of energy and strength were worn down to nothing. It’s bad enough to hear a magistrate declare that you are sentenced to death; it’s far worse when a voice deep inside yourself tells you that you might as well give up and die. That is the point Paul had reached, the point where the night had become totally dark and all hope of dawn had disappeared.
Does that mean he’d been relying on his own resources up to that point? That sounds strange for someone who could write, in the previous letter, about his work being done not by his own efforts, but by God’s grace (1 Corinthians 15.10). But maybe, beneath this conscious sense of God’s help and grace, there was still more that Paul had to learn about the meaning of the resurrection–the very thing that he had made the climax of the earlier letter (chapter 15)! Here he says it plainly: the fact that he came to the point where he despaired of life itself was somehow intended–intended by God, he must mean–to make him rely on ‘the God who raises the dead’. This old Jewish belief in the life-giving God, the God whose power created the wor...