Paul calls the Lord “the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation,” beginning his letter to the Christians in Corinth with these very words. Apparently, the apostle considered it extremely important to begin his letter with precisely this description, for these few verses reveal the entire essence of how people in this world are bound together through mutual consolation.

Christ consoles us in our afflictions so that we can do the same for those around us who need it. Paul calls us not to shut ourselves up within our suffering, but to seek consolation from God, who alone can deliver us from it, and at the same time to seek those to whom we ourselves can bring His love. By giving what we freely received from the Lord, we lose nothing but gain a great deal, becoming part of the circulation of His mercy among people. Is this not what the example of all the Christian saints bears witness to?

Paul's words about consolation in the midst of sorrow can sound strange. The point, of course, is not that sorrows (for example, hardships or persecutions connected with ministry) are meaningless; no one convinced of the rightness of his faith or views and actively preaching them would say that. But in this case the issue is plainly not only a readiness to sacrifice something, or even oneself, for one's faith. If that were all, Christianity in this respect would differ in no essential way from any of the many religions and teachings that exist and have existed in the world: all religions and all teachings in every age have had adherents ready to sacrifice not only well-being but even life for their convictions. But the apostle has more than such readiness in mind.

His words recall the words of Jesus Himself, who regarded persecution for faithfulness to Him and for righteousness as an inseparable part of the Christian path (and more broadly, of the path of every righteous person). Of course, such persecutions are not an end in themselves, but they are a good indicator. This is especially true when Christians are concerned. If a Christian is fully acceptable to the world, if in this world that lies in evil he is at home, and the world counts him entirely and completely its own, then something is wrong with his Christianity.

If a Christian wants to make his Christianity so acceptable to this world that this world is satisfied with it and regards it as organic to itself, then something very serious has happened to his spiritual life. This is not because Christians seek to shock people, but because there can be no organic unity between the Kingdom and this world that lies in evil. At least not until the world is completely transformed.

And the process by which the Kingdom enters the untransformed world cannot be natural and organic; it is always a conflict. Since the Kingdom enters the world through Christians, conflict with the world becomes an inseparable part of their own lives, and it becomes clearer the more actively they are involved in this process.

Paul understands this perfectly from his own experience, for he lived the life of the Kingdom in a fullness that was open to few in his time. He knew what he was talking about. But the breath of the Kingdom for him, as for every genuine Christian, was more real than everything connected with the untransformed world. And in it, in this breath, the apostle found the consolation about which he wrote. Not in fidelity to convictions or to faith, but in the new life that had opened to him in the Kingdom. The very life to which he bore witness to the end of his earthly path.

Paul begins his second letter to the Corinthian church by mentioning the persecutions that fell upon him and his companions in Asia Minor (the Roman province of Asia, v. 8). And he begins with a discussion of what confession and martyrdom are for a Christian (vv. 3-5). To a person who does not know the Kingdom, they often look like the persecutions and harassment that preachers of new ideas or fighters for justice have often suffered in the past and still suffer today. In a certain sense such a view can be considered correct: all the apostles, including Paul, preached Christ and bore witness to the Kingdom, and here there was room both for new ideas and for demanding reminders about the Torah and about righteousness, without which one cannot enter the Kingdom.

But the apostles' witness was still not the presentation of new ideas or a call for justice as old as the world. The Kingdom brought into the world by the Savior is not an idea and not a call to a new life; it is life itself, which for the witness is as real and unquestionable as the life of our world, not yet transformed, is unquestionable for a person who does not know the Kingdom. And the very readiness to die becomes not simply proof of the truth of the witness's words, which he values above his own life, but witness as such, a visible example that the life of the Kingdom is for the speaker precisely a genuine and unquestionable reality, one that proves more real for him even than death, which places the final period in the fate of everyone whose life passes within the boundaries of our world alone, still not transformed. In a world stricken by sin, all are sentenced to death, and the only question is whether a person's life is limited to the bounds of this world, or whether he can still hope in the One who, having Himself overcome the sin of the world, can deliver His followers as well from the power of death (vv. 9-10).

Suffering and death in themselves, of course, prove nothing. Proof can come only from the evident fact that in the witness's life there is something not subject either to suffering or to death, a fact to which the witness is able to bear witness to those around him precisely during sufferings or at the moment of his own death. And such witness is possible only if the witness lives the life of the Kingdom, sensing it within himself even when a person who does not know the Kingdom has nothing left to count on. It is no surprise that those who are not directly involved in such sufferings can also participate in them: the matter concerns the Kingdom, which knows no boundaries (vv. 6-7). Of course, neither suffering nor death in themselves have any meaning or can have any, just as no evil can have meaning. But there is meaning in victory over death, and a Christian can bear witness to it. Then his witness becomes not merely witness to his own fearlessness in the face of death, but witness to the Kingdom.