NOTES for Co2 12:11-21

Yesterday's reading ends with a very important thought that the apostle Paul expresses repeatedly in different forms: “When I am weak, then I am strong.” He also remarks that he “takes pleasure in weaknesses.” In the Greek text we see the words “εύδοκω εν άστενείαις”—I find pleasure, I am content in weaknesses. Within the framework of God's Word, the thought is so simple and natural that it would seem there is nothing to discuss. Yet how impossible the apostle's words appear from an earthly, human point of view!

There is a wonderful parable by Saint Francis of Assisi about perfect joy, which a person finds when completely deprived of everything and rejected by everyone. Christian attempts to do good to all while demanding nothing in return are directed precisely toward acquiring this joy. For this is the path of becoming like the crucified God. Every attempt to find a worthy reward and gratitude for the good one has done is natural and understandable, but it leads far away from this joy.

What exactly the apostle has in mind here is not hard to understand: a little earlier he describes the rather unceremonious behavior of those who considered themselves teachers and spiritual mentors of the Corinthian church.

Unlike them, Paul never demanded anything from the Corinthian Christians; he only tried to help them become established in their relationships with Christ and in the life of the Kingdom. For him apostolic service is possible only when a person becomes poor in the full sense of the word, meaning, of course, poverty above all as a spiritual condition. Paul, to be sure, was not rich materially either, but the point lies elsewhere.

The point is the power by which a person acts: his own or God's. The idea of poverty, as Isaiah of Jerusalem already understood it, one of the great prophets of Israel who lived eight centuries before the coming of Christ, came down to a person's experience of his own nonexistence. Indeed, a person exists only as long as God's 'breath of life' breathes in him, and this breath by no means belongs to the person. In a certain sense a person is always not his own; he not only does not belong to himself, but does not exist as a separate being independent of God.

A person can exist as a person only as long as quite definite relationships connect him with God, at least minimally, and only God's presence allows him to live and exist. In that case it also becomes understandable that a person cannot have anything of his own by right or by merit: for that, a person would at least have to be self-sufficient and independent of God in his existence. Awareness of this simple and evident fact is what Isaiah, and after him many others including Jesus Himself, calls poverty.

The more a person becomes aware of himself as poor, the more room remains in his life for God's presence and God's action. In that case, in order to live the life of the Kingdom, in order to be filled with its breath, a person must become not simply poor, but precisely nothing. Then the life of the Kingdom will flow freely in him, and he will be able to bear witness to it not only by word, but also by deed. As is proper for an apostle.

Preachers are different, and they preach in different ways. This is especially true of Christianity, which is unthinkable without preaching. But Christians too, if we speak of the history of Christian preaching, have preached in different ways. And the main distinction in every age has been the distinction between preaching as telling and preaching as testimony.

Originally, for all Christian preachers, including Paul himself, preaching was precisely testimony, testimony about Christ and the Kingdom. This is not surprising, since Christianity is not a religion but life with the risen Christ in His Kingdom, and the first Christians could speak only about this. Of course, they could also talk about other things, but when asked what Christianity is, they could tell only one thing: about life with the risen Christ in His Kingdom.

Such a witness wants nothing from a person; he wants only to join him to what he himself has experienced, to make him, like himself, an inhabitant of the Kingdom by introducing him to the One who opened this Kingdom to him. So Paul, addressing the members of the Corinthian church, says that he needs nothing from them of what belongs to them; he needs them themselves, in order to make them the same inhabitants of the Kingdom that Paul himself had become by that time.

But another kind of preaching is also possible: not preaching-testimony, but preaching-telling. In the history of Christianity there was more and more of such preaching and such preachers as Christianity increasingly became a religion, acquiring the characteristic features of religion: its own ritual, doctrine, and structure.

Now preachers had the opportunity not only to testify about Christ and the Kingdom, but also to acquaint listeners with that religion, new to them, of which the preachers had begun to feel themselves adherents. Sometimes this could be interesting to the hearers, but unfortunately it often turned out that the main thing in Christianity, Christ and the Kingdom, moved into the background during such preaching.

Of course, in the early Christian age there were fewer opportunities for this kind of preacher than later, but judging by Paul's letter to the Corinthian church, they had already begun to appear: the Jewish religious tradition gave them many opportunities in this respect. Paul, as we can see, strives to set priorities so that the secondary does not obscure the main thing and does not prevent those seeking Christ from finding Him and entering the Kingdom.