on Paul's thorn in the flesh. The resources of imagination having been
exhausted, people are returning to the obvious. The thorn in the
flesh[103] was something painful, which affected the Apostle's body; it
was something in its nature purely physical, not a solicitation to any
kind of sin, such as sensuality or pride, else he would not have ceased
to pray for its removal; it was something terribly humbling, if not
humiliating--an affection which might well have excited the contempt and
loathing of those who beheld it (Gal. iv. 14, which probably refers to
this subject); it had begun after, if not in consequence of, the rapture
just described, and stood in a spiritual, if not a physical, relation to
it; it was, if not chronic or periodic, at least recurrent; the Apostle
knew that it would never leave him. What known malady, incident to human
nature, fulfils all these conditions, it is not possible with perfect
certainty to say. A considerable mass of competent opinion supports the
idea that it must have been liability to epileptic seizures.[104] Such
an infirmity Paul might have suffered under in common with men so great
as Julius Cæsar and the first Napoleon, as Mahomet, King Alfred, and
Peter the Great. But it does not quite satisfy the conditions. Epileptic
attacks, if they occur with any frequency at all, invariably cause
mental deterioration. Now, Paul distinctly suggests that the thorn was a
very steady companion; and as his mind, in spite of it, grew year after
year in the apprehension of the Christian revelation, so that his last
thoughts are always his largest and best, the epileptic hypothesis has
its difficulties like every other. Is it likely that a man who suffered
pretty constantly from nervous convulsions of this kind wrote the Second
Epistle to the Corinthians after fourteen years of them, or the Epistles
to the Romans, Philippians, Colossians, and Ephesians later still? There
is, of course, no religious interest in affirming or denying any
physical explanation of the matter whatever; but with our present data I
do not think a certain explanation is within our reach.
The Apostle himself is not interested in it as a physical affection.
He speaks of it because of its spiritual significance, and because of
the wonderful spiritual experiences he has had in connexion with it.
It was given him, he says: but by whom? When we think of the
purpose--to save him from spiritual pride--we instinctively answer,
"God." And that, it can hardly be doubted, would have been the
Apostle's own answer. Yet he does not hesitate to call it in the same
breath a messenger of Satan. The name is dictated by the inborn,
ineradicable shrinking of the soul from pain; that agonising,
humiliating, annihilating thing, we feel at the bottom of our hearts,
is not really of God, even when it does His work. In His perfect
world pain shall be no more. It does not need science, but experience,
to put these things together, and to understand at once the evil and
the good of suffering. Paul, at first, like all men, found the evil
overpowering. The pain, the weakness, the degradation of his malady,
were intolerable. He could not understand that only a pressure so
pitiless and humbling could preserve him from spiritual pride and a
spiritual fall. We are all slow to learn anything like this. We think
we can take warning, that a word will be enough, that at most the
memory of a single pang will suffice to keep us safe. But pains remain
with us, and the pressure is continuous and unrelieved, because the
need of constraint and of discipline is ceaseless. The crooked branch
will not bend in a new curve if it is only tied to it for half an
hour. The sinful bias in our natures--to pride, to sensuality, to
falsehood, or whatever else---will not be cured by one sharp lesson.
The commonest experience in human life is that the man whom sickness
and pain have humbled for the moment, the very moment their constraint
is lifted, resumes his old habit. He does not think so, but it is
really the thorn that has been keeping him right; and when its
sharpness is blunted, the edge is taken from his conscience too.
Paul besought the Lord, that is Christ, thrice, that this thing might
depart from him. The Lord, we may be sure, had full sympathy with that
prayer. He Himself had had His agony, and prayed the Father thrice
that if it were possible the cup of pain might pass from Him. He
prayed, indeed, in express submission to the Father's will; the voice
of nature was not allowed in Him to urge an unconditional peremptory
request. Perhaps in Paul on this occasion--certainly often in most
men--it is nature, the flesh and not the spirit, which prompts the
prayer. But God is all the while guarding the spirit's interest as the
higher, and this explains the many real answers to prayer which seem
to be refusals. A refusal _is_ an answer, if it is so given that God
and the soul thenceforth understand one another. It was thus that Paul
was answered by Christ: "He hath said to me, My grace is sufficient
for thee: for [My] strength is made perfect in weakness."
The first point to notice in this answer is the tense of the verb: "He
hath said." The A.V. with "He said" misses the point. The sentence is
present as well as past; it is Christ's continuous, as well as final,
answer to Paul's prayer. The Apostle has been made to understand that
the thorn must remain in his flesh, but along with this he has
received the assurance of an abiding love and help from the Lord. We
remember, even by contrast, the stern answer made to Moses when he
prayed that he might be permitted to cross Jordan and see the goodly
land--"Let it suffice thee: speak no more unto Me of this matter."
Paul also could no more ask for the removal of the thorn: it was the
Lord's will that he should submit to it for high spiritual ends, and
to pray against it would now have been a kind of impiety. But it is no
longer an unrelieved pain and humiliation; the Apostle is supported
under it by that grace of Christ which finds in the need and
abjectness of men the opportunity of showing in all perfection its own
condescending strength. The collocation of "grace" and "strength" in
the ninth verse is characteristic of the New Testament, and very
significant. There are many to whom "grace" is a holy word with no
particular meaning; "the grace of God," or "the grace of the Lord
Jesus Christ," is only a vague benignity, which may fairly enough be
spoken of as a "smile." But grace, in the New Testament, is force: it
is a heavenly strength bestowed on men for timely succour; it finds
its opportunity in our extremity; when our weakness makes us incapable
of doing anything, it gets full scope _to work_. This is the meaning
of the last words--"strength is made perfect in weakness." The truth
is quite general; it is an application of it to the case in hand if we
translate as in the A.V. (with some MSS.): "_My_ strength is made
perfect in [thy] weakness." It is enough, the Lord tells Paul, that he
has this heavenly strength unceasingly bestowed upon him; the weakness
which he has found so hard to bear--that distressing malady which
humbled him and took his vigour away--is but the foil to it: it serves
to magnify it, and to set it off; with that Paul should be content.
And he is content. That answer to his thrice-repeated prayer works a
revolution in his heart; he looks at all that had troubled him--at all
that he had deprecated--with new eyes. "Most gladly therefore will I
rather glory in my infirmities--that is, glory rather than bemoan them
or pray for their removal--that the power of Christ may spread its
tabernacle over me." This compensation far outweighed the trial. He
has ceased to speak now of the visions and revelations, perhaps he has
ceased already to think of them; he is conscious only of the weakness
and suffering from which he is never to escape, and of the grace of
Christ which hovers over him, and out of weakness and suffering makes
him strong. His very infirmities redound to the glory of the Lord, and
so he chooses them, rather than his rapture into Paradise, as matter
for boasting. "For this cause I am well content, on Christ's
behalf,[105] in infirmities, in insults, in necessities, in
persecutions and distresses; for when I am weak, then am I strong."
With this noble word Paul concludes his enforced "glorying." He was
not happy in it; it was not like him; and it is a triumph of the
Spirit of Christ in him that he gives it such a noble turn, and comes
out of it so well. There is a tinge of irony in the first passage
(chap. xi. 21) in which he speaks of weakness, and fears that in
comparison with his high-handed rivals at Corinth he will only have
this to boast about; but as he enters into his real experience, and
tells us what he had borne for Christ, and what he had learned in pain
and prayer about the laws of the spiritual life, all irony passes
away; the pure heroic heart opens before us to its depths. The
practical lessons of the last paragraphs are as obvious as they are
important. That the greatest spiritual experiences are incommunicable;
that even the best men are in danger of elation and pride; that the
tendency of these sins is immensely strong, and can only be restrained
by constant pressure; that pain, though one day to be abolished, is a
means of discipline actually used by God; that it may be a plain duty
to accept some suffering, or sickness, even a humbling and distressing
one, as God's will for our good, and not to pray more for its removal;
that God's grace is given to those who so accept His will, as a real
reinforcement of their strength, nay, as a substitute, and far more,
for the strength which they have not; that weakness, therefore, and
helplessness, as foils to the present help of God, may actually be
occasions of glorying to the Christian,--all these, and many more, are
gathered up in this passionate Apologia of Paul.
FOOTNOTES:
[99] This is done by a number of critics, including Holsten and
Schmiedel.
[100] Godet gives the incident a peculiar turn, more ingenious than
convincing. "No doubt the list I have given is one of mere infirmities.
I might well boast of things apparently more glorious--as when the whole
of that great city, Damascus, was raised against me, and I could only
escape secretly."--_Introduction au Nouv. Test._, p. 393.
[101] In their margin Westcott and Hort read δὲ οὐ.
[102] The editors vary greatly in punctuation, especially as they do
or do not insert διὸ before the first ἵνα μὴ ὑπεραίρωμαι. Westcott and
Hort suspect some primitive error.
[103] For the meaning "thorn," not "stake" or "cross," see Ezek.
xxviii. 24; Hosea ii. 8 (6); Num. xxxiii. 55.
[104] I should lay no stress here on what some so much insist
upon--the use of ἐξεπτύσατε in Gal. iv. 14, and the fact that _morbus
despui suctus_ is a name for epilepsy: ἐκπτύειν does not mean
_despuere_, and after ἐξουθενεῖν it is necessarily metaphorical.
[105] Construe ὑπὲρ Χριστοῦ with εὐδοκῶ.
XXVII
_NOT YOURS, BUT YOU_
"I am become foolish: ye compelled me; for I ought to have been
commended of you: for in nothing was I behind the very chiefest
apostles, though I am nothing. Truly the signs of an apostle were
wrought among you in all patience, by signs and wonders and mighty
works. For what is there wherein ye were made inferior to the rest
of the Churches, except _it be_ that I myself was not a burden to
you? forgive me this wrong.
"Behold, this is the third time I am ready to come to you; and I
will not be a burden to you: for I seek not yours, but you: for the
children ought not to lay up for the parents, but the parents for
the children. And I will most gladly spend and be spent for your
souls. If I love you more abundantly, am I loved the less? But be it
so, I did not myself burden you; but, being crafty, I caught you
with guile. Did I take advantage of you by any one of them whom I
have sent unto you? I exhorted Titus, and I sent the brother with
him. Did Titus take any advantage of you? walked we not by the same
Spirit? _walked we_ not in the same steps?
"Ye think all this time that we are excusing ourselves unto you. In
the sight of God speak we in Christ. But all things, beloved, _are_
for your edifying. For I fear, lest by any means, when I come, I
should find you not such as I would, and should myself be found of
you such as ye would not; lest by any means _there should be_
strife, jealousy, wraths, factions, backbitings, whisperings,
swellings, tumults; lest when I come again, my God should humble me
before you, and I should mourn for many of them that have sinned
heretofore, and repented not of the uncleanness and fornication and
lasciviousness which they committed."--2 COR. xii. 11-21 (R.V.).
Expositors differ widely in characterising the three or four brief
paragraphs into which this passage may be divided: (1) vv. 11-13; (2)
vv. 14, 15, and vv. 16-18; (3) vv. 19-21. What is clear is, that we
feel in it the ground-swell of the storm that has raged through the last
two chapters, and that it is not till the beginning of chap. xiii. that
the Apostle finally escapes from this, and takes up an authoritative and
decisive attitude to the Corinthians. When he does reach Corinth, it
will not be to explain and justify his own conduct, either against
rivals or those whom rivals have misled, but to take prompt and vigorous
action against disorders in the life of the Church.
(1) A review of what he has just written leads to a burst of indignant
remonstrance. "I _have_ become foolish." The emphasis is on the verb,
not on the adjective; it is the painful fact that the eleventh chapter
of Second Corinthians is a thing that no wise man would have written
if he had been left to himself and his wisdom. Paul, who was a wise
man, felt this, and it stung him. He resented the compulsion which was
put upon him by the ingratitude and faithlessness of the Corinthians.
The situation ought to have been exactly reversed. When he was defamed
by strangers, then they, who knew him, instead of hearkening to the
calumniators, ought to have stood up in his defence. But they basely
left him to defend himself, to plead his own cause, to become a fool
by "glorying." This kind of compulsion should never be put upon a good
man, especially a man to whom, under God, we ourselves have been
deeply indebted. The services he has rendered constitute a claim on
our loyalty, and it is a duty of affection to guard his character
against disparagement and malice.
Paul, in his deep consciousness of being wronged, presses home the
charge against the Corinthians. They had every reason, he tells them,
to act as his advocates. When he was among them, he was in nothing
inferior to the "superlative" Apostles--this is his last flout at the
Judaist interlopers--nothing though he was. The signs that prove a man
to be an apostle were wrought among them (the passive expression keeps
_his_ agency in the background) in all patience, by signs and wonders
and mighty deeds. Their suspicions of him, their willingness to listen
to insinuations against him, after such an experience, were
unpardonable. He can only think of one "sign of the apostle" which was
not wrought among them by his means, of one point in which he had made
them inferior to the other Churches: he had not burdened them with his
support. They were the spoilt children of the apostolic family; and he
begs them, with bitter irony, to forgive him this wrong. If they had
only been converted by a man who stood upon his rights![106]
"The signs of an apostle" are frequently referred to in Paul's
Epistles, and are of various kinds. By far the most important, and the
most frequently insisted on, is success in evangelistic work. He who
converts men and founds Churches has the supreme and final attestation
of apostleship, as Paul conceives it. It is to this he appeals in 1
Cor. ix. 2; 2 Cor. iii. 1-3. In the passage before us Calvin makes
"patience" a sign--_primum signum nominat patientiam_. Patience is
certainly a characteristic Christian virtue, and it is magnificently
exercised in the apostolic life; but it is not peculiarly apostolic.
Patience in the passage before us, "every kind of patience," rather
brings before our minds the conditions under which Paul did his
apostolic work. Discouragements of every description, bad health,
suspicion, dislike, contempt, moral apathy and moral licence--the
weight of all these pressed upon him heavily, but he bore up under
them, and did not suffer them to break his spirit or to arrest his
labours. His endurance was a match for them all, and the power of
Christ that was in him broke forth in spite of them in apostolic
signs. There were conversions, in the first place; but there were also
what he calls here "signs [in a narrower sense], and wonders, and
mighty deeds." This is an express claim, like that made in Acts xv.
12, Rom. xv. 19, to have wrought what we call miracles. The three
words represent miracles under three different aspects: they are
"signs" (σημεῖα), as addressed to man's intelligence, and conveying a
spiritual meaning; they are "wonders" (τέρατα), as giving a shock to
feeling, and moving nature in those depths which sleep through common
experience; and they are "mighty works" or "powers" (δυνάμεις), as
arguing in him who works them a more than human efficiency. But no
doubt the main character they bore in the Apostle's mind was that of
χαρίσματα, or gifts of grace, which God ministered to the Church by
His Spirit. It is natural for an unbeliever to misunderstand even New
Testament miracles, because he wishes to conceive them, as it were,
_in vacuo_, or in relation to the laws of nature; in the New Testament
itself they are conceived in relation to the Holy Ghost. Even Jesus is
said in the Gospels to have cast out devils by the Spirit of God; and
when Paul wrought "signs and wonders and powers," it was in carrying
out his apostolic work graced by the same Spirit. What things he had
done in Corinth we have no means of knowing, but the Corinthians knew;
and they knew that these things had no arbitrary or accidental
character, but were the tokens of a Christian and an apostle.
(2) In the second paragraph Paul turns abruptly (ἰδοὺ, "behold!") from
the past to the future. "This is the third time I am ready to come to
you, and I will not burden you." The first clause has the same ambiguity
in Greek as in English; it is impossible to tell from the words alone
whether he had been already twice, or only once, in Corinth. Other
considerations decide, I think, that he had been twice; but of course
these cannot affect the construction of this verse: for the third time
he is in a state of readiness--this is all the words will yield. But
when he makes the new visit, whether it be his third or only his second,
one thing he has decided: he will act on the same principle as before,
and decline to be a burden to them. He does not speak of it boastfully
now, as in chap. xi. 10, for his adversaries have passed out of view,
but in one of the most movingly tender passages in the whole Bible. "I
will not lie on you like a benumbing weight, for I seek, not yours, but
you." It is not his own interest which brings him to Corinth again, but
theirs; it is not avarice which impels him, but love. In a sense,
indeed, love makes the greater claim of the two; it is far more to
demand the heart than to ask for money. Yet the greater claim is the
less selfish, indeed is the purely unselfish one; for it can only be
really made by one who gives all that he demands. Paul's own heart was
pledged to the Corinthians; and when he said "I seek _you_," he did not
mean that he sought to make a party of them, or a faction, in the
interest of his own ambition, but that the one thing he cared for was
the good of their souls. Nor in saying so does he claim to be doing
anything unusual or extraordinary. It is only what becomes him as their
father in Christ (1 Cor. iv. 15). "I seek _you_; for the children ought
not to lay up for the parents, but the parents for the children." Filial
duty, of course, is not denied here; Paul is simply bringing himself as
the spiritual father of the Corinthians under the general rule of nature
that "love descends rather than ascends." If this seems a hard saying to
a child's heart, it is at least true that it descends _before_ it
ascends. It all begins from God: in a family, it all begins from the
parents. The primary duty of love is parental care; and nothing is more
unnatural, though at a certain level it is common enough, than the
desire of parents to make money out of their children as quickly and as
plentifully as possible, without considering the ulterior interests of
the children themselves. This kind of selfishness is very transparent,
and is very naturally avenged by ingratitude, and the Apostle for his
part renounces it. "_I_," he exclaims, with all the emphasis in his
power--"_I_ have more than a natural father's love for you. I will with
all gladness spend, yes, and be spent to the uttermost, for your souls!
I will give what I have, yes, and all that I am, that you may be
profited." And then he checks that rush of affection, and dams up the
overflowing passion of his heart in the abrupt poignant question: "If I
love you more abundantly, am I loved less?"[107]
This is not the first passage in the Epistle, nor, near as we are to
the end, is it the last, in which Paul shows us the true spirit of the
Christian pastor. "Not yours, but you," is the motto of every minister
who has learned of Christ; and the noble words of ver. 15, "I will
very gladly spend and be spent to the last for your souls," recall
more nearly than any other words in Scripture the law by which our
Lord Himself lived--not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to
give life a ransom for many. Here, surely, is a sign of
apostleship--an unmistakable mark of the man who is specially called
to continue Christ's work. That work cannot be done at all except in
the spirit of Him who inaugurated it, and though love like Paul's, and
love like Christ's, may be mocked and trampled on, it is the only
power which has the right to speak in Christ's name. The joy of
sacrifice thrills through the Apostle's words, and it is joy in the
Holy Ghost; it is a fellowship with Christ in the very life of His
life that lifts Paul, for the moment, to the heavenly places. This is
the spirit in which wrong is to be met, and suspicion, calumny, and
contempt; it is in this, if at all, that we can be more than
conquerors. Nature says, "Stand upon your rights; vindicate your
position; insist on having all that you conceive to be your due"; but
love says, "Spend and be spent, and spare not till all is gone; life
itself is not too much to give that love may triumph over wrong."
It is not possible to write long as Paul writes in these two verses (14
and 15). The tension is too great both for him and for his readers. With
ἔστω δέ--"But be it so"--he descends from this height. He writes in the
first person, but he is plainly repeating what he assumes others will
say. "Very well, then, let that pass," is the answer of his enemies to
his friends when that passionate protestation is read. "He did not
_himself_ prove burdensome to us, but being crafty he brought us into
his net by guile. He exploited the Church in his own interest by means
of his agents." This charge the Apostle meets with a downright denial;
he can appeal to the knowledge which the Corinthians themselves possess
of the manner in which his agents have conducted themselves. He had no
doubt had occasion, far oftener than we know, to communicate with so
important and so restless a Church; and he challenges the Corinthians to
say that a single one of those whom he had sent had taken advantage of
them. He instances--perhaps as the last of his deputies, who had but
just returned from Corinth when he wrote this letter; perhaps as the one
on whom scandal had chosen to fasten--his "partner" and "fellow-labourer
toward them," Titus; and he refers to an unknown brother who had
accompanied him. They cannot mean to say (μήτι) that Titus took
advantage of them? "Walked we not in the same Spirit?" A modern reader
naturally makes "spirit" subjective, and takes it as equivalent to "the
same moral temper or principle"; an early Christian reader would more
probably think of the Holy Spirit as that which ruled in Paul and Titus
alike. In any case the same Spirit led to the same conduct; they walked
in the same self-denying path, and scrupulously abstained from burdening
the Corinthians for their support.
(3) We feel the meanness of all this, and are glad when the Apostle
finally turns his back on it. It is an indignity to be compelled even
to allude to such things. And the worst is, that no care a man can
take will prevent people from misunderstanding his indignant protest,
and from assuming that he is really on his trial before them, and not
improbably compromised. Paul's mind is made up to leave the
Corinthians no excuse for such misunderstanding and presumption. In
ver. 19 he reads their ignoble thought: "Ye have long[108] been
thinking"--_i.e._, all through the last two chapters, and, indeed,
more or less all through the Epistle; see chap. iii. 1--"that we are
making our defence at your bar. Far from it: at God's bar we speak in
Christ." He will not endure, with his visit to Corinth close at hand,
that there should be any misapprehension as to their relations. His
responsibility as a Christian man is not to them, but to God; He is
the Master to whom he stands or falls; it is He alone to whom he has
to vindicate his life. The Corinthians had been seating themselves in
imagination on the tribunal, and they are summarily set on the floor.
But Paul does not wish to be rude or unkind. "You are not my judges,
certainly," he seems to say, "but all I have said and done, beloved,
all I say and do, is for your building up in Christian life. My heart
is with you in it all, and I sincerely intend your good." We cannot
sufficiently admire the combination in the Apostle, or rather the
swift alternation, of all those intellectual and emotional qualities
that balance each other in a strong living character. He can be at
once trenchant and tender; inexorable in the maintenance of a
principle, and infinitely sympathetic and considerate in his treatment
of persons. We see all his qualities illustrated here.