Psalm 48:1, 13 Great is Abba God, and highly to be praised; in the city of our God is his holy hill. This God is our God for ever and ever; Abba God shall be our guide for evermore.

Introduction

At times there are great highs in this Christian life, and then there are great lows. We see love come and then indifference; we see liberation come and then captivity; we see life come and then death. We are caught in what feels like a great tug-of-war between power eager to bring life, love, and liberation and power eager to eliminate it. To be in the world but not of the world is to have a foot in the temporal realm and in the spiritual realm, with neither feeling all that much like home while we are still here in the body. We will have joy, and we will have pain. At times our hearts will swell with gratitude; at others, they will deflate with despair.  But this is part of our Christian journey in the world and so is the anguish we feel at times when injustice seems to win over justice, war over peace, death over life. This anguish causes us to feel pointless and hopeless, purposeless and directionless. But it’s here, in this very real human weakness, where God summons us to step further into the void…

2 Corinthians 12:2-10

Concerning this thing, I beseeched the Lord three times so that it might [take leave] from me. And he has spoken to me, “My grace suffices for you; for power is reaches perfection in weakness.” Therefore, I will gladly boast all the more in my weakness, so that the power of Christ may dwell upon me. That is why I am resolved in weakness, in insult, in constraint, in persecution, and great distress on behalf of Christ; for whenever I am weak, at that time I am strong. (2 Cor. 12:8-10)

Paul begins this portion of his letter to the Corinthians by telling them about a person who—fourteen years ago—was caught up in an ecstatic encounter with God, brought up to the third heaven and that this person then heard unutterable utterances which a person is not permitted to speak. Paul speaks as one who is not sure about the details of the event—whether in the body I have known not, or outside of the body I have known not; God has known—thus the reader/hearer is led to believe it is someone else of whom Paul is speaking. So, who is this person caught up into the presence of God?[1] Most likely it’s Paul. Paul is not one to practice futile self-boasting, so he phrases the story in the third person and avoids any notion that he is any different than the Corinthians.[2] In this way, Paul speaks about divine encounter that takes one to the peaks yet without creating a chasm between himself and his audience; he didn’t do this, [3] God did.[4] In other words, as other leaders are trying to lord their power over others,[5] Paul is just like his audience because there is no hierarchy among the believers, because in God’s reign hierarchies are destroyed—all are brought low in Christ’s death to be raised in Christ’s resurrection.

So, Paul refuses to boast in himself unless he’s speaking of his own weakness—on behalf of such a one I will boast, but on behalf of myself I will not boast except in weakness. His goal is to send all attention to God, to Jesus Christ, to the power of the divine Spirit. To boast of his own encounters with God would send the attention directly to himself and away from God;[6] people would focus on him, revere him, worship him, would elevate him above themselves and make him into something he isn’t.[7] This misallocation of reverence due God perpetuates the misuse of power, exacerbates the violence of hierarchies in the kingdom of humanity, and would detract from Paul’s message: depend fully on God and God’s word and love your neighbor to God’s glory. Paul wants the Corinthians to judge him not according to one off encounters with God but by his day in and day out living by and in accordance with the gospel and in this way glory remains with God and not with Paul.

With this we get to the main message of this pericope: for Christians our weakness is the intersection of the waning of human power and the waxing of divine power. Paul tells us, On which account so that I might not be raised up, a thorn for the flesh was given to me—a messenger of Satan—so that he might strike me with a fist so that I might not be lifted up. Paul confesses that he struggles with a recurring “thing” that is a thorn in his side,[8] it is this that keeps him humble especially since his petitions to the Lord to have it removed are met with, My grace is suffices for you; for power reaches perfection in weakness. If Paul could, he’d remove this “thing,” but he is fully dependent on God to work through this recurring and persistent weakness; he is reminded of his creaturely posture before God.

Many scholars speculate about what Paul’s thorn was—something physical,[9] a person, something mental—and while I will defer to their expertise on what the particular thing is, I’d like to draw a correlation to something a bit less literal, to a correlation between Paul and his thorn and Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Based on what Paul has shared about being taken up into the presence of God and overhearing unutterable utterances, I believe Paul takes a share in the divine anguish for the world. His recurring thorn is those real moments where that anguish seizes him, where his heart breaks, where he pleads with God to take this cup from him, and God’s response is to usher him forward through his weakness to allow for God’s divine power to be made known through that weakness. While not one-to-one, this is not unlike Jesus’s presence before God in the garden pleading for this cup to pass, sweating blood, feeling the weight of the task before him, burdened by his share of existential anguish over the world and God’s beloved. Jesus was brought into this moment of weakness because of his love for humanity and the world and it would be that same love that would be the source of divine power summoning him out of the earth on Easter morning. And if for Jesus, then for Paul, too. Paul was raptured with God’s love not only for him but for the beloved of God, thus this love brought him to ultimate weakness, and it was at this point, too, where he threw himself upon God and that same love reached perfection through Paul.[10] It isn’t that Paul found strength in God’s love to muscle through. It’s that he died under the weight of that divine love for the world only to be made alive by that love; in this way, Christ’s grace is sufficient because God’s love is sufficient especially when it means bringing to life out of death.

Conclusion

As those who believe in Christ we share in Christ’s anguish over the world. The love that forsakes its own comfort, forgoes its own life to bring comfort and life to the object of love, the beloved. As those so caught up in this type of divine love, we will experience the thorn of existential anguish as we are forced to witness the world reject love, life, and liberation. Our hearts will break. Our hope will wane. Our strength will falter. But in these moments we must find recourse to drive ourselves further into God through prayer, to cling tighter to the Gospel of God (Jesus Christ the incarnate word), and to collapse into the presence of the divine Spirit. It is here at the end of love where love summons us back to life and brings us forward into the world to continue participating in God’s loving, life-giving, liberating mission in the world.

This existential anguish that is a part of our love of God and the world is an essential part of our being Christian. There is no loop whole making an easier way or some winding path around having these heavy feelings and experiences. We must walk through it, one step at a time. As weak clay vessels, we must walk, eyes wide open, ears tuned to God and to the cry of our neighbor, ready to use our hands and feet to summon forward God’s love, life, and liberation for the beloved to the glory of God. And when we can’t may we throw ourselves (once again) on the mercy and grace of God because God’s grace in Christ is sufficient for us because God’s love reaches perfection through the love that has rendered us weak.

[1] [1] Murray J. Harris, The Second Epistle to the Corinthians: A Commentary on the Greek Text, NIGTC, eds. I Howard Marshall and Donald A Hagner (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 840. “It is probable that this was Paul’s cosmology, so that when he says ἕως τρίτον οὐρανοῦ, ‘right up to the third heaven,’ he mans ‘into the presence of God.”

[2] Harris,  Second Corinthians, 835. The experience is about Paul, “…he was embarrassed at needing to engage in fruitless boasting (v.1) and found in this objectifying of his experience a convenient way of distancing himself from this necessary but futile boasting that in itself did not contribute to the common good …Again, this literary technique enabled him to avoid suggesting that he was in any sense. A special kind of Christian.”

[3] Harris, Second Corinthians, 837. “Paul’s ascent was not the result of a self-induced trance or any other form of psychological preparation.”

[4] Harris, Second Corinthians, 835. “From first to last the initiative lay with God.”

[5] Harris, Second Corinthians, 837. “…Paul’s purpose may have been to draw attention to his prolonged silence about the episode; it was only the present contest with his rivals, brought on by the Corinthians’’ disloyalty to him, that had forced him (cf. 12.1, 11) to break that silence and reluctantly mention his privileged ascent to heaven.”

[6] Harris, Second Corinthians, 847. “…he was not prepared to boast about himself, about the ‘extraordinary revelations’ given him (11:7), because that would detract from the Lord’s preeminence and would suggest his own distinctiveness and eminence as a Christian or as an apostle.”

[7] Harris, Second Corinthians, 848. “He had good reason to boast if that was his wish. But he repudiates that option of self-promotion so that the Corinthians should form an accurate estimation of him and his ministry—not an opinion based on his boasting but an assessment that relied on their own observation of his conduct and their own evaluation of his teaching…”

[8] Harris, Second Corinthians, 851. “The ‘thorn,’ … was a recurrent trial that could incapacitate and humiliate him at any time. Being both past and present, ‘weakness’ was integral to Paul’s experience.”

[9] Harris, Second Corinthians, 859. “The present writer believes that some kind of physical ailment…”

[10] Harris, Second Corinthians, 863. “But we should probably find a still broader reference in ἀσθένια, a reference to attitudinal weakness, the acknowledgment of one’s creatureliness and of one’s impotence to render effective service to God without his empowering.”

https://laurenrelarkin.com/2024/07/07/existential-anguish-of-the-christian-life/