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The Sixth Sunday After Pentecost
O God, who hast taught us to keep all thy commandments by loving thee and our neighbor: Grant us the grace of thy Holy Spirit, that we may be devoted to thee with our whole heart, and united to one another with pure affection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (Proper 9)
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The Sixth Sunday After Pentecost
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Scripture citation(s): II Corinthians 12:2-10; Mark 6:1-13
A Sermon by
Fr. Daniels
on
II Corinthians 12:2-10; Mark 6:1-13
✛
Grace is Sufficient
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One of the most notable characteristics of the Christian New Testament must be the highly unusual relationships it suggests between strength and weakness, between success and failure.
You can see that in the life of Jesus, of course: his crucifixion being his crowning moment. But it’s just as true of the apostles he sent out into the world, taking nothing for their journey, as we hear about in our gospel today. If you’ve ever wondered about how that ended up, about the fate of the most successful apostles, you need only to listen to our epistle reading this morning from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians.
Somewhere around the year 56 or 57 AD, the church in Corinth was in upheaval because of the entrance into their community of people who bitterly opposed Paul’s message of Gentile inclusion. These people were apparently viciously attacking his character and his worth as an apostle. His response is this epistle, written to people whom he has loved but who are increasingly turning their back on him. One biblical scholar says this about the epistle: “[It] fills much the same place in the New Testament as does the book of Job in the Old. It is a letter written by one whose heart has been broken…”
I’m struck by this. Hearts can break for any number of reasons, but it seems that Paul had been heartbroken by the fact that the hopes that he had for his spiritual children in Corinth had not come to pass, and they were being led astray by his charismatic adversaries. Paul himself was not particularly charismatic, we are told, and it seems that he was lacking in eloquence, unpleasant in personality, and, most importantly for them, he had not had the kinds of rapturous spiritual experiences that they viewed as the most important mark of a religious authority.
And this young church at Corinth, still new, without strength of tradition or depth of experience, was easily impressed by the dazzle of spiritual fireworks, but ignorant of the lack of substance they hid from view. The interlopers took advantage of that, and the Corinthians accepted it. It breaks Paul’s heart. And so, while they’re boasting of their piety and religious excellence, what does he boast of instead? Paul lists instead his humiliations—of which this ecclesial failure is one. His infirmities, his reproaches, persecutions and distresses.
Because against those agitators in Corinth, Paul recognized that the spiritual experiences of which they were so proud are not the content of Christian faith—not for him, nor for the other apostles, nor, for that matter, for Jesus himself. To acknowledge Jesus as Lord is not to be guaranteed religious elation, just as it is not a guarantee of earthly success. Sure, Paul has had an ecstatic experience—being taken up to the “third heaven”—but he is modest enough about it that he tells the story in the third person. Moreover, he talks about it as a passive event; he didn’t ascend himself to Paradise, he was taken up—literally “snatched up” by the Lord himself. It was the Lord’s doing, not his own.
Even more, note that Paul doesn’t come back from the third heaven enlightened, like a mystical sage. In fact, quite the contrary: he comes back even worse off than before, returning with a thorn in his flesh, there to be a constant reminder that what has happened to him is not something about which he can boast. It is not a result of his own accomplishments. He was “snatched up” by the Lord, after all.
He doesn’t brag about that. Instead, in one of those wonderful New Testament inversions, he brags about his infirmities and weaknesses. Rather than being thorns that must be overcome—rather than being the things that his opponents take as proof of inferior character—these weaknesses are potential instruments of glorification. Rather than being things that hold him back, paradoxically they become the raw material that can be used by God. If they are acknowledged as weaknesses, God can transform them to his own glory. It’s an odd and unexpected relationship between strength and weakness that Paul suggests here; it’s the opposite of what his opponents think, and it might be the opposite of what we’d typically think, too.
That may be because his opponents, and perhaps we as well, haven’t internalized the lesson Paul learned from Christ, which is this: after Paul begs him, three times, to have the thorn in the flesh taken away from him, in no small part to keep his enemies at bay, the Lord replies, “No—my grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.” My grace is sufficient, the Lord says. Nothing else is needed. And if God’s grace truly is sufficient, then it means that it’s sufficient to transform anything, overcome anything, and thus that those weaknesses and infirmities and thorns in the flesh do not have to keep Paul, or us, from doing the work of the Gospel.
But more than just that, I think. God’s grace being sufficient also means that those weaknesses that Paul’s opponents mocked him for also don’t have to keep him, or us, from relationship with God. In fact, they can even be the means by which that relationship is effected for us, precisely by realizing our own shortcomings and insufficiencies. Even sin itself can be a way in which a person realizes his need for and dependence on God, because God’s grace is sufficient. Those things about us that fill us with shame, those things about which we’re embarrassed, those shortcomings that cut us off from God and each other: they need not be the final word when the story of our relationship with God is written, because his grace is sufficient and can transform anything for his purposes. And his purposes are not only the propagation of the Gospel, like Paul was trying to do, but also salvation, which is eternal life with him. His grace is sufficient for that, too.
There is also another corollary to this. It also means that nothing else but grace is sufficient. If it is the infirmities and weaknesses that can be transformed into strength by grace, and by grace into salvation, then it is not our native strengths, the things we’re proudest of, that can accomplish for us what it is that we really need. They are not the means of salvation. The things we boast of, the things that make us feel better than others, those things that puff us up, are not enough. They can’t accomplish the salvation that is the deepest desire of our heart, the desire that is the root of all other desires. Nothing else but grace can satisfy that desire.
This is what Paul is saying to the interlopers in Corinth, who were bragging about their religious experiences, and it’s what he’s saying to us, just as clearly. The people interfering in Corinth were proud of what belonged to them. They were proud that God had given them the gift of religious ecstasy and they saw it as proof that they were special, and that they had everything they needed, just with that. They thought those religious experiences were sufficient, but they are not. They thought it about their religious experiences and silver-tongued oratory, and we think it about our successes, or our natural gifts, or our cosmopolitan sophistication.
This is the bad news: that those things that we’re so proud of do not get us what we think they do; they do not save us. But the good news is that God’s grace is sufficient, and it is a grace that is given to us in Jesus, who himself brings us directly into life with God.
So he is the thing we can be proudest of; he is what we can boast of—Christ alone, who can heal Paul’s broken heart, and ours. God’s grace, and only his grace, is sufficient.
