Author: Bryan Richardson

Re:Verse reading–2 Corinthians 7:5-16 (day three) 

“This body of ours had no rest, but we were harassed at every turn—conflicts on the outside, fears within.”

There is a triumphalist tendency in popular Christianity which airbrushes and streamlines the rough and tumble of faith in Christ.  The result is the prettiest pictures of Christians you could ever imagine: nice, sincere, unflappable, harboring no doubts, no anxieties, no sadness.  Rubbish.  If you would love your neighbor—a person whose life you can actually affect—it is necessary that you lay bare your weakness.  Not your theoretical weakness—as in “I was blind but now I see” or “They are weak but he is strong”—but your actual weakness.  Pull back the curtain.  The world’s aching need is a vision of somebody confident enough in Christ to struggle before others as a weak person in real time.

Re:Verse reading–2 Corinthians 4 (day three)

“What is seen is temporary.”

Paul said it earlier: “The world in its present form is passing away.”  The pattern of this age, the stopgaps, the diversions, the workarounds—all of what we think of as “just the way things are”—really have only the most tenuous hold on the universe.  It’s only a matter of time before these bankrupt systems of living completely collapse. You might not want to get too celebratory about that just yet.  How are we supposed to live if we can’t depend on what we thought were the cold hard facts of life?  Don’t repeal if you can’t replace.  This is what Paul was getting at when he spoke of his longing that “Christ be formed” in people.  Christ teaching you your work habits, Christ teaching you how to think—determine to learn from him.

Re:Verse reading–2 Corinthians 1:12-24, 2:1-11 (day three) 

“It was in order to spare you that I did not return to Corinth.”

Paul was right about the Corinthian church. He was right, and history would bear him out. It would have been a glorious moment of battle for the sake of purity in the church, with his detractors vanquished and the church cleansed of all the troublemakers. But Paul had learned long ago that the upper hand has no place in the fellowship of love. With one fiery visit he would have saved the idea of church, only to kill its community. The church is not an idea. It is a people. And people learn painstakingly, and minds change incrementally. So love—the most powerful force in the universe—is slow. Waiting means more than winning. Weakness means more than waylaying. And then people learn to live like Jesus.

Re:Verse reading–2 Corinthians 1:1-11 (day three)

“If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation.”

The real wreckage that has resulted from the fall of man is not that suffering occurs.  It is that we have no idea what suffering means.  A well-known author and lecturer with an atheistic perspective sums up his understanding of humanity’s quest as avoidance of suffering.  What an impoverished legacy such a viewpoint would leave to us.  If there is nothing more at the base level of reality than the maintenance of ease for a little while, then we are nothing more than collections of decaying molecules.  But Paul—following the trail blazed by Jesus Christ—wakes us up to the knowledge that suffering itself testifies to a glory that was lost, and can be found again.

Re:Verse passage – I Corinthians 15:3-20, 35-44, 50-57 (day three)

“If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.”

A body is by definition physical.  What, then, is a “spiritual body”?  It’s a body powered by the spiritual realm instead of by the natural realm.  The body isn’t a piece of inferior work to be superseded by something better.  It is God’s handiwork, and is, in God’s own words, “very good.”  Paul says that at the resurrection the physical body will actually live forever because it will be powered by the inexhaustible resources of the spiritual realm.  In other words, the age to come will be grounded, not ghostly—solid, not shadowy.  Keep in mind the words the resurrected Jesus said after “Peace be with you.”  He said, “Do you have anything to eat?”  A real body in a real world—that’s what the resurrection promises.

Re:Verse reading–1 Corinthians 13 (day three) 

“Love never fails.” 

Fails to what?  To “be there” for you when you come to your senses?  No, it’s already with you in your foolishness.  You are never beyond love’s presence, though you might be unwilling to receive it or believe it or learn its ways—so unwilling that it might seem you’ve become unable to do so.  Ask yourself: Does anybody in your life regard you with love, however imperfectly acted upon?  Most likely, you will say yes.  If then you have not wandered beyond love’s reach, you have not wandered beyond God’s reach, because love is the mark of God’s regard for you.  And if another person would claim that his or her life is devoid of the love of parent, friend, spouse, or child—a great tragedy—what then? Will love announce its presence through you?

Re:Verse reading–1 Corinthians 12:4-31 (day three)

And now I will show you the most excellent way.

He means love, of course.  Paul was ramping up to the resplendent summation of love’s life-bringing strength and power in what we now call chapter 13.  As he did so, he reframed the Corinthian congregation’s understanding of the gifts of spiritual ability.  Prophecy exists because there is someone who has lost his way and needs a light to follow. Wisdom makes its way through a congregation because foolishness has not ceased to plague the church.  Healing comes because we are sick and weak.  Interpretation of tongues rises up because accuracy and accountability escape us so easily.  The abilities come amidst our weakness.  We handle them poorly.  And yet in love’s excellent way, we give them to one another.  This is another reason we call them gifts.

Re:Verse reading—1 Corinthians 8; 10:22-23 (day three)

“Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause him to fall.”

Living as a “good witness”—a reliable conveyor of the gospel—is a good and right aspiration, but that’s not Paul’s focus here.  Rather, his stated reason for refraining from meat is the well-being of his Christian brother.  He marks the controversy in the fellowship—to eat or not to eat—as an unsolvable clash of opinions.  It’s ultimately a sham question, not unlike the one the Pharisees put to Jesus: Give to Caesar or nah?  Jesus transcended the arguments.  Paul does the same.  At issue here isn’t “Who’s right?” but “Will we love one another?”  Vexing conflicts that become zero sum games always call us to stop debating and, instead, to love.

Re:Verse reading–1 Corinthians 5 (day three) 

And you are proud!

When Paul said that this kind of incest-y behavior didn’t occur among the pagans, he meant it didn’t occur as a practice accepted by the establishment.  Neither did murder, but people still got bumped off.  Paul’s point is that even pagan society addressed the ethical implications of human desire.  This is good and right.  If by contrast the emerging ethics of Christianity would begin to resemble undisciplined minors whose parents have left the house for the weekend, few would take it seriously for long.  “The rules were always holding me back” is not a vision for the gloriousness of the human person.  The Incarnation shows us God’s regard for human beings—and for bodily behavior in particular.  If we’re going to live with our bodies any way we please, the tomb might as well have remained occupied.

Re:Verse reading–1 Corinthians 3:1-17 (day three)

“You are still worldly.”

Paul has articulated how ridiculous the church’s proclamation of the kingdom of God will sound to the wider world’s thought systems: scandalous to Judaic thinking, foolhardy to Hellenistic thinking.  Their prospects don’t look good.  For this project of cultural shift, they will need all hands on deck.  But they can’t muster all hands on deck.  You know why?  The energy one spends on outmaneuvering those who disagree—so that one’s own faction can achieve and maintain dominance—leaves little-to-no energy for anything so demanding as representing that apparently ridiculous kingdom.  And furthermore, no kingdom will be represented at all if factions and dominance are the treasures of the church.  They will have sold their birthright for worldly gain.  The strength of the gates-of-hell-crashing church isn’t political muscle.  It’s the clasping of one another’s hands in weakness.