June 5-11
June 7, 2015
Cross~Wind
Title: Do Not Lose Heart
Going deeper
II Corinthians 4:13-5:1
[The theme of 4:7-5:10 is the hardship and hopes of
apostleship. Furnish (Anchor Bible Commentary) says the polemical issue raised
is that some believe the suffering of Paul and his associates is reason to
invalidate his apostleship. Paul will
stress that a life of faith is not always a life of ease or comfort. Verses 7-12 is a list of hardships. He offers
another list in Romans 8:31-39 and I Corinthians 4:8-13. We hold the treasure
in clay jars, so that it will be obvious that what they do comes from the power
of God. He then lists some of the hardships. We experience affliction, but not
crushed. We experience being perplexed, but not despair. We experience
persecution, but not forsakenness. We are struck down, but not destroyed. We
always carry in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also
become visible in our bodies. He has genuine life in Jesus, but circumstances
seem to keep offer “us” up to death for the sake of Jesus. The external
pressure causes a repetition of the dying of Jesus.[1]
In this sense, death for the believer is not ahead of us, but behind us, as we
bear the marks of the death of Jesus.[2]
We see here that hope of eternal life is a consequence of fellowship with Jesus
Christ in general, but especially with his death.[3]]
In 4:13-15, Paul shows that the suffering endured by the
apostle is part of the ministry of the gospel. The text may endow apostolic
ministry with a sacramental character.
13 But just as we have the same spirit of
faith [Paul uses “Spirit of faith” nowhere else. It refers to perseverance.
[With an apologetic tone that is customary in II Corinthians, Paul says]
that is in accordance with scripture [kata to gegrammenon] —"I believed, and so I
spoke" [allusion to
Psalm 116:10, which reads, "I kept my faith,
even when I said, 'I am greatly afflicted.'"]—we also believe, and so we speak, [Psalm
115:1 of the Septuagint (LXX), which Paul cites without any modification --
"I believed, and so I spoke epistensa dio elalhsa. The second half of the Psalm describes
the circumstances in which an ancient sage had spoken: "But I have been
greatly humiliated egw de etapeinwqhn sfodra]" 14 because we know [Therefore, faith
is not blind obedience to the apostolic authority. Faith necessarily rests on
knowledge.[4]]
that the one who raised the Lord Jesus
will raise us also with Jesus, and will bring us with you into his presence. [If Paul's suffering and the Corinthian spirit are combining
to build up Christ within the faithful, this new unity will reach its fruition
when all stand together in the presence of the Lord. For Jesus, the focus of
faith was the God of Israel and zealous adherence to the first commandment, on
which he based his summons to the kingdom. In Paul, the faith of Christians in
the future salvation that fellowship with Christ guarantees rests on knowledge
of the incorruptibility of the risen Lord.[5]
We can also see that the specific hope of life beyond death rests on fellowship
with Christ places it on the right basis.[6]] [The theme now shifts to having treasure in
earthen pots. Everything, Paul insists, happens for the sake of the glory of
God.] 15 Yes, everything is for your sake, so that grace, as it extends to
more and more people, may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God. 16 So we
do not lose heart. [He is full of hope because he
trusts God. In short, Paul refuses to "become discouraged," one way
to translate egkakoumen] Even though our outer nature is wasting away,
our inner nature is being renewed day by day. [The outer nature
is the life that begins in each Christian when he or she forms a believing
relationship with Christ. While the life
experienced by the outer nature is real, Paul also sees it as only
momentary. He now offers the contrasts
of "seen" and "unseen" "temporary" and
"eternal." That which is seen,
those hardships and troubles that assail the outer nature, are only
temporary. The inner nature, out
Christ-filled center, is as yet unseen, hidden from the world inside the weak
and troubled outer nature.] 17 For
this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory
beyond all measure, ["Affliction" is
"slight," that is, insignificant, trivial or minor -- more of a
nuisance than anything else. In addition, "affliction" is
"momentary," that is, fleeting, short-lived or transitory --
something that does not endure. Even more importantly, our "slight
momentary affliction" is not without meaning. It serves a greater purpose,
indeed, a timeless one. The weight will be indescribable and incomparable.] 18 because we look not at what can be seen
but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot
be seen is eternal. [The "inner person"
is not visible, yet is of ultimate significance to the individual. The daily renewal is by repeated acts of faith,
so that the believer receives the life of Jesus repeatedly. Our days are numbered. Almost imperceptibly,
they pass by, and our years increase incrementally. Regardless of life's
unpleasant finale, and in spite of much malevolence from many parties, he would
not and could not lose hope. Moreover, as our own mortality becomes an
ever-present reality, moment-by-moment thoughts of decay can begin to dominate
our view of the future in such a way that hope grows faint. Yet in the face of
that harsh certainty, the apostle Paul offers an exhortation that refuses to
surrender to that bleak outlook.]
1 For we know that if the
earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not
made with hands [New
Jerusalem, not a heavenly body], eternal
in the heavens. [It is the ultimate destiny for
all who have ever lived, now live, and will live on Earth. Yet for Paul, God
has not and will not abandon us. Even though our bodies decay and we die, we
will not remain homeless.]
Barth says that what is visible is the temporal, but the
eternal that is to be raised up is invisible. What is visible is the
destruction of the outward person that perishes daily, but the renewal of the
inward person that forbids us to be discouraged is invisible. What is visible
is the present affliction, which causes us to sigh, but that this will quickly
pass and is light that works for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of
glory.[7]
As C. S. Lewis perceptively observed,
"The sense that in this
universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet
with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is
part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the
promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep
desire. For glory means good rapport with God, acceptance by God, response,
acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have
been knocking all our lives will open at last ... [and reveal] ... a weight or
burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain."[8]
In 5: 1-5, Paul rejects the possibility that when we take
off the tent, we would be naked. While we are still in this tent, we groan
under our burden. We wish not to be unclothed, but to have further clothing, so
that life may swallow up what is mortal. We see here an example of how the new
eschatological life is life in the full sense, in comparison with which earthly
life is life only with reservations.[9]
In Paul, the resurrection means participation already in the salvation of
eternal life.[10]
God is the one who has prepared us for this, giving us the Spirit as a
guarantee. The New Testament finds in the presence of the Spirit with Jesus
Christ and believers the decisive indication of the coming of the
eschatological consummation. In the case here, we see this true in Paul with
the thesis that the Spirit is the eschatological revealer of God through whom
the coming of God’s kingdom is already dawning. Here, then, the Spirit is
imparted to believers, who guarantees them a share in the future consummation.[11]
By the Spirit, the future of Jesus Christ is already present to believers as
their personal and common future of salvation. Therefore, the fellowship of the
church can be a sign that prefigures the eschatological fellowship of a
humanity renewed in the kingdom of God.[12]
The gift of the Spirit is an advance on the life of resurrection from the dead.
As such, the gift of the Spirit, as the pledge of future glory, constitutes the
eschatological assurance of salvation for those who are linked to Jesus by
faith and baptism.[13]
Barth will say that the earthly tabernacle or tent is temporary and in process
of having human life tear it down, but we move toward the building God has
prepared for us. We await with fear the moment when the first house is gone and
the second does not yet surround and protect us. We can evacuate the old and
enter the new with assurance and peace, for we have the pledge of the Spirit in
our hearts. As he sees it, the passage has a primarily ecclesiological and
eschatological character.[14]
Barth says that Paul contrasts our present life in a perishable tent with the
divinely prepared and eternal house with which we shall be clothed. Our
pilgrimage in time will end with our being at home in the Lord. He makes no
attempt to conceal his longing and sighing for the latter. Yet, he finds only a
relative and not an absolute place for this desire. The conclusion is that we
labor in the context of acceptance by the Lord.[15]
Introduction
"So we do not lose heart," the apostle Paul famously wrote to
the Corinthians. This came at the conclusion of a passage in which he
summarized the troubles he and his coworkers had faced:
"We
are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to
despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always
carrying in the body the death of Jesus ..." (2 Corinthians 4:8-10).
All of that, and they do not lose heart?
In a study published in the October
2011 issue of Nature Neuroscience, researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for
Neuroimaging at University College London present evidence that optimistic
people learn only from information that reinforces that rosy outlook. The study
actually suggests that many of us are hardwired for optimism. What this means
is that in many of us, our brains do not make pessimistic updates to what we
think. Some reporters call this a “brain defect.” If so, people seem to need
the defect in order to make personal progress. The defect allows us to imagine
better realities. Imagine our distant ancestors living in caves. They might
still be there, dreaming of light and heat, if it were not for their ability to
be optimistic and imagine a better future. Of course, individual exceptions are
always there. Some of us may be among them. Yet, as a human race, this study
suggests, we tilt toward optimism because, on balance, positive expectations
increase our odds for survival. Here is
a comment from one of the researchers, Tali Sharot,
"Without
optimism, our ancestors might never have ventured far from their tribes and we
might all be cave dwellers, still huddled together and dreaming of light and
heat." ("The optimism bias." TIME, June 6, 2011, 38-46)
We may have some
hard wiring, so to speak, that helps us take risks because we imagine a better
future.
Application
In every generation, Christians
must decide for themselves whether the hope of Paul and the early Christians
was an illusion, or something that can sustain their lives today as well.
A church sign supposedly read like
this:
EVENINGS AT 7 IN THE PARISH HALL
Mon: Alcoholics Anonymous
Tues: Abused Spouses
Wed: Eating Disorders
Thurs: Say No To Drugs
Fri: Teen Suicide Watch
Sat: Soup Kitchen
SUNDAY SERMON 9 A.M.
"Our Joyous Future in Christ"
Christianity is realistic about the
difficulties of life, but it insists that those difficulties are not what
define where we are headed when we are following Jesus.
What can we say about hope?
For one thing, we can observe that
some notable pessimists, deep thinkers such as Soren Kierkegaard and Reinhold
Niebuhr, were not able, despite their gloom, to abandon Christian hope. I have read their writings extensively. You
might want to read Works of Love, by
Kierkegaard. In any case, for you pessimists out there, here were two profound
men who, while pessimistic, never abandoned hope.
For another, we can remind
ourselves that the hope to which Christianity clings is not based on a mere
bright outlook but on promises of God
found in Scripture.
Paul did not simply have a bias
toward optimism. Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann writes that it
[The Old Testament] "voices the
oldest, deepest, most resilient grounding of hope in all of human history, a hope
that has been claimed by both Jews and Christians ... The hope articulated in
ancient Israel is not a vague optimism or a generic good idea about the future
but a precise and concrete confidence in and expectation for the future that is
rooted explicitly in [God's] promises to Israel."
We can add that the New Testament articulates a precise and
concrete confidence in and expectation for the future that is rooted explicitly
in God's promises through Jesus Christ.
For a third thing, we can recognize
that every time we recite affirmations from the Christian tradition, such as
the Apostles' Creed, we are hearing the testimony
of those who staked their lives on hope. When we repeat those words, we declare
our belief that the One who sits at the right hand of the Father will come
"to judge the living and the dead." We declare our belief in the
"forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life
everlasting." Even the pessimists among our fellowship speak the creed,
and in doing so, they join the optimists and the realists among us in affirming
that God is not done with us, and that when human history moves to its final
stage, we can stand with Christ.
Paul refers to the destroying of
this earthly tent. I want to give you a few testimonies of hope as people faced
one of the most challenging experiences of all, that of aging and death.
One day when John Quincy Adams, one of America's early presidents was
80 years of age, a friend met him on a street in Boston. "How is John Quincy Adams?" the friend
inquired. "John Quincy Adams
him-self is very well, thank you. But
the house he lives in is sadly dilapidated.
It is tottering on its foundations.
The walls are badly shattered, and the roof is worn. The building trembles with every wind, and I
think John Quincy Adams will have to move out of it before long. But he himself is very well."
Consider that Golda Meir was 71 when she became Prime Minister of
Israel. George Bernard Shaw was 94 when
one of his plays was first produced.
Benjamin Franklin was a framer of the U.S. Constitution at the age of
81. Thomas Edison was still making pioneering discoveries at 83. Michaelangelo was 80 years of age when he
designed the dome for St. Peter's.
Goethe was 81 when he finished Faust.
And Pablo Cassals at the age of 93 was still practicing the cello five
or six hours a day. Someone said,
"Pablo, why do you practice the cello?
You're 93!" He said,
"Because I think I'm making some progress!"
Agatha Christie, the late mystery writer who married H.E. Mallowen, the
famous archeologist, who once quipped, "There are some tremendous
advantages to marrying an archeologist--for one thing, the older you get, the
more interested he becomes in me."
Arie Brouwer, prior to his death from colon cancer in 1993 at age 58,
was a leader in the Reformed Church in America, and had formerly been general
secretary of the National Council of Churches. In his final months, he wrote:
"These
days I hold out very little hope for my cancer to be cured. I haven't given up,
but the statistics steadily weigh in ever heavier against it. In spite of all
that, I find my feelings of hope undiminished! How do I explain that even
within the household of faith, to say nothing of a skeptical world? How do I
keep people from feeling as I speak of this, or as they read this, that I am
clutching at a straw? That I am deceiving myself, using hope as a form of
escapism from the harsh reality of terminal illness and death? How do I
communicate that in truth we do not sorrow as those who have no hope (1
Thessalonians 4:13)? I believe that death is not the end, not the last word.
...
"Having
believed all of this for many years, my feelings of hope are strong. I am not
filled with dismay or anger or bitterness. This is true in spite of the aching disappointment
I feel related to the people I want to be with and the things I would like to
do in this life ... This experience of hope in spite of everything is to me
even more important than the experience of faith in spite of everything. ... I
am profoundly grateful for both."
Dr. Carver McGriff, who had been pastor at
St. Luke’s UMC for 27 years, preached the memorial service on Friday night. It
was special for Suzanne and me, for we met at one of the ministries of that
congregation. It was amazing to see him now, at 90, get up there to preach in
essentially the same way he did when he was 70. He preached without a note in
front of him. Given the context of the message, he shared about the death of
his first wife in a car accident, and the challenge it was to his faith and
hope. One friend drove all the way from Kansas with his family, stood in line
for two hours, embraced him, whispered ‘God loves you” in his ear, and left.
The next morning, they went back to Kansas.
We need to incorporate aging and approaching
that embraces the fullness of a human life. This would appear to be what Robert
Browning had in mind when he wrote in his poem Rabbi Ben Ezra, "Grow old
along with me! The best is yet to be."
The Easter message tells us that our
enemies—sin and death--are beaten.
Ultimately, they can no longer start mischief. They still behave as though the game were not
decided, the battle not fought; we must still reckon with them, but
fundamentally we must cease to fear them anymore.[16]
[1] Church Dogmatics IV.3 [71.5] 633.
[2] Church Dogmatics III.2 [47.5] 621-2.
[3]
Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume
3, 211.
[4]
Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament
Volume 1, 318.
[5]
Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume
3, 138.
[6]
Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume
3, 534.
[7] Church Dogmatics IV.1 {59.3] 330.
[8] ("The Weight of
Glory," in C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses [New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1975; First Touchstone Edition, 1996], 34-36.)
[9]
Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume
2, 347.
[10]
Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume
3, 568.
[11]
Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, Volume
2, 98.
[12]
Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume
3, 134.
[13]
Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume
3, 241, 552.
[14] Church Dogmatics IV.2 [67.1] 628-9,
III.2 [47.1] 494.
[15] Church Dogmatics III.2 [47.5] 640.
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