I begin with a focus upon the theology of this text.
When Paul offers grace, an expression found in Greek letters of the time, and peace, a common greeting in Jewish letters of the time, to those to whom he is writing, he is also reminding his readers of important theological expressions within the Christian community. Grace as a Christian term is the sign of the appearance and activity of God. It signifies the antecedent act of God that is the foundation of Christian faith. This grace comes through Jesus Christ as a gift to the believer, enabling ministry to the body of Christ and to the world. Shalom refers to total well-being, wholeness, and fullness. Grace and peace invite readers to participate in the new state of salvation now available to all who confess Christ. Together, they constitute the gift of salvation. Such a greeting in a letter that contains grit and pointed reminders may have a touch of irony. However, it also contains an important theological truth, since they are from the God as the Father of our Lord who is Jesus, the promised Jewish Messiah. While Hellenistic letters often began with expressing gratitude, he will use this thanksgiving to invite the congregation to live into their calling. He will offer a thumbnail sketch of the issues confronting the congregation in the context of his thanksgiving. His thanks is to God for the greatest gift, that of the grace of God given to them in Christ Jesus, enriching them in Christ in every way, but especially in speech (λόγῳ) and knowledge (γνώσει) of every kind, a reference to some of the thorniest issues he will face. Since this congregation seems to have division due to vindictive language, ecstatic utterance, and misconstrued theology, one can sense the irony of this reference. He tries to put such extraordinary gifts in a positive light. He also connects them to their true source in Christ. Paul is emphasizing that Christ is the one who unifies them, preparing the reader for his reflections in Chapters 1-4, and especially Chapter 2 and his reflection on wisdom and foolishness. Further, in strengthening or confirming the testimony or gospel that founded the church concerning the life, death, and resurrection of Christ given by Paul. Therefore, they do not lack any spiritual gift, with which they seem overwhelmed by uncontrolled use (11-13). The human experience of feeling as if something is missing in our lives may mean that we already have something that we do not know we have. We are not good at receiving, so we perceive lack. We may feel lack when we need to see who we are in Christ. Our purpose is to show to others the gifts we have received. We often do not pay attention to the gifts we have received. Is it because we take them for granted? Is it because we do not perceive them as gifts? The gifts we have may derive from the way we faced difficult circumstances, and thus all we see is the challenging work. Yet, if we could pause long enough to reflect upon them, we would realize that we already have what we need to meet the challenges of this day or of the net stage of our lives. You lack nothing because God has given you the gift of life in a world that is teeming with life. Such life has its beauty and love to offer, but it also has its dangers and risks. You are part of humanity, uniquely related to God. You are part of a nation, a community, an ethnic group, a family, each of us has unique gifts for you to learn, appreciate, and embody in your life. For the Christian, becoming part of the people of God makes us part of the Body of Christ, inviting us to fellowship with each other and with Christ. Such persons also have the Spirit of God at work within them. My point, of course, is that none of this are alone in this thing called life, and certainly not Christian life. The resources we need to face the challenges of life are not simply within us. If that were so, we would also lack. We ack nothing because we are more intimately bound together with others and with God than we may even know. Therefore, we truly lack nothing.
All this is occurring now, but in a way that shows they are waiting for the revealing (ἀποκάλυψιν or revelation) of our Lord, Jesus, who is the promised Jewish Messiah, an unusual phrase for Paul. The apocalyptic context of the term shows it is provisional until that final revelation, suggesting that faith and hope that looks toward that final revelation will be important qualities of a Christ life. [1] This notion still finds expression in hymns. Even the title of O Come, O Come Emmanuel gives expression to this hope. Charles Wesley (1744) could write Come, Though Long Expected Jesus and say:
Him the people to deliver, born a child and yet a King
Born to reign in us forever, now Thy gracious kingdom bring
By Thy own eternal Spirit, rule in all our hearts alone
By Thine all sufficient merit, raise us to Thine glorious throne
Paul emphasizes his eschatological outlook. The Spirit now at work in the gifts is a foretaste of what shall come. Their spiritual gifts today do not mean the eschaton has already appeared. Such gifts are an earnest of what is yet to come. Such gifts provide the community with a glimpse into the future glory that awaits them. The gifts are not fully present. If a day is coming for a revealing of Christ, then the present is a time of some hiddenness of whom Christ is. The present is a time of waiting for the fullness of revelation. The present is a prolepsis of the fullness of future revelation. They can exercise their gifts in the present as they look forward to final revelation. They can look beyond their present poverty, slavery, and victimization by evil and see the glory to come. In fact, Christ strengthens them to the end, stressing that the grace of God will not run short and will bring them home. Christ gives the prophetic announcement of the Day of the Lord, a day of judgment and liberation, further content as our Lord, Jesus, the promised Jewish Messiah. Christ ushers in the fulfillment of the promised eschatological era. Such eschatological imagery from the prophets finds its home in the New Testament as well. The Day is a time of judgment in which Christ has victory over sin and death. Until that Day, all believers live on the wings of grace. Paul is quite aware that he and his fellow Christians live between two advents or comings of Jesus Christ. The event to which Paul in his time bore witness continues. He is still in his time, as are all the apostles. They are such only as they are in the time of the revelation, declaration, and realization of their time in its hastening towards the end that has already come. What is at issue is the manifestation of the beginning of time posited in Christ, as well as its goal and end.[2] God will not break this promise, so Great is Thy Faithfulness, as the hymn puts it. The promise to Israel and the church remains stable (Romans 9-11).
Thou art the Lord who slept upon the pillow,
Thou art the Lord who soothed the furious sea.
What matter beating wind and tossing billow
If only we are in the boat with thee?
Hold us in quiet through the age-long minute
While thou art silent, and the wind is shrill:
Can the boat sink while thou, dear Lord, art in it?
Can the heart faint that waiteth on thy will?
--Amy Carmichael
Paul wants them to remember that God has called (ἐκλήθητε) them into being, and he will urge them to live into that calling. God has called them into the fellowship (κοινωνίαν) or partnership of the Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. The evidence of their calling is partnership with the Son. This word is rich in meaning, pointing us to the quality of the relationship within the community. The word has a basic meaning of sharing possessions. The fellowship shared in the community is to reflect the fellowship they have with Christ. They are to have unity in action and concerns. Such partnership has its root in grace. Such partnership unites the congregation to the Father, Son, and Spirit. Christ is our partner in human nature, so we are partners in the divine nature (II Peter 1:4). Thus, the call of the gospel is toward the faith of the recipients and therefore at their participation in salvation in fellowship with Christ.[3] For Paul, this focus on partnership also serves as a bridge to a discussion of the division experienced by the community. Their identity is communal. Their calling is to live into a unique relationship with the Son. They belong to God, and thus, as we look ahead to the difficult matters Paul will address, not to any group of believers.
I now turn to an exegetical and homiletical presentation of the text.
I Corinthians 1:1-9 is the introduction of the letter. In context, we should note the major themes in this introduction point to problems that this congregation has asked Paul to address. One could say he begins gently, even while he will soon address some difficult matters.
Paul offers 3grace to them, a greeting in common Greek use for letters. Yet, grace as a Christian term is the sign of the appearance and activity of God. It signifies the antecedent act of God that is the foundation of Christian faith. This grace comes through Jesus Christ as a gift to the believer, enabling ministry to the body of Christ and to the world. Paul also offers peace, a greeting common in Jewish letters. Shalom refers to total well-being, wholeness, and fullness. Grace and peace invite readers to participate in the new state of salvation now available to all who confess Christ. Together, they constitute the gift of salvation. Looking ahead to the strife this Christian community is experiencing, such a greeting has added significance. He may greet them in this way with a sense of irony. He greets them with grace and peace, but his letters to Corinth are full of grit and pointed reminders. Such grace and peace are from God our Father and the Lord, suggesting Jesus as Lord stands in relation to the church as Yahweh did with Israel, but it was also a title for Caesar, Jesus Christ.
Paul then shares his prayer for them, a prayer that, while full of praise and support, set the stage for the difficult message of this letter. He gives 4thanks to God. Letters in Hellenistic culture typically opened with offering thanks or gratitude. He will use this thanksgiving to invite the congregation to live into their calling. He will offer a thumbnail sketch of the issues confronting the congregation in the context of his thanksgiving. He thanks God always for them because of the grace of God given to them in Christ Jesus. Such “charis” covers demonstrations of favor in the sense of gifts.[4] Such charismata or grace gifts foreshadows some of the thorniest issues Paul address later. The greatest gift is the gift of grace. Such grace is a gift given by God through Christ. Believers experience this grace as something realized in the community through the presence of tangible gifts. He emphasizes the gratuitous quality of grace in that God gives it to all Christians in an unearned way. 5God has enriched them in every way in Christ. What makes one rich in Christ? Paul is going to let us know. This enrichment occurs in speech (λόγῳ) and knowledge (γνώσει) of every kind, a reference to some of the thorniest issues he will face. Since this congregation seems to have division due to vindictive language, ecstatic utterance, and misconstrued theology, one can sense the irony of this reference. He tries to put such extraordinary gifts in a positive light. He also connects them to their true source in Christ. Paul is emphasizing that Christ is the one who unifies them, preparing the reader for his reflections in Chapters 1-4, and especially Chapter 2 and his reflection on wisdom and foolishness. 6Further, they have strengthened or confirmed the testimony about Christ given by Paul among them as it flourishes with the community. This testimony refers to the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. It refers to the gospel that founded the church. One can see the strength of this testimony in the health of the body of Christ. Paul then stresses that the result is that 7they are not lacking in any spiritual gift. In Chapters 11-13, they seem overwhelmed by the uncontrolled use of gifts. Further, they wait for the revealing (ἀποκάλυψιν or revelation), an unusual phrase for Paul. When Paul writes of “revelation” here, he does so in an apocalyptic context, in which Christ will separate the righteous and the unrighteous. The extent to which the gospel is a revelation, then, is provisional until that final revelation.[5] Its provisional quality means faith and hope will always be important qualities of a Christian life.
Even today, congregations sing prayerfully, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” We sing, “Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus,” from Charles Wesley (1744):
Him the people to deliver, born a child and yet a King
Born to reign in us forever, now Thy gracious kingdom bring
By Thy own eternal Spirit, rule in all our hearts alone
By Thine all sufficient merit, raise us to Thine glorious throne
The congregation waits for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ. Paul emphasizes his eschatological outlook. The Spirit now at work in the gifts is a foretaste of what shall come. Their spiritual gifts today do not mean the eschaton has already appeared. Such gifts are an earnest of what is yet to come. Such gifts provide the community with a glimpse into the future glory that awaits them. The gifts are not fully present. If a day is coming for a revealing of Christ, then the present is a time of some hiddenness of whom Christ is. The present is a time of waiting for the fullness of revelation. The present is a prolepsis of the fullness of future revelation. They can exercise their gifts in the present as they look forward to final revelation. They can look beyond their present poverty, slavery, and victimization by evil and see the glory to come. 8Christ will also strengthen them to the end, stressing that the grace of God will not run short and will bring them home. Such strengthening means that they may be blameless (they are not blameless now) on the day (think of the prophets and the Day of Judgment and liberation) of our Lord Jesus Christ. Christ ushers in the fulfillment of the promised eschatological era. Such eschatological imagery from the prophets finds its home in the New Testament as well. The Day is a time of judgment in which Christ has victory over sin and death. Until that Day, all believers live on the wings of grace. Paul is quite aware that he and his fellow Christians live between two advents or comings of Jesus Christ. The event to which Paul in his time bore witness continues. He is still in his time, as are all the apostles. They are such only as they are in the time of the revelation, declaration, and realization of their time in its hastening towards the end that has already come. What is at issue is the manifestation of the beginning of time posited in Christ, as well as its goal and end.[6] Therefore, 9God is faithful. God does not break promises. Truly, “Great is Thy Faithfulness.” The divine promise to Israel remains viable (Romans 9-11).
Thou art the Lord who slept upon the pillow,
Thou art the Lord who soothed the furious sea.
What matter beating wind and tossing billow
If only we are in the boat with thee?
Hold us in quiet through the age-long minute
While thou art silent, and the wind is shrill:
Can the boat sink while thou, dear Lord, art in it?
Can the heart faint that waiteth on thy will?
--Amy Carmichael
Despite the issues this community faces, God is the one who called (ἐκλήθητε) them. God remains faithful to the congregation that God has called into being. At the beginning of the letter, Paul refers to his calling as an apostle. He now reminds them that God has called them as well. Paul will invite them to live into their calling. Paul sees some signs of the impact of the transforming work grace in their lives. The open question is whether they will live fully into their divine calling. God has called them into the fellowship (κοινωνίαν) or partnership of the Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. The evidence of their calling is partnership with the Son. This word is rich in meaning, pointing us to the quality of the relationship within the community. The word has a basic meaning of sharing possessions. The fellowship shared in the community is to reflect the fellowship they have with Christ. They are to have unity in action and concerns. Such partnership has its root in grace. Such partnership unites the congregation to the Father, Son, and Spirit. Christ is our partner in human nature, so we are partners in the divine nature (II Peter 1:4). Thus, the call of the gospel is toward the faith of the recipients and therefore at their participation in salvation in fellowship with Christ.[7] For Paul, this focus on partnership also serves as a bridge to a discussion of the division experienced by the community. Their identity is communal. Their calling is to live into a unique relationship with the Son. They belong to God, and thus, as we look ahead to the difficult matters Paul will address, not to any group of believers. To repeat, this thanksgiving is a gentle way to begin a discussion of the difficult issues he thinks he must address.
You do not lack any spiritual gift (verse 7). If so, why do we feel like ... well, like this:
If I just had more time ...
If I just had more money ...
If I just had more power ...
If I just had more confidence ...
If I just had more influence ...
Why is it that we feel so acutely that something is missing from our lives? If we think about the stages of a human life, we realize that each stage brings new challenges. We are constantly adding to our knowledge of self and world. Yet, if we have a sense that something is missing, our problem may not be that we are lacking something. Our problem is not that we need certain things that we just do not have. Our problem may be that we have something that we do not know we have. We are not good at receiving, and so we perceive a lack or void in our lives. We are so busy worrying about checking an itemized list to see what we have (Is there a water view? Does he have a great career ahead of him? Is an egg roll included?) that we are incapable of comprehending that God intends for us to lack nothing. The fear that we lack contains an irony.
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us. It's in everyone, and, as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."[8]
Brother David Steindl-Rast suggests what this means:
"Sometimes people get the mistaken notion that spirituality is a separate department of life, the penthouse of our existence. But rightly understood, it is a vital awareness that pervades all realms of our being. Someone will say, 'I come alive when I listen to music,' or 'I come to life when I garden' or 'I come alive when I play golf.' Wherever we come alive, that is the area in which we are spiritual. And then we can say, 'I know at least how one is spiritual in that area.' To be vital, awake, aware, in all areas of our lives, is the task that is never accomplished, but it remains the goal."[9]
Here is another way of looking at the power of the feeling that we lack.
"'Burnout is a surrender,' Dr. Martin Luther King once said at a conference in 1964. A lot of us were sitting at a table talking about the subject because we had witnessed it in others and in ourselves. He explained his somewhat startling choice of words this way: 'We have just so much strength in us. If we give and give and give, we have less and less and less - and after a while, at a certain point, we're so weak and worn, we hoist up the flag of surrender. We surrender to the worst side of ourselves, and then we display that to others. We surrender to self-pity and to spite and to morose self-preoccupation. If you want to call it depression or burnout, well, all right. If you want to call it the triumph of sin - when our goodness has been knocked out from under us, well, all right. Whatever we say or think, this is arduous duty, doing this kind of work; to live out one's idealism brings with it hazards.'"[10]
The point is that we have received in life. Even if we have difficult early years, we survived, showing the strength we have that stretches toward fullness of life. We often do not pay attention to the gifts we have received. Is it because we take them for granted? Is it because we do not perceive them as gifts? The gifts we have may derive from the way we faced difficult circumstances, and thus all we see is the challenging work. Yet, if we could pause long enough to reflect upon them, we would realize that we already have what we need to meet the challenges of this day or of the net stage of our lives.
You lack nothing because God has given you the gift of life in a world that is teeming with life. Such life has its beauty and love to offer, but it also has its dangers and risks. You are part of humanity, uniquely related to God. You are part of a nation, a community, an ethnic group, a family, each of us has unique gifts for you to learn, appreciate, and embody in your life. For the Christian, becoming part of the people of God makes us part of the Body of Christ, inviting us to fellowship with each other and with Christ. Such persons also have the Spirit of God at work within them. My point, of course, is that none of this are alone in this thing called life, and certainly not Christian life. The resources we need to face the challenges of life are not simply within us. If that were so, we would also lack. We ack nothing because we are more intimately bound together with others and with God than we may even know. Therefore, we truly lack nothing.
[1] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 1, 208-10.
[2] Barth, Church Dogmatics III.4 [56.1] 581.
[3] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 447.
[4] Pannenberg Systematic Theology Volume 3, 199.
[5] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 1, 208-10.
[6] Barth, Church Dogmatics III.4 [56.1] 581.
[7] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 447.
[8] Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles, 1992.
[9] -In The Music of Silence, cited in Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 29.
[10] -Robert Cole in The Call to Service, cited in Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 346.
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