A Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity
A Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity
2 Corinthians 3:1-11
by William Klock
One morning back in my Macintosh technician days my boss walked up and put a resume on my bench. “Does this look suspicious or is it just me?” he asked. He pointed to the guy’s work history. Every one of his previous employers was defunct, but somehow he had the personal email address of every one of his old bosses. If that wasn’t odd enough, all of them had Yahoo and Hotmail email addresses using similar formats. It was pretty obvious. Every one of those email addresses was made up and would just go back to him and he could write his own references.
Of course, the whole point of a reference is that someone—who is either known personally or known by reputation—someone else is vouching for you. They did this in Paul’s world just like we do today. Jews, especially in the diaspora, would carry letters of recommendation indicating that other Jews could trust them. In the pagan Greco-Roman world it was common for your patron to supply you with a letter of recommendation. But writing your own recommendation, well, that kind of misses the whole point. But that seems to be what the Corinthians are accusing Paul of doing in today’s Epistle. They read parts of his first epistle to them—parts like Chapter 9 where he defends himself as an apostle—and they took it as inflated self-commendation. But now, people in Corinth have been making false accusations against him too, so he’s going to have to do the same thing all over again. We can hear his frustration as he writes to them, beginning Chapter 3 of Second Corinthians:
So, we’re starting to “recommend ourselves” again, are we? Or perhaps we need—as some do—official references to give to you? Or perhaps even from you?
Maybe he should get one of his other churches—maybe the brothers and sisters in Ephesus—to write him a letter, vouching for him. But Paul shouldn’t have to do that.
Paul had a difficult relationship with the Corinthians. When he left them in ad 50, the church was very supportive of him and his mission, but over the next several years their attitude towards him soured. The church grew, new preachers arrived, attitudes changed. Paul wrote to intervene in their struggles over leadership and to rebuke them for allowing pagan idolatry and immorality to get a foothold in the congregation. They patted themselves on the back for being free in the Messiah and Paul rebuked them saying that this isn’t what freedom in the Messiah means. Of course, they didn’t appreciate Paul’s rebukes and so he became persona non grata in Corinth. He wrote to them and they responded with a “Thanks, but no thanks, Paul.”
So Paul responds sort of facetiously: “Am I going to need a recommendation before you’ll listen to me?” That would be a bit like telling our bishop that he needs a recommendation from some other church before we’ll let him visit or preach here. Others might have shaken the dust from their shoes at that point and left the ingrates in Corinth to themselves, but not Paul. He has a pastor’s heart. He cares too much for them. And he answers not to them, but to Jesus. I don’t think they actually asked for a letter of recommendation, but he offers one anyway—but not like any other—because Paul knew that the gospel commends itself. So he writes to them:
You yourselves are our letter…
They rejected him. They’ve told him not to come around and not to write to them anymore to give advice. They’ve disrespected and insulted him. And Paul writes: I don’t need a letter of recommendation to prove my credentials as an apostle and servant of Jesus. I don’t. Because you people yourselves are my letter of recommendation. You people, even though you’ve rejected me, you’re the proof of my gospel credentials.
You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all. It’s quite plain that you are a letter from the Messiah, delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of beating hearts.
Brothers and Sisters, if that’s not grace I don’t know what is. Paul doesn’t need a letter written in ink on paper. These messed up, confused, infuriating people are nevertheless filled with the life of the Spirit promised in the gospel. For all their faults and for all their inability to see how they’ve been shaped by their culture in their rejection of him, their joy in the Lord and their hope in the good news is the result of Paul’s ministry to them and that says everything about Paul that needs to be said. Despite their imperfections and immaturity, their transformation by and their life in Jesus and the Spirit, make them his credentials.
That’s pretty astounding and it says something about the power of the gospel and Paul’s expectation of its power to transform people, even when they looked hopeless and even when they’re still far from perfect. These were people he rebuked for putting the wisdom of the Greeks over the truth of the gospel. These were people he rebuked for tolerating a church member who was sleeping with his step-mother. These were people he rebuked for dragging each other through the courts, for divorce, for not treating each other as equals, for abusing spiritual gifts, for abusing the Lord’s Supper, for having crazy, disordered worship. The list is a long one. And yet despite their multitude of failings, he says, “You want to see my credentials as a gospel minister, as an apostle? You’re it.” Paul could see the gospel at work in them. For all their faults, they were not the people they had once been. As he had written to them in his first epistle, no one affirms that Jesus is Lord apart from the transforming work of the Spirit. Paul could see through the flaws and immaturity and knew that they believed, that they loved Jesus, that they were full of the Spirit. He had proclaimed the good news about Jesus to them and it had done its work, it was continuing to do its work, and he was confident, it would in time complete its work. This is important. Sometimes we look at other Christians or other churches and they’re a mess and we’re tempted to write them off completely. Brothers and Sisters, be careful. Is Jesus being proclaimed as Lord? If he is, that means that the gospel and the Spirit are at work there. Maybe the gospel and the Spirit have a lot of work yet to do. The Corinthians needed correction—a lot of it. But Paul didn’t write them off. They had the gospel. These aren’t the other folks Paul warns about who were preaching another, a different gospel. That’s a whole other problem. But the Corinthians received the gospel and the gospel is a powerful thing. It is the power of God to save. Now, word of caution. Their context was different from ours. This was a first-generation church living in the days when these things were still being worked out. We don’t have that excuse today. But still, no one, no church is perfect, but if the gospel is there, we should be confident that Jesus and the Spirit will be with a church to correct and to bring maturity.
But how could Paul look at these messed up people in a messed up church and be so sure? He could, because he knew that God is faithful. Because he knew the story and because he knew the promises of God. And so Paul reminds the Corinthians of Jeremiah 31 and of God’s promise to Israel there.
In those days Israel was in exile. Israel had been unfaithful to God. She had been unfaithful to her covenant obligations. She had refused to trust in his goodness and she had prostituted herself to foreign kings and to foreign Gods. So the Lord had judged her and allowed the Babylonians to conquer her, to destroy Jerusalem, to tear the temple down to the ground, and to carry the people off into captivity, away from the land they’d been promised—and most importantly, away from his presence.
But that was not the end. Through the prophet Jeremiah, the Lord promised the people that he would redeem them. They may be covenant-breakers—like a cheating spouse—but he was not. He would always be faithful to his promises. And so one day he would restore Israel by establishing a new covenant. There would be a new agreement between the Lord and his people. There would be a new marriage between Israel and her Lord. He had established the old covenant through Moses when he gave Israel his law, written on stone tablets. But that law carved on stone did not have the power to give the people the real life they needed and that the Lord desired for them. And so the Lord promised a new covenant that would restore Israel. The new covenant would deal fully with the sins of the people—that’s what the cross of Jesus is about. And the new covenant would give the people the new life they needed in order to truly be the renewed people the Lord wanted them to be—to remake humanity into what we were meant to be—God giving his people his own life, transforming their hearts and minds in a way that the law written on stone was never able to do. In this new covenant, the Lord promised through Jeremiah, he would write the law on their hearts—he would give his people his own Spirit.
That was the story and that was the promise. And when Paul looked at the Christians in Corinth, even though they were confused and muddled and had rejected him, he could write to them and say that they were his letter, they were his credentials, because the life of God’s Spirit was evident in their life as a church. They themselves were a letter from Jesus the Messiah. The powerful work promised through Jeremiah and the other prophets was manifest in the amazing work that the Spirit had accomplished in them. Think about that. Some of them had been Jews—the same sort of Jews that Paul himself had been when he persecuted Jesus’ people. Some of them had been Greek pagans, worshipping idols, offering incense to Caesar, deeply involved in a degenerate culture. But Paul had brought them the good news that Jesus is Lord. He preached Jesus’ death and resurrection. And they had been transformed. The Spirit had moved them to repentance and given them a totally new life. The living God had written something powerful on their hearts and they would never be the same people again. And the pagan world around them could see it even if these people couldn’t see it themselves anymore. Again, think about that. Think about your own stories. Think of the way you were once met with the good news. Think of the forgiveness you have found at the cross. Think of the new life Jesus has given you. Just like the Corinthians, each of us has a long road ahead of us as we grow into a mature faithfulness to Jesus and his lordship, but Jesus has poured his Spirit into us. In our baptism he has plunged us into the Holy Spirit and we are not the people we once were—and neither were the Corinthians.
And so Paul goes on, getting back to his credentials, writing in verses 4-6:
That’s the kind of confidence we have towards God, through the Messiah. It’s not as though we are qualified in ourselves to reckon that we have anything to offer on our own account. Our qualification comes from God. God has qualified us to be stewards of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. The letter kills, you see, but the Spirit gives life.
All the proof of Paul’s faithfulness as a minister of the gospel, as a minister of God’s new covenant is right there in the work accomplished in the Corinthians by Jesus and the Spirit. It’s not that Paul is competent himself. He merely showed up in Corinth and preached the good news as he’d been called to do by Jesus himself. But as a result of Paul preaching the good news of Jesus and the kingdom, God’s new creation had unfolded right there in a powerful and very visible way. The “letter”—the old law written on stone—brought death, but the Spirit now poured into these people had given them life. In his resurrection Jesus unleashed life into the world. All Paul did was preach that good news and where he did that the Spirit brought transformation—the Spirit brough the life promised by God all those centuries before.
As frustrated as Paul was with the Corinthian Christians, the fact that they were Christians—well, Paul knew it was by the grace of God. They’d been transformed and in that Paul saw the glory of God, the glory of the cross, the glory of gospel, the glory of Jesus and the Spirit. Paul has been absolutely swept up and away by it all. God’s amazing faithfulness and his glory revealed in the cross and the empty tomb and in Jesus and the Spirit have captivated Paul. It drives him on and it’s the lens through which he sees literally everything. But the Corinthians just aren’t seeing it anymore. They’ve been distracted by worldly things and by their petty disputes. And so having declared how they themselves are the proof of God’s faithfulness and the power of the gospel, in verse 7 he now goes on, trying to get them to look up again. To forget the cheap and dingy things that have distracted them and to get them captivated again by the glory of what God has done in Jesus and the Spirit. He says to them:
Think about it: If the ministry of death, carved in letters on stone, came in glory, so glorious in fact that the children of Israel couldn’t look at Moses because of the glory of his face—a glory that was to be abolished, how much more will the ministry of the Spirit come in glory?
From waxing eloquent about the glory of the new covenant, Paul takes them back to the dark days of the old. And yet, as much as we might (and they) might think of the old covenant times, the time before Jesus and the Spirit, as dark, Paul reminds them of Moses face when he came down from Mt. Sinai with the law. Moses had been in the presence of the Lord and he came down the mountain with his face radiating the Lord’s glory. It was so bright, so brilliant, so radiant of the holiness of God that the people pleaded with Moses to cover his face. As glorious as it was, it was just too much for them to look upon.
And Paul’s point is this: If the law carved on stone came down from the mountain in such amazing glory, if the old covenant carried that much glory, how much more glorious is the ministry of the Spirit and God’s new covenant with his people? He goes on in verses 9-11:
For if the ministry of condemnation was glorious, how much more does the ministry of justification abound in glory? In fact, what used to be glorious has come in this respect to have no glory at all, because of the new glory which goes so far beyond it. For if the thing which was to be abolished came with glory, how much more glory will there be for the thing that lasts?
Like the Christians of Ephesus who, in Revelation, are described as having lost their first love, the Corinthians had lost sight of the glory of the Holy Spirit’s ministry. It wasn’t that they’d lost the Holy Spirit. That’s impossible. It’s the Spirit who binds us to Jesus, he’s the one who unites us to his life, he’s the one who renews our minds and regenerates our hearts, turning us from everything that is not Jesus and giving us the desire and the faith to take hold of Jesus with both hands. You cannot be a Christian without the Holy Spirit. But somehow they’d lost perspective. The Spirit had empowered these people remarkably, they had no shortage of gifts, but they’d lost sight of the gospel, Jesus was no longer their centre, and they misused and abused those gifts. And they’d slowly let the values of Greek culture creep in to displace a gospel-centred life. Somehow they’d lost sight of the glory of God revealed in Jesus and the Spirit. Does that sound familiar?
Brothers and Sisters, we can all too easily fall prey to the same sorts of things. Our own culture infiltrates the church in many, many ways. It compromises our call to holiness and we become worldly in our living. It creeps into our churches, too. Our culture is overwhelmingly commercialistic, materialistic, and individualistic and too often, without even realizing it’s happened, we start building our churches around these things. We treat the gospel like a commodity to sell. We displace it with programs and we tailor our preaching to appeal to our culture’s self-centred individualism. Programs can be good and useful in accomplishing the work of the church, but most of the time these days they’re treated as sales tools. But God doesn’t give us programs. He gives us his word. Through the ministry of the Spirit he caused his word to be written by prophets, apostles, and evangelists so that we can know him and proclaim him to the world. And in Jesus he sent his word to become flesh—not to give us programs or gimmicks or to tickle the itching ears of sinners—but to die for our sins and to rise again to unleash life into the world. A church should never have its identity tied up with anything other than the gospel. A church is a place where the word is faithfully preached and the sacraments faithfully administered. That was the definition the Protestant reformers developed. What constitutes a church? A church is a body of believers that preaches the word and administers the sacraments. But today it seems many preach everything but the word and the sacraments are often side-lined or even sometimes considered optional. As ministers of the gospel, we—and that’s both you and I—are not called to be flashy, we’re not called to preach the pop-psychology and self-help that our culture obsesses over, we’re not called to be motivational speakers, we’re not called to preach health and wealth. We’re called to proclaim that Jesus has died and risen and that he is Lord. We’re called to summon the world to repentance before the throne of Jesus the Messiah. And we’re called to leave behind and to sacrifice everything that is not Jesus, everything that is not of his kingdom. We’re called to back-up our proclamation by living the life of the Spirit, by manifesting the love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control that the Spirit bears in our lives. We’re called to live justly and to do mercy. We’re called to use the giftings of the Spirit not for our own ends, but for the sake of the gospel and for the well-being of the Church. We’re called to be gloriously counter-cultural: being poor in spirit, mourning sin, living in meekness, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, being merciful, and making peace—even when it means rejection and persecution. As people filled with God’s own Spirit, we are the earnest of God’s promise and work of new creation. By our preaching and by our lives, we’re called to lift the veil on God’s new creation, to pull God’s future into the present so that the world can have a taste of it—and see the goodness and faithfulness of the Lord. Brothers and Sisters, it’s this Jesus-centred and Spirit-empowered life that manifests the glory of God to the world, that makes us the light of the world and the salt of the earth—that marks us out as the people of God.
Let us pray: Almighty and everlasting God, you are always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve: Pour upon us the abundance of your mercy, forgiving us those things of which our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things for which we are not worthy to ask, except through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ our Saviour; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.