 |
The Archdiocese of Cincinnati Main Page || The Catholic Telegraph || Live Letters index |
Live
Letters Seventh Sunday in
Ordinary Time |
The Catholic Telegraph
February 18, 2000The semi-continuous reading of Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians which we begin today gets short shrift in the Church’s lectionary. It is interrupted when Lent and Easter time take over from the Sundays in Ordinary Time. Then, when Ordinary Time begins once more after the Easter season, the first three Sundays of it are superseded by Pentecost and the feasts of the Holy Trinity and Corpus Christi. We never get to read all eight portions of Second Corinthians that the Lectionary offers. We just get pieces of it. In a sense, that’s not inappropriate because some scholars think that Second Corinthians is itself a collection of pieces, of briefer letters sent to Corinth over a certain span of time and later gathered together, perhaps by Paul himself, into one document.
The general context of Second Corinthians is tension and misunderstanding. The Corinthians themselves seem to have been demanding and insecure, but the young church had also been visited by other Christian missionaries who differed from Paul in their approach to the gospel and who seem to have been quite free about sowing doubt and confusion in the minds of the Corinthians about Paul’s character and methods. Hence this letter is a long and defensive explanation by Paul of certain specific happenings and of his apostolate in general. Because so much of the letter is concerned with words and actions that are not fully explained, it is sometimes difficult to understand the points that he is making. Reading Second Corinthians is like listening to one side of a family fight.
In today’s reading from chapter one, the issue is Paul’s promise to make several visits to Corinth and then not showing up. Later he will explain that his change of plans was determined by his conviction that a visit would not have been timely or helpful to the Corinthians, but here he is addressing a wider issue: his own credibility. It seems that the hostile element at Corinth took Paul’s change of plans as merely one more sign of his character and his ministry: vacillating, inconstant, unsure. They saw him as one who talks out of both sides of his mouth, whose yeses and nos were indistinguishable and undependable. So now, at the beginning of his explanation about the unmade visits he has to defend his basic reliability and consistency.
My ministry deals with Christ, he says, as does the ministry of Silvanus and Timothy, my colleagues. We are not indecisive or unclear about what we preach. We preach the decisiveness and clarity of Christ who is the unique fulfillment of all God’s promises. Christ is God saying "yes" to us even as our response to Christ is saying "yes" to the Father through Him. You ought to have confidence in us when it comes to relating to Christ, because we have been appointed by God and because we have received the Spirit as a kind of down payment on the full messianic benefits still to come. In Christ God is faithful, and clear, and unequivocal and so are we.
Paul’s defense of his single minded apostolate raises some interesting issues for us. For us, too, Christ is God’s affirmation of love and care, the expression of His providence for us. We, too, have received the Holy Spirit Who constitutes the beginning of our final fulfillment in Christ’s kingdom. The basic outlines of meaning in our life are clear. There is no reason for us to wonder what we are all about and where we are supposed to be headed. In Christ, God has said "yes" to us and we have said "yes" to God.
Yet all too often we act as if we aren’t really convinced of all that. Many of our priorities are not concerned with Christ. We spend a lot more time worrying about the details of job and family and personal economic security that we do about the presence and action of Christ in us. Often our personal relationships are more concerned with self-assertion than with sharing Christ’s love with others. Our culture puts great importance on "feeling good about yourself," and we tend to put more energy into pursuing that goal than into appreciating and appropriating the self that Christ has imparted to us. Our attention to the presence of Christ in prayer and community worship frequently takes second place to dealing with the mundane demands of ordinary life or to an extra hour’s sleep on Sunday. It’s not that we have walked away from Christ or given up our Christian beliefs, but that the strong "yes" of faith that Christ demands of us has degenerated in practice to, "Maybe, if it’s not too much trouble."
Clarity and consistency and single mindedness were part of Paul’s basic character as an apostle. If those traits were not obvious to the Corinthians, it was because they really didn’t understand him, or chose not to understand him. Clarity and consistency and single mindedness are supposed to be part of our character as Christian believers. If they are not, it may be because we really haven’t understood Christ.
###
Conversation Questions.
What elements in my life indicate that I have offered a firm "yes" to Christ?
What elements in my life indicate that my commitment isn’t all that it should be?
###
Main Page
|| The Catholic Telegraph || Live Letters index
Copyright © 2000 Archdiocese of Cincinnati.