Paul here reflects a “divine jealousy” for the Corinthians, continuing from earlier in the chapter. He is hurt by the rejection of the people there in favor of the “super-apostles” who are preaching a false gospel, adding works to the grace of Christ.
So Paul responds with pure, uncut sarcasm. The Corinthians put up with these false teachers who are authoritarian (“enslave you”), who exploit the church for financial gain, who puff themselves up and overall abuse them. He apologizes, sarcastically, for not having mistreated them in the same way, since that is apparently what they respond to.
Behind this sarcasm, we can sense some pain – these are people Paul has known and loved and led to Christ, and they are turning down a dark path.
So, since they respond to foolish boasting, Paul jumps in with his own foolish boasting. He lists facts and anecdotes about both his spiritual status and the price he has paid for his ministry. “Do you want to play? Let’s play.” He lists out the trials and pain and agony he endured for the sake of the gospel, at the hands of both Jews and gentiles, from mobs and governments, bandits and nature. Many of these stories are recounted in Acts, though the shipwrecks he mentions don’t even include the shipwreck story in that book! (Paul was not someone you wanted to go boating with.)
Paul is more concerned, though, with the spiritual lives of the people in the Church, not just in Corinth but everywhere. He feels intensely the weakness and shame of those in the church who struggled – including the Corinthians themselves. All this is in sharp contrast to the Super-Apostles he opposes.
Paul’s last physical boast is about the time he was lowered in a basket to escape the city of Damascus – possibly to set up a moderately clever contrast with being “caught up” to heaven watch he gets into in the next section.
So this is Paul’s “resume of suffering.” We all have our own resume of suffering. We go through things and we don’t know why. Even though our circumstances are very different than Paul’s, and usually are not derived from persecution like Paul’s, there is still much we can learn here. First of all, even though we may suffer and not know why, God’s love never wavers as He identifies with us in our pain.
It is easy to believe that if we do everything right, we will have an easy life. But as Paul’s life makes clear, that is not how it works.
Bart Ehrman, an atheist, has a book called “God’s Problem” where he examines the reasons for suffering in the Bible and decides that because there are multiple reasons given, the Bible is contradictory. As Christians, and adults who are able to understand things slightly more complex than a child’s story, we can understand that, hey, maybe there are just a lot of different reasons for suffering?
But Ehrman does a good job of breaking down the different kinds of suffering seen in the Scripture. “Classical suffering” is that which results from the consequences of sin, which we see in Genesis as well as the results of sin in the nation of Israel. “Redemptive suffering” is suffering that results in the ultimate alleviation of suffering, like the story of Joseph or, of course, the Cross. There is “meaningless suffering,” which is suffering without a comprehensible purpose, at least in this life (Job, Ecclesiastes.) And finally, “apocalyptic suffering” which is the result of taking a stand for God, as described in Revelation, and Paul here is describing the as well.
Across these types of suffering, we must grapple with why a good God allows it to happen, the problem of “theodicy.”
However you interpret that, one thing Paul makes clear is that suffering is not the result of a “lack of faith.” While we may not be able to understand why we are being allowed to suffer, we must understand that God still loves us in that suffering, and in fact knows intimately what it is like to suffer. The Gospel is not put on hold because we suffer.
As a body, we are not called to understand or even categorize all the suffering among us. We are called to mourn with those who mourn and rejoice with those who rejoice, to follow the lead of our very Creator in entering into and coming alongside the suffering in our midst.
– Sermon Notes, Dave Lester, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA, June 10, 2018
