Manna Praxis

The Book of 2 Corinthians: Power Perfected in Weakness

Introduction

Today’s Passage: An Overview of the Whole Book

You have just walked through 1 Corinthians, and you know that church now: gifted, articulate, quarrelsome, still carrying the port city in its bones. Now open the second letter and you find something you did not expect. The teacher has been wounded. Between the two letters a great deal happened that the New Testament only lets us see out of the corner of our eye. Paul made a visit to Corinth that went badly, so badly that he calls it a painful visit and resolves not to make another one like it. He wrote them a letter we no longer have, a severe one, written out of great distress and anguish of heart, with many tears, and then he had to live with the silence of not knowing how it had landed. He went to Troas to preach and found a door standing wide open in the Lord, and he could not settle to the work, because Titus had not come back with news. So he left an open door behind him and pushed on into Macedonia to find him. When Titus finally came, the news was good: they had received the letter, they had grieved, they had turned, they longed for Paul again. And that is where 2 Corinthians is written from, out of the flood of relief on the far side of a reconciliation. It is the most personal and the most raw of everything Paul ever wrote. He does not organize it the way he organized the first letter, problem by problem. He pours it out. Comfort and affliction, glory and dying, confidence and tears, and then a long, sorrowful, half-ironic defense of his own ministry against a group of impressive newcomers who had dazzled the Corinthians and told them Paul was not much to look at. Read it slowly. You are reading a pastor’s heart with the lid off.

As you read, hold this: Writing out of a hard, tearful season and under attack from polished rivals, Paul refuses to defend himself with strength, and shows instead that God comforts the afflicted, carries His treasure in jars of clay, and perfects His power in weakness.

The name and what it means

There is no name to unfold here, so let us take the word that governs the letter instead, because Paul rings it like a bell before he says anything else. It is παράκλησις (paraklēsis), pronounced par-AK-lay-sis (Strong’s G3874), with its verb parakaleō, and the English Bibles render it comfort, consolation, encouragement, exhortation. The word is built from two pieces: para, alongside, and kaleō, to call. It means a calling to someone’s side. That is worth sitting with, because our English word comfort has softened over the centuries into something like soothing, a warm blanket and a lowered voice. Paraklēsis is stronger than that. It is what happens when someone is summoned to stand beside you: an advocate called to your side in a court, a friend called to your side at a graveside, a commander called alongside troops who are about to break. It braces as much as it soothes. Now count the word in the opening of this letter. In the first seven verses Paul uses that noun and its verb ten times, stacked one on another until the sentence can hardly carry them, and he traces every one of them back to a single source: the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort. Not a God who sends comfort from a distance, but the God who is Himself all of it. And listen for the family resemblance in the word, because you have heard it before. On the night before He died, Jesus promised His disciples another paraklētos, another One called alongside, the Helper, the Advocate, the Spirit of truth who would be with them forever. The comfort Paul is talking about is not a mood. It is a Person, sent to stand beside afflicted people. Hold that word and half of 2 Corinthians is already open to you: God does not spare His servants affliction, He comes and stands beside them in it, and then He sends them to stand beside somebody else.

The world of the book

You already know Corinth: the isthmus and its two harbors, the money, the Isthmian games, the rock of the Acrocorinth over the town, the freedmen’s city with its appetite for status. What has changed by this letter is not the city but the relationship. Something had gone wrong between Paul and the congregation he had fathered. Someone in the church, at some point, had wronged him openly and publicly, and the congregation had sat on its hands. He had come and gone in grief. He had written and waited. And into that gap walked other men. Paul calls them, with a sting you can hear across two thousand years, the super-apostles. They arrived with letters of recommendation, they took money for their teaching, and they knew how to hold a room. That last point mattered more in Corinth than we can easily imagine. In the Greco-Roman world, public speaking was a performance art with paying audiences and celebrity practitioners, and a speaker was expected to commend himself: to speak well of his own credentials, his lineage, his triumphs, his bearing. Self-promotion was not a vice there. It was the job. So a teacher who refused to take pay, who worked with his hands at a leatherworker’s bench like a common laborer, whose letters hit hard but who in person was unremarkable, looked to Corinthian eyes like a man with nothing to sell. They said so out loud. His letters, they admitted, were weighty and forceful, but “his physical presence is unimpressive, and his speaking is of no account.” The rivals had simply taken the city’s own scale of measurement and applied it to the apostles, and Paul had come up light.

Running underneath all of it is a large and practical piece of business. For years Paul had been gathering a relief offering among the Gentile churches of Macedonia and Achaia for the poor believers in Jerusalem, and Corinth had been eager about it a year earlier and had then let it drift. Chapters 8 and 9 are Paul, gently and without a hint of coercion, getting that collection finished before he arrives. It is more than charity. A Gentile church sending money to Jewish believers in Jerusalem was a visible argument that in Christ the wall had come down and these were one people. But notice how carefully he has to walk. The moment a traveling teacher asks a congregation for money, the whole city’s suspicion about traveling teachers is awake in the room, which is exactly why he sends Titus and two trusted brothers ahead to handle the funds and takes pains that no one can accuse him of anything. So the letter carries three things at once, braided together: a wound healing, a defense of a ministry that refuses to defend itself on the world’s terms, and an offering to finish. Under all three is the same conviction, that the God who raises the dead has chosen to work through what looks like nothing much at all.

The shape of the book

The one thread to carry

Carry this through the thirteen chapters: God’s power is not diminished by weakness. It is displayed through it. That is not a consolation prize handed to people whose lives did not turn out impressive. It is the deliberate design of God, and the cross is the pattern of it, because the strongest thing God ever did in this world looked from the outside like total defeat. Paul had learned that the hard way, and he says it in a single image no one has ever improved on. In the ancient world the ordinary storage jar was cheap earthenware, plain, unlovely, easily broken, the sort of thing a household owned dozens of and thought nothing about. Put something priceless inside one and the contrast tells its own story.

"Now we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this surpassingly great power is from God and not from us." 2 Corinthians 4:7 (BSB)

The rivals at Corinth were not clay jars. They were polished vessels and they wanted to be seen. Paul will not compete with them on those terms, and the reason is not modesty. It is that a splendid container would obscure what is inside it. Then, at the end of the letter, he tells the story he had kept to himself for fourteen years: the revelations, the thorn, the three prayers, and the answer he received. God did not remove the thorn. God said something better.

"But He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is perfected in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly in my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest on me." 2 Corinthians 12:9 (BSB)

Notice that this is not a general principle Paul reasoned his way to. It is a sentence spoken to him by the Lord Jesus, and he never got over it. Grace that is sufficient is grace that is enough, right now, at the present measure of the trouble, with no shortfall to make up somewhere else. And notice where it all comes from. The whole pattern of strength in weakness is not a technique for enduring hardship. It stands on one exchange at the center of the letter, and at the center of everything.

"God made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God." 2 Corinthians 5:21 (BSB)

Read that sentence slowly and do not soften it. The One who knew no sin was made sin. The ones who had no righteousness of their own became the righteousness of God in Him. That is the great exchange, and everything else in this letter grows out of it: the comfort, the confidence, the refusal to lose heart, the generosity, the willingness to look like nothing at all in front of a city that worshiped appearance. A man who has been reconciled to God like that can afford to be a clay jar.

And when Paul finally lays down the pen at the end of a letter that has cost him more than any other, he does not sign off with an argument won. He signs off with a blessing, and it is one of the fullest Trinitarian sentences in all of Scripture, three persons of the one God named in a single breath over a congregation that had lately broken his heart.

"The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you." 2 Corinthians 13:14 (BSB)

That is where this letter is going. Grace, love, and fellowship, over people who had wounded him and been restored. So walk into 2 Corinthians expecting to meet a God who does not hand out exemptions from affliction, but who comes and stands alongside the afflicted, and who has never once needed an impressive vessel to do anything glorious. Praise Him for that. Learn the Word, keep your eyes on the crucified and risen Christ whose power is perfected in weakness, and give thanks.