Sermon preached at St Paul’s Athens on the 5th Sunday after Trinity – 4th July 2021: : Ezek 2, 1-5; 2 Cor 12, 2-10; Mark 6, 1-13.
Fr Leonard Doolan
What happened to the persecutor of the new sect that would soon be known as Christians? I am referring of course to Saul, or Paul, who would later be known as ‘the Apostle’ and who along with St. Peter had his annual feast day earlier this week.
Breathing fire against these wacky new ‘Way’ followers of a crucified man called Jesus, Paul was travelling to Damascus. We all know that something happened to him as he travelled. We are not so clear about ‘what it was’ in any detail, though we know Paul experiences in some way an extraordinary ‘repentance’ or conversion.
When he writes to the church in Corinth, there are moments in the correspondence when the Apostle is surprisingly personal, humble, and quite intimate, in the way he shares details about himself. This is not always the Paul we have in our minds.
This morning’s passage from 2 Corinthians is just one such moment where we catch a glimpse of a different Paul. It may also shed some light on what happened on the road to Damascus.
With an element of humility the Apostle shares with the Corinthian Christians something of his very personal spiritual life and experience. Rather cleverly he places it into the ‘third person’. ‘I know a person in Christ’ he begins, but he really means himself.
He goes on to describe a profoundly mystical experience. He describes it as εκτός του σώματος – an elliptical short phrase, but he is describing some sort of ‘out of body experience’.
The contents of this experience are not really divulged – and it seems that even he, talking in the third person about a man to whom this is happening, appears still to be baffled as to how it all happened – how often in a few sentences does he say ‘I don’t know’. What Paul does know is that it is this ‘3rd party’ Paul who feels he has some right to speak about the Lord, not the man standing in front of them with all his faults. He understands what humanity transfigured means. He is changed beyond all recognition; the former man he was has been left behind.
The out of body, or mystical experience gives to Paul an authority to speak with a certain wisdom and insight into life in union with Christ. Every now and then one encounters someone who is touched by this mystical relationship with God in Christ – we can detect in them a closeness with the divine, and a holiness in speech and action. It is not a specialism, however, and many of us can approach something akin to this, through prayer and concentrated contemplation of God. More of us could, and I include myself, be far more open to mystical experience if we gave a little more attention to this part of Christian living.
The mystical way is not confined to hesychastic monks on Mount Athos, nor the Theresa of Avila, and St. John of the Cross of the Spanish counter-reformation Catholic church, but also in the English mystical tradition people such as Mother Julian of Norwich, Margery Kemp, and Richard Rolle, to name but a few.
Mystics, and those who seek something of the mystical way of life, are not more perfect Christians than the rest of us. In a balanced theology of Church there is no distinction between someone who comes close to Christ ‘out of the body’, and someone who comes close to her fellow citizen who needs to be fed on the street. Both, and everything in between, are ways of living together, ‘in Christ’.
Having alluded to his experience Paul then gives us some rare insight into what keep his feet firmly on the ground. He makes reference to ‘a thorn given me in the flesh’. I’m sure we would all wish to know exactly what that was. In the Greek NT the word used is σκόλοψ. It is a fascinating word, and it occurs only once – it is one of those words called a hapax legomenon – occurring only once, here in this letter to the Corinthians. What is Paul telling us? What is his thorn in the flesh?
We know from other details in his letters that Paul was not a fine big strapping man. In his book that some of us studied earlier this year, Rowan Williams gives a description of what we know Paul looked like – based on an early 2nd century text – a little man, bow-legged, thin faced, hook-nosed, bald with heavy eyebrows meeting in the middle. (Meeting God in Paul, p 19), but Williams also refers to the possibility of Paul being epileptic, and with some sort of eye disease, as there are references to him having to screw up his eyes, but there is also this enigmatic ‘thorn in the flesh’. There is some speculation that he had the stigmata the marks of the crucified body of Jesus on his own body.
Whatever the ailment, the thorn, Paul sees it as a means of keeping him humble, even though he may have had a quite extraordinary experience ‘in Christ’. His ailment is used to glorify God, and it gives Paul deep insight into his theology of the cross, and of the crucified Saviour, for as Paul says in his letter, the Lord says to him ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.’ (2 Cor 12, 9). We see elsewhere Paul’s understanding that the power of the cross lies in its weakness, and at the end of today’s reading Paul himself says ‘whenever I am weak, then I am strong’.
Paul acknowledges physical weakness, but spiritual life transformed. This is not the experience that we read of in our gospel reading. Jesus is in his family home town – Nazareth. They hear him teaching in the synagogue but any real authority is undermined by the power of jealousy, hardness of heart, and disbelief. This is only the carpenter’s boy, and we know what happened with his mother, before she married Joseph. He has brothers and sisters still here in the town.
So, as Paul might have said, ‘a messenger of Satan’ infects them with scepticism and they take offence at the teaching Jesus. That infection so easily enters our own souls and in place of the generosity of God we harbour a meanness of spirit, which makes it all but impossible to see in the looking glass anything but dimly. (1 Cor 13, 12). So it is that in Nazareth Jesus achieves little, and is amazed at their unbelief.
Paul’s remarkable message to the Corinthians warns us against taking easy offence, against feeling that in frailty there is powerlessness, or that a humble way is a weak way. It is quite the opposite. ‘Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Cor 12, 10). It is the mystery of the powerful weakness of the cross.
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