Treasure in Clay Jars

The letter did not fix Corinth. Paul went down to see them, and the visit went badly. Somebody in the gathering stood up and said something against him in front of everybody, and the rest sat there and let it happen. He left. Then he wrote them another letter. Afterward he said this about it: “Out of a great deal of trouble, with my heart pressed down, I wrote to you through a great many tears — not so that you would be sad, but so that you would know how much I love you.”

He sent it down with Titus, and then could not wait. He went up the coast to Troas, and a door swung wide open there — people wanting to hear — and he walked away from it, because Titus was not back and he could not quiet himself down. “I had no rest in my spirit. So I said goodbye and went out into Macedonia.” He got no rest in Macedonia either. Fights outside, fears inside — his own words. Then Titus came up the road with word from Corinth. They were sorry. They had put it right. They wanted him back. This is the letter he wrote then. It is the letter of a man who has been hurt and is not hiding it.

It opens with a blessing. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of every compassion and the God of all comfort — who comforts us in all our trouble, so that we are able to comfort other people in whatever trouble they are in, with the same comfort we ourselves were given by God.” Comfort is not kept. Whoever has had it passes it along.

“We do not want you left in the dark, brothers, about the trouble that came on us in Asia. We were weighed down past measure, past our own strength, until we had given up even on staying alive. Inside ourselves we had already heard the sentence of death. But that was so we would stop leaning on ourselves and lean on God, who raises the dead.” “And you can help us by praying. Then many faces will be giving thanks on our behalf.” Whatever happened in Asia, he thought it would kill him. Praying is the only help he asks for.

They had been saying he could not be trusted: he had said he was coming, and had not come. “I call God as my witness: it was to spare you that I did not come to Corinth again. We are not lords over what you believe. We are workers alongside you, for your joy.” And about the man who had spoken against him — the gathering had punished him since — he writes: “The punishment most of you gave him is enough for a man like that. Now do the opposite: forgive him, and comfort him, or he will be swallowed up by too much sadness. I am asking you to settle it and love him. Anybody you forgive, I forgive.”

Other traveling teachers had come to Corinth carrying letters from important people saying how good they were, and had asked Paul where his letters were. “You are our letter, written on our hearts, and everybody alive can read you. Written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God; not on slabs of stone but on hearts.” Moses came down the mountain with his face shining and put a cloth over it, and the shine faded under the cloth; what God is doing now does not fade. And where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

And then he wrote about clay jars. A clay pot was the cheapest thing in the house: mud fired hard, chipped at the rim, thrown out and replaced without a thought. “We have this treasure in clay jars, so that it is plain to everyone that power this size belongs to God and does not come out of us.” “Pressed hard on every side, and not crushed. At a loss, and not at the end of everything. Hunted, and not left behind. Knocked down, and not finished.” He is not describing a strong man. He is describing a cracked pot with a light in it, and the cracks are how anybody can tell the shine is not the pot.

“So we do not lose heart. Even if the outside of us is wearing away, the inside is made new day after day. We are not looking at the things you can see but at the things you cannot. The things you can see last a season. The things you cannot see last forever.” “We know that if the tent we live in is taken down, we have a building from God — a house not made with hands, everlasting, in the heavens.”

“The love of Christ holds us tight. One died for all, so all died; and he died for all so that the living would not live for themselves any more, but for the one who died for them and was raised. If anyone is in Christ — a new creation. The old things went. Look: new things have come.” “God was in Christ making peace between himself and the world, not counting people’s wrongs against them, and he has put that word of peacemaking into us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, as if God were asking through us. On Christ’s behalf we beg you: be at peace with God. The one who never knew sin, he made sin for us, so that in him we could become the rightness of God.”

“Working alongside him, we ask you: do not take the favor of God for nothing.” Then he tells them how he has been living all this while: “In great endurance; in troubles, in hard need, in tight corners; in beatings, in prisons, in riots; in hard work, in nights without sleep, in going hungry. In purity, in knowledge, in patience, in kindness, in the Holy Spirit, in love with no pretending, in a word of truth, in the power of God. Through honor and dishonor, through a bad name and a good one. Counted liars, and telling the truth. Unknown, and known perfectly well. Dying — and look, we are alive. Made sad, and always glad. Poor, and making a great many people rich. Having nothing, and holding everything.” “Our mouth is open to you, Corinthians. Our heart is wide open. There is no narrow place in us. The narrow place is in you. I am talking to you as to my own children: you open wide too.”

Then he gives them a rule, a hard one: “Do not get yourselves hitched into the same yoke as people who do not trust God. What do rightness and lawlessness share? What does light have in common with darkness? What agreement is there between Christ and Beliar, or between somebody who trusts and somebody who does not? What has God’s holy house to do with idols? We are the house of the living God, and God said: I will live in them and walk among them, and they will be my people. So come out from among them and set yourselves apart, and do not take hold of anything unclean; and I will take you in, and I will be a father to you, and you will be sons and daughters to me.” “So, having promises like these, dear ones, let us wash ourselves clean of everything that dirties body or spirit, and finish being holy in the fear of God. Make room for us. We wronged nobody. We ruined nobody. We took advantage of nobody.” A yoke is the bar laid across two animals so they must pull one plow one way.

Then, in the middle of it, the money. Poor believers in Jerusalem were going hungry, and for a year Paul had been collecting for them out of the Greek towns. Corinth started early and let it slide. So he tells them what the gatherings in Macedonia did — and Macedonia was poorer. “In a hard testing by trouble, their overflowing joy and their poverty right down to the bottom overflowed into a wealth of plain generosity. As much as they could — I saw it — and more than they could, of their own accord, they begged us for a share in this service. And they gave themselves first to the Lord.” “You overflow in everything — in trust, in speech, in knowledge, in every kind of diligence, in love. See that you overflow in this favor too.” “You began this a year ago — not only the doing of it but the wanting to. Now finish the doing of it, out of what you have. If the willingness is there, a gift is measured by what a person has, not by what he does not have. This is not so that other people can be comfortable while you go short. It is so there is evenness: your plenty now for their lack, so that another time their plenty can be for your lack.” “The one who sows a little will reap a little, and the one who sows on blessings will reap on blessings. Each one is to give what he has decided beforehand in his own heart — not out of sadness and not because somebody made him. God loves a cheerful giver.” “So show these men the proof of your love, and of our boasting about you, in front of all the gatherings.” “So I thought I should ask these brothers to go on ahead to you and get the gift you promised arranged before I come — ready as a blessing, and not squeezed out of you at the door.”

In the last part he is being made to talk about himself, and hates it. Men had come to Corinth calling themselves apostles a cut above the apostles — fine speakers who took money for it, and who had made the Corinthians ashamed of Paul, a man who worked with his hands and was nothing much in person. Somebody said so out loud, and he quotes it back: “His letters are heavy and strong, but in person the man is weak, and his speaking is worth nothing.” “If anybody is sure he belongs to Christ, let him think it over again: so do we. And let a man like that count on this — what we are in word by letter when we are away, that is what we will be in deed when we are there.” “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.” “Let nobody think me foolish. But if you do, then take me as foolish, so that I can boast a little too.” So he boasts — calling it foolishness while he does it — and boasts about the wrong things.

“Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they Abraham’s family? So am I. Are they servants of Christ? — I am out of my mind to talk this way — I am more.” “In hard work, more. In prisons, more. In beatings, past counting. Near death again and again. Five times from the Jews I took the forty lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked. A night and a day I spent out in the open sea. Always on the road: danger from rivers, from robbers, from my own people, from the nations, in the city, in the wilderness, at sea, from false brothers. Worn out and working, awake at night, hungry and thirsty, cold, and not enough clothes.” “And besides everything on the outside, there is what comes down on me every single day: the worry about all the gatherings. Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is knocked over, and it does not set me on fire?” If he has to boast, he says, he will boast about what shows how weak he is. So the story he picks is not a rescue. It is the night in Damascus when the governor had the gates watched, and his friends let him down out a window in the city wall in a basket, like a bundle of washing.

One more thing he mentions sideways, as though it happened to somebody else. Fourteen years ago he was snatched up as far as the third heaven — in his body or out of it he does not know — and heard words a person may not repeat. He will not boast about that. He gives the other half instead: “So that I would not be lifted up too high, there was given to me a stake in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to hit me with its fists, so that I would not be lifted up too high. Three times I begged the Lord about it, that it would stand away from me.” Something in his body that hurt and would not stop. He asked three times. It was not taken away. Here is the answer he got: “My favor is enough for you. Power is brought to its finish in weakness.” “So I would rather boast about my weaknesses than about anything else, so that the power of Christ can pitch its tent over me. That is why I am pleased with weakness, with insults, with hard need, with being hunted, with being in a tight place, for Christ’s sake. Because when I am weak, that is when I am strong.”

He is coming a third time, he says, and will not be a weight on them: he does not want what they have, he wants them. Parents save for children, not children for parents. He is afraid of what he will walk into — quarreling, jealousy, tempers, gossip — so he gives them something to do before he arrives. “Test yourselves, and see whether you are in the faith. Prove yourselves.” “And we pray to God that you do nothing evil — not so that we ourselves look approved, but so that you do what is good.” The letter ends like this: “Finally, brothers: be glad. Be mended. Be encouraged. Think the same thing. Be at peace — and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the holy ones here send you their greeting.” “The favor of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the sharing of the Holy Spirit, be with all of you.”