Homily 10 — Second Corinthians 5, verses 1 to 10

“For we know that if the earthly house of our tent is taken down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal, in the heavens.” [a]

Again he stirs up their zeal, because many trials were coming on them; and it was likely, too, that with him away they had grown weaker on this point. So what does he say? We should not be surprised that we suffer affliction, or be thrown into confusion by it, since we even reap many gains from it. Some of these gains he has already mentioned. For instance, we “carry about in our bodies the dying of Jesus,” and we give the greatest proof of his power, for he says, “so that the surpassing greatness of the power may be from God.” And we display a clear proof of the resurrection, for, he says, “so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our mortal flesh.”

But along with these things he had said that our inner self is also made better in this way: “though our outer self is wasting away,” he says, “yet the inner self is being renewed day by day.” And so, showing again that being flogged and persecuted is useful in proportion, he adds that when this is carried through to the end, then countless good things will spring up for those who have endured it. He says this so that when you hear that your outer self is perishing, you will not grieve. When it has been completely accomplished, he says, then you will rejoice most of all and come into a better inheritance. So we should not only refuse to grieve at its perishing now in part; we should even eagerly seek the completion of that destruction, for this more than anything leads you on to immortality. That is why he added, “For we know that if the earthly house of our tent is taken down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”

He is urging the teaching of the resurrection again, the point on which they were especially unsound, and so he calls in the judgment of his hearers as well and establishes it that way. He does not do it in the same manner as before, but arrives at it, as it were, from another subject, since they had already been corrected. And he says, “We know that if the earthly house of our tent is taken down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”

Some say that the “earthly house” is this world, but I would maintain that he is referring rather to the body. And notice, please, how by the very words he uses he shows that the things to come are superior to the present ones. Having said “earthly,” he set “heavenly” against it. Having said “house of our tent,” and so declared both that it is easily taken apart and that it is temporary, he set “eternal” against it; for the word “tent” often signifies something temporary. That is why Christ says, “In my Father’s house are many dwelling places” (John 14, verse 2). And if anywhere he also calls the resting places of the saints tents, he does not call them simply tents, but adds a word to describe them. He did not say, “so that they may receive you” into their tents, but “into the eternal tents” (Luke 16, verse 9).

Again, in saying “not made with hands,” he was hinting at what is made with hands. What then? Is the body made with hands? Not at all. Either he is hinting at the houses here, which are made with hands, or, if not that, he called the body, which is not made with hands, “a house of a tent.” For he did not use the word to set the one against the other in contrast, but to heighten that praise and swell that commendation.

Verse 2: “For truly in this we groan, longing to be clothed over with our dwelling that is from heaven.” [c]

What dwelling, tell me? The incorruptible body. And why do we groan now? Because that is far better. He calls it “from heaven” because it is incorruptible. For surely he does not mean that a body will come down to us from above; by this expression he means the grace that is sent from there. So far, then, should we be from grieving at these trials, which come only in part, that we should even seek their fullness. It is as if he had said: “Do you groan because you are persecuted, because this outer self of yours is wasting away? Groan that this is not happening to the full, that it is not perishing entirely.” Do you see how he has turned what was said around to its opposite? He has proved that they ought to groan because those things were not being done in full, when they had been groaning because those things were being done in part. That is why from here on he no longer calls it a tent, but a house, and with good reason. For a tent is easily taken apart, but a house stands for good.

Verse 3: “If indeed, having been unclothed, we will not be found naked.” That is, even if we have put off the body, we will not be presented there without a body, but with the same one, made incorruptible.

But some read — and the reading very much deserves to be adopted — “If indeed, having been clothed, we will not be found naked.” So that no one would be confident simply because of the resurrection, he says, “If indeed, having been clothed” — that is, having received incorruption and an incorruptible body — “we will not be found naked” of glory and safety. So he also said in the former letter, “We will all be raised, but each in his own order” (First Corinthians 15, verses 22 and 23), and, “There are heavenly bodies, and earthly bodies” (First Corinthians 15, verse 40). For the resurrection is common to all, but the glory is not common. Some will rise to honor and others to dishonor; some to a kingdom, and others to punishment. This, surely, is what he meant here too when he said, “If indeed, having been clothed, we will not be found naked.”

Verse 4: “For indeed we who are in this tent groan, not because we want to be unclothed, but because we want to be clothed over.” [f]

Here again he has completely and openly stopped the mouths of the heretics, showing that he is not speaking of a different body at all, but of corruption and incorruption. “We do not groan for this reason,” he says, “to be set free from the body, for we do not wish to be stripped of it. What we are eager for is to be set free from the corruption that is in it.” That is why he says, “We do not wish to be unclothed” of the body, but to have it “clothed over” with incorruption. Then he also interprets it this way: “so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.”

To many people, putting off the body seemed a painful thing, and in saying “we groan” he was going against everyone’s judgment, though he did not mean that he wished to be set free from the body. For someone says: “If the soul suffers so and laments when it is separated from the body, how can you say that we groan because we are not separated from it?” So that this would not be urged against him, he says: “I do not claim that we groan for this reason, to put it off. No one puts it off without pain; indeed Christ says even of Peter, ‘They will carry you, and lead you where you do not want to go’ (John 21, verse 18). No, we groan to have it clothed over with incorruption.”

For this is how the body burdens us: not because it is a body, but because we are wrapped in a body that is corruptible and subject to suffering. It is this that gives us pain. But when life arrives, it destroys and uses up the corruption — the corruption, I say, not the body. “And how does this come about?” someone says. Do not inquire. God does it. Do not be too curious. That is why he added, Verse 5: “Now he who has made us for this very thing is God.” By this he shows that these things were sketched out in advance from the first. For this was not decreed only now; it was decreed at the beginning, when he fashioned us from the earth and created Adam. He did not create him for this, that he should die, but so that he might make him immortal as well. Then, to show that this is believable and to supply the proof of it, he added, “who also gave the down payment of the Spirit.”

For even then he fashioned us for this, and now he has worked toward it by baptism, and has given us no slight security for it: the Holy Spirit. And Paul keeps calling the Spirit a down payment because he wants to prove that God is a debtor for the whole, and in this way also to make what he says more believable to those of a more earthbound mind.

Verse 6: “Being therefore always of good courage, and knowing.” The words “of good courage” are said with the persecutions, the plots and the continual deaths in view. It is as if he had said: “Does someone harass you, persecute you, kill you? Do not lose heart; it is all done for your good. Do not be afraid, but be of good courage. For the thing you groan and grieve over — that you are enslaved to corruption — he removes from your path from now on, and sets you free from this slavery all the sooner.” That is why he says, “Being therefore always of good courage” — not only in times of rest, but in times of distress as well — “and knowing,” [h]

Verses 7 and 8: “that while we are at home in the body, we are away from the Lord (for we walk by faith, not by sight); we are of good courage, I say, and are willing to be away from the body and to be at home with the Lord.”

The greatest thing of all he has put last, for to be with Christ is better than receiving an incorruptible body. What he means is this: “The one who makes war on us and kills us does not snuff out our life. Do not be afraid. Be of good courage even when you are cut to pieces. For he not only sets you free from corruption and from a burden; he also sends you quickly to the Lord.” That is why he did not simply say “while we are in the body,” but spoke as of people living in a foreign and strange land: “Knowing therefore that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, we are of good courage, I say, and are willing to be away from the body and to be at home with the Lord.”

Do you see how he has kept back what was painful, the words “death” and “the end,” and used instead words that stir up great longing, calling them being present with God? And how he has passed over the things people count sweet, the things of this life, and expressed them in painful words, calling life here an absence from the Lord? He did this so that no one would linger fondly among present things, but would rather grow weary of them; and so that no one about to die would be troubled, but would even rejoice, as one departing to greater good things.

Then, so that no one hearing that we are away from the Lord would say, “Why do you talk like this? Are we then estranged from him while we are here?” he headed off the thought in advance, saying, “For we walk by faith, not by sight.” Even here we do know him, but not so clearly. As he also says elsewhere, “in a mirror” and “dimly” (First Corinthians 13, verse 12).

“We are of good courage, I say, and are willing.” How wonderful! Where has he brought the discussion around to? To an intense desire for death, having shown that the painful is pleasant and the pleasant painful. For by the words “we are willing” he means “we desire.” Desire what? To be “away from the body and at home with the Lord.” And he does this constantly, as I showed before too: he turns his opponents’ objection around to its very opposite.

Verse 9: “Therefore we also make it our aim, whether at home or away, to be well pleasing to him.” “For what we seek is this,” he says: “whether we are there or here, to live according to his will; for this is the main thing. So by this you already hold the kingdom, without waiting for the test.” Having brought them to so great a desire to be there, he did not want them to be troubled again at how long it would be first; so in this he gives them already the chief of those good things. And what is this? To be “well pleasing.” For just as departing is not good in itself, but departing in God’s favor, which is what makes departing good as well, so remaining here is not painful in itself, but only remaining while offending him. So do not think that departing from the body is enough; virtue is always needed. When he spoke of a resurrection, he did not let them take courage from that alone, but said, “If indeed, having been clothed, we will not be found naked.” In the same way, having shown a departure, he added that we must be well pleasing, so that you would not think that departure is enough to save you.

Having persuaded them, then, by many good things, from here on he alarms them also with things of a gloomier look. For our welfare lies both in gaining the good things and in escaping the evil ones — in other words, hell and the kingdom. But escaping punishment is the stronger motive. Where the penalty goes only as far as not receiving good things, most people will bear it contentedly; but if it extends to suffering evil, they will no longer do so. They ought, of course, to think the first unbearable; but because most people are weak and their minds cling to the ground, the second seems harder to them. Since, then, as I say, the offer of good things does not rouse the ordinary hearer as much as the threat of punishment does, he is obliged to end with this, saying, Verse 10: “For we must all be made manifest before the judgment seat.” [j]

Then, having alarmed and shaken the hearer by mentioning that judgment seat, even here he has not set down the grim things without the good. He has mixed in something pleasant, saying, “so that each one may receive the things done in the body,” according to what “he has done, whether good or bad.”

By saying these words he both revives with those hopes the ones who have lived virtuously and are being persecuted, and makes those who have slipped back more earnest through that fear. And in this way he confirmed what he had said about the resurrection of the body. “For surely,” he says, “what has served in both the good and the evil will not stand shut out from the recompense. Together with the soul it will be punished in the one case, and crowned in the other.”

But some of the heretics say that it is another body that is raised. How so? Tell me. Did one body sin, and another is punished? Did one live virtuously, and another is crowned? And what will you answer Paul when he says, “We do not wish to be unclothed, but clothed over”? And how is what is mortal “swallowed up by life”? For he did not say that the mortal or corruptible body would be swallowed up by the incorruptible body, but that corruption would be swallowed up “by life.” That happens when the same body is raised. But if God gave up that body and prepared another, corruption would no longer be swallowed up; it would go on ruling.

So this is not how it is. Rather, “this corruptible” — that is, the body — “must put on incorruption.” For the body is in a middle state: at present it is in the one condition, and hereafter it will be in the other. And the reason it is in the first condition first is that incorruption cannot be dissolved. “For neither does corruption inherit incorruption,” he says — for how would it then be incorruption? — but on the contrary, “corruption is swallowed up by life.” Life outlasts corruption, but corruption does not outlast life. Just as wax is melted by fire, but does not itself melt the fire, so corruption melts and vanishes away under incorruption, but can never itself get the better of incorruption.

So let us listen to the voice of Paul saying that “we must stand before the judgment seat of Christ.” Let us picture that court of justice to ourselves, and imagine that it is here now and that the accounting is being demanded. I will speak about it at greater length. Paul was discussing affliction, and since he had no wish to afflict them again, he did not dwell on the subject; he stated its severity briefly — “each one will receive according to what he has done” — and quickly moved on. [k]

So let us imagine that it is here now. Let each of us settle accounts with his own conscience, count the Judge as already present, and everything as already revealed and brought out into the open. For we must not merely stand there; we must also be made manifest. Do you not blush? Are you not astounded? If now, when the reality has not yet come but is only supposed for argument’s sake and pictured in thought — if now, I say, we are ruined, stricken in conscience, what will we do when it arrives? When the whole world is present, when angels and archangels are there, rank upon rank, all hurrying at once, and some are caught up on the clouds, and the whole array is full of trembling? When there are the trumpets, one after another, and those unceasing voices?

Suppose there were no hell: even so, to be rejected in the midst of such brightness and to go away dishonored — how great a punishment! Even now, when the emperor rides in with his train, each of us, looking at his own poverty, gets less pleasure from the spectacle than dejection at having no share in what is going on around the emperor, and at not being near the sovereign. What will it be like then? Or do you think it a light punishment not to be ranked in that company, not to be counted worthy of that glory beyond words, but to be thrown out from that assembly and those untold good things to some place far away?

But when there is also darkness, and gnashing of teeth, and chains that cannot be broken, and a worm that never dies, and fire that is never quenched, and affliction and anguish, and tongues burning like the rich man’s; and we wail, and no one hears; and we groan and gnash our teeth in agony, and no one cares; and we look all around, and nowhere is there anyone to comfort us — where shall we rank those who are in that condition? What is more miserable than those souls? What more pitiable?

When we go into a prison and see those inside — some filthy, some in chains and starving, others shut up in darkness — we are moved with pity, we shudder, we do everything we can so that we will never be thrown into that place. How will it be with us, then, when we are led and dragged away into the very torture chambers of hell? For those chains are not made of iron, but of fire that is never quenched. Those set over us there are not our fellow human beings, whom it is often possible even to soften, but angels whom one cannot even look in the face, fiercely angry at the insults we have offered their Master. Nor is it possible there, as it is here, to see some people bringing in money, some food, some words of comfort, and so to find consolation. There, nothing is ever let off. Even if it were Noah, or Job, or Daniel, and he saw his own kindred being punished, he would not dare to help.

For then even natural sympathy is done away with. It happens that there are righteous fathers of wicked children, and righteous children of wicked fathers. So, that their pleasure may be unmixed, and that those who enjoy the good things may not be moved to sorrow by the compelling force of sympathy, even this sympathy, I tell you, is put out, and they themselves share their Master’s indignation against their own flesh and blood. For if ordinary people, when they see their own children given over to vice, disown them and cut them off from the family, much more will the righteous do so then.

So let no one hope for good things if he has not done any good, even if he has ten thousand righteous ancestors. “For each one will receive the things done in the body, according to what he has done.” Here he seems to me to be hinting also at those who commit sexual immorality, and to be raising the fear of that world like a wall against them — and not against them alone, but against all who transgress in any way at all.

Let us listen, then — we too. If you have the fire of lust in you, set that other fire against it, and this one will soon be put out and gone. If you mean to say something harsh, think of the gnashing of teeth, and the fear will be a bridle to you. If you mean to plunder, hear the Judge giving the command, “Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness” (Matthew 22, verse 13), and you will throw out this craving too. If you are a drunkard and are always gorging yourself, hear the rich man saying, “Send Lazarus, so that he may cool this burning tongue with the tip of his finger” (Luke 16, verse 24), and not getting it; and you will keep yourself well away from that disease. [n]

If you love luxury, think of the affliction and the anguish there, and you will not give luxury a thought. Again, if you are harsh and cruel, remember those virgins who missed the bridal chamber because their lamps had gone out, and you will quickly become kind to your fellow human beings. Or are you sluggish and slack? Think of the man who hid his talent, and you will be more fervent than fire. Or does desire for your neighbor’s property eat you up? Think of the worm that does not die, and you will easily put this disease away from you, and in everything else you will live virtuously.

For he has commanded nothing burdensome or oppressive. Why, then, do his commands seem burdensome to us? Because of our own laziness. For just as, if we work hard, even what seems unbearable will be light and easy, so, if we are lazy, even bearable things will seem hard to us.

So, considering all these things, let us think not of those who live in luxury, but of what their end is: here, filth and obesity; there, the worm and the fire. Not of those who plunder, but of what their end is: here, cares and fears and anxieties; there, chains that cannot be broken. Not of the lovers of glory, but of what these things bring forth: here, slavery and pretense; there, unbearable loss and burning without end. For if we talk this way with ourselves, and with these and similar thoughts keep casting a charm over our evil cravings, we will quickly cast out the love of present things and kindle the love of the things to come.

So let us kindle it and make it blaze. For if even our idea of those things, faint as it is, gives so much pleasure, think how great the gladness that the actual experience itself will bring us. Blessed, and three times blessed, yes, many times three times blessed, are those who enjoy those good things; and so, in the same measure, pitiable and three times wretched are those who endure the opposite. So that we may be among the first and not the second, let us choose virtue. For in this way we will also attain the good things to come, which may we all attain, through the grace and love for humankind of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom and with whom be glory, might and honor to the Father, together with the Holy Spirit, now and always, and forever and ever. Amen.