Sermon: Paul's Authority in the Corinthian Correspondence

The question of authority is a perennial one. Whether it is the domestic matter of parents convincing children that there is a need for a certain bedtime or the question of determining what decisions are made by whom is a local or international church, the subject is often vexed.      

When people encountered Jesus, both in word as well as deed, we know that they were impressed by his authority. ‘He spoke with authority’ they said, ‘not like the scribes’. (Matthew 7.29)  What did they mean?

Several things, I suggest:

First, that they felt what he was saying, that it made a heart connection as well as a head connection.

Second, that they recognized integrity in what he said.  It came across as authentically him. When Jesus spoke it was the real Jesus as it were who was speaking. He was not projecting out some fantasy personality.

Third, that there was something relevant and nourishing in what he had to say.  When people speak with authority they say something wholesome. 

To speak with authority then, is to offer something wholesome from the heart and with integrity.  If we want to speak with authority our task is therefore not one of learning rhetorical tricks. Such tricks can work, like those of a conjurer, and we can be taken along by them – for a while. But the sad thing is that when the razzle-dazzle and pyrotechnics of oratory fade you are left with that candy floss feeling.  Although you have laughed out loud and clapped your hands, when the wow factor fades you begin to wonder: was I being strung along there?  Was there authority in that – was it wholesome and heartfelt and did it come across as completely authentic?

I mention all this because it seems to me that the second letter of Paul to the Corinthians raises all these questions of authority and rhetoric. Jesus certainly spoke with authority. But what about Paul, and what about his writing? This is a key issue in his two letters to the church in Corinth.

The people of Corinth probably never seemed like a very promising mission field.  They were, before a church was established there, a rough and readily lot; as Eugene Peterson has put it, they were ‘unruly, heard drinking and given to sexual promiscuity’.  Paul spent 18 months with them and in the process founded a church.  His first letter was written sometime after that when he had received the unwelcome if not perhaps entirely surprising news that things had fallen apart.  So he wrote his first big epistle. It is a friendly, affectionate letter, trying to tell them how to get back on the straight and narrow and, perhaps above all else, to rekindle that sense of unity in fellowship. 

In the early chapters of the first letter Paul is already engaging with questions of authority. He speaks of being of sent to proclaim the gospel but ‘not with eloquent wisdom’. His concern is that the cross of Christ is not emptied of its power.  His problem is not with true wisdom of course but with ‘eloquence’ with human persuasion and the exercise of human persuasive power.

Why is he so concerned? Because he knows that if what we build is based on human skill it is entirely vulnerable to human weakness and fallibility.  In teaching and building up the church we must rely therefore not on our cleverness but on the integrity and quality of the gospel that we proclaim. 

In Chapter 4 Paul talks about his own trustworthiness (another word for authority, perhaps) and about where his confidence as an apostle comes from. He also has a bit of a go at his readers when he contrasts with some irony the way in which the Corinthians regard themselves with the way they regard the Apostles: ‘We are fools for the sake of Christ, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak but you are strong. You are held in honour, but we in disrepute’. (1 Corinthians 4. 10)

In the chapters that follows he reminds them of some basic Christian principles and teaching but returns to this question of authority in Chapter 9.  Paul was a fastidious man in some ways and he was always at pains not to be a drain on the finances of the locals so he did his work of tent-making when out and about on mission. Chapter 9 reveals that he is actually a bit obsessed about all this; he suffers from  a curious kind of pride that says, ‘I am not going to depend on you but you need to be respectful of me because I have made, as he puts it, “myself into a slave to all”’. (2 Corinthians 9.19). 

And then the letter returns to more clarifications about Christian living which culminate in his talk about spiritual gifts in Chapters 12 to 14.  It is perhaps surprising to notice just how much of this is about communicating:

In chapter 12: ‘No one speaking by the spirit of God ever says ‘let Jesus be cursed!’ and no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit’. (2 Corinthians 12.3)

In chapter 13: ‘If I speak in tongues of mortals and of angels but have not love I am a noisy gong or clanging symbol.’ (2 Corinthians 13.1)

In chapter 14: ‘I would rather speak five words with my mind, in order to instruct others also, than ten thousand words in a tongue.’ (2 Corinthians 14.19)

Paul then speaks with confidence about the resurrection, explaining his theology in some detail, encourages them to support the saints in Jerusalem and offers some final messages and greetings.

The letter arrives in Corinth.  How is it received?

Well it is not exactly a triumph. Indeed it is the failure of the first letter that means that the second letter is needed.

But Paul is in a different mood when he takes up his pen to have a second go.  Notice how often the word ‘affliction’ occurs in the first chapter. Things have not gone well, recently.  His confidence has been dented.  He was planning to travel to see them again but it did not work out. Failure to deliver erodes confidence and needless to say those who did not like what he had to say in his first letter have seized on this opportunity to undermine him.  In the second chapter of 2 Corinthians we hear about one individual who mounted a painful personal attack on him.  Things that were difficult have got even more difficult. The need for Paul to exercise some authority has got even greater but he is not able to be there in person.  Some, we learn later, are saying that his while his written words are bold and brave his physical presence and actual speech is not so impressive.  He is under threat.

So what is he to do?  How is he to establish some kind of authoritative leadership for this community of Christians which is pretty much out of control?

The answer is the whole of the second letter to the Corinthians, a letter which has one overriding theme, a theme which we have not heard in Paul before. The theme is that strength comes through weakness and that renewal comes through suffering. And this, of course, is the opposite of the commonsense thought that strength comes from strength, that success breeds success and that we are renewed by pleasure and leisure.

So, faced with recalcitrant, unlistening, difficult people Paul does not go for the big stick but digs into his own self awareness and finds that it is in his vulnerability that his true authority is to be found.  For at this stage in his ministry Paul realizes that the treasure of the gospel is held in, as he puts it, ‘clay jars’ so that ‘we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down but not destroyed’. (2 Corinthians 4 8-9) 

In terms of the ordinary exercise of power in the world this does not make a lot of sense.  No one wants their leader to be only just scraping by. They want some evidence of high level competence and the confidence that comes with it.  Why does Paul not offer this in 2 Corinthians? Why does he not stand up and say that basically he has sorted all this out in his mind and that he is in the business of vanquishing enemies and opponents so that the shrewdest thing for the Corinthians to do is to fall into line?

There are three answers I think.

One is time. Paul is older now – more mature, wiser, humbler, less easily impressed with himself but also less concerned to try to create a ‘super me’ image for others to admire.

The second is that Paul is not an ordinary leader but a Christian leader. He knows that his message of victory over sin and death, his gospel of justification is only secure because of the passion and death of Jesus which opened the door to the possibility of triumphant resurrection. This is why he talks about ‘always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in out bodies’. (2 Corinthians 4.10) Paul saw the victory of God in the death and resurrection of Jesus, and the nature of God he was in the true Messiah, Jesus Christ.  And it is in 2 Corinthians that Paul develops the theme of the face of Christ. The face of Christ is not only the face of God which we can see and live – but it is the face of God which we must see if we are to live.  

The third is that something happened to Paul in the time between the two letters that shook him to the core.  This is the affliction of 2 Corinthians  chapter 1:  ‘We do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, of the affliction we experienced in Asia; fore we were so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself.’ (2 Corinthians 1.8)

This is indeed a different Paul that is writing now. Before he was confident that the Lord would return during his own life time, now he is thinking that he very nearly copped it.  He had, to his own astonishment, found himself staring death in the face.  He had experienced an intense and diminishing version of weakness – as many have done – but unlike the many he had seen this not as a source of shame and embarrassment but as the basis of his Christian authority, his voice.  ‘Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death so that we would rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead’. (2 Corinthians 1. 9)

This sermon has been a bit of an essay on authority in Paul’s Corinthian correspondence. But I hope that the practical and pastoral implications are not too obscure. 

Authority is a key question, a fundamental aspect of that cluster of issues that fits under the heading of ‘leadership’.  However, it is never going to be resolved in a satisfactory way if our primary question is one about how I can become authoritative or persuasive or a great leader. True authority comes from looking yourself in the eye, God in the eye and mortality in the eye. It is only when we are formed by attending to the reality not of our strengths but our fundamental weaknesses that the true, authentic, powerful voice of Christian integrity can be liberated.

The voice of authority is seldom heard from the roof tops; seldom is it blasted from the pulpit, rarely is it dressed up in amazing rhetoric or elegant style. The voice of true authority, like the voice that Elijah heard on the mountains comes after the earthquake, wind and fire and is in the still, small, maybe stammering voice that somehow carries with it the truth of self, the truth of God and the truth of death that, when taken together, point to resurrection, joy, peace and a life worth living. And that is what Christian authority, true authority is all about. Paul learnt it the hard way – because it can only be learnt the hard way. It will be great blessing to many if we can do the same.