Main news for 16 July 2024

Continuing to speak about himself and his ministry, Paul again says that he never made it his goal to achieve success or popularity in the Corinthian church or in any other church. About preachers who seek popularity, the apostle says that they "compare themselves with themselves" (v. 12), thereby noting the key feature of every kind of self-assertion: the self-assertive person always considers himself, and himself alone, the only criterion of truth. Paul, however, is not trying to compare himself with anyone at all. He is simply doing God's work, saying of himself that he will boast "according to the measure of the portion given by God" in this work (v. 13). But "boasting" of this kind is not boasting at all, because with this approach to one's own ministry the minister no longer needs to be preoccupied with an imagined "fit" or "lack of fit" either for the task set before him or for the audience sent to him by God. He does not need to "stretch" himself anywhere (v. 14); he simply does the work entrusted to him by God, and doing it brings him closer to those whom God has entrusted to him (vv. 14-16).

Summing up what has been said, Paul calls those who still want to boast about something to "boast in the Lord," which for him in fact means only one thing: to give everything, including all successes and achievements, to God, who Himself will grant His servant as much honor and respect from others as He considers necessary (vv. 17-18). This is not a call to modesty as such, but the fact that without humility, without complete surrender of oneself to the will of God, together with everything one has, including all successes and achievements in the work entrusted by God, one cannot enter the Kingdom. For there, what matters is not merit, but relationships. And these relationships are not determined by any merit. For the Kingdom the opposite is closer to the truth: any merits have meaning in it only insofar as they are the fruit of relationships among the inhabitants of the Kingdom. That is why Paul calls attention to the love that binds Christians together, not to merits that often become a cause of division.

Paul's words about man, who glories himself, can show themselves at first sight trivial: because all know that boasting is stupid and absurd, that it leads to nothing good. But, on the other hand, rises the question of what we usually call "a deserved and objective evaluation": because it would seem, everyone has right on it, why then man cannot give himself such an evaluation? The most wide-spread and most obvious answer is the following: the fallen man is not objective in general, and especially in his own evaluation. It is of course really so, but then hardly we can also consider the evaluation of a large number of persons, the evaluation of the society as objective: from the set, no matter how extensive, one shall not make the non objective evaluations objective evaluations.

As an objective evaluator there is only God, who knows each such as nobody else knows himself. Such reasonings are known for a long time, and there would have been nothing new also probably in them. If it was not only one "but": Paul speaks about the Christian life, and thus, about the life of the Kingdom. And in the Kingdom, eulogy and evaluation play not at all the same role as in the not transformed world: because in the not transformed world the initial sense of any evaluation is the information, by the evaluation we judge man and his works.

But in the Kingdom the works speak in fact of themselves, because there, there is nobody and nothing, which can seem not oneself, there is no break between the outward and the essence there. And the evaluation of God already becomes in the Kingdom not an eulogy or a blame, as we understand both today, but the measure of His participation in the life and the works, for which He "glorifies" the inhabitant of the Kingdom.