NOTES for Co2 1:1-7

Paul's words about consolation in the midst of sorrow can sound strange. The point, of course, is not that sorrows (for example, hardships or persecutions connected with ministry) are meaningless; no one convinced of the rightness of his faith or views and actively preaching them would say that. But in this case the issue is plainly not only a readiness to sacrifice something, or even oneself, for one's faith. If that were all, Christianity in this respect would differ in no essential way from any of the many religions and teachings that exist and have existed in the world: all religions and all teachings in every age have had adherents ready to sacrifice not only well-being but even life for their convictions. But the apostle has more than such readiness in mind.

His words recall the words of Jesus Himself, who regarded persecution for faithfulness to Him and for righteousness as an inseparable part of the Christian path (and more broadly, of the path of every righteous person). Of course, such persecutions are not an end in themselves, but they are a good indicator. This is especially true when Christians are concerned. If a Christian is fully acceptable to the world, if in this world that lies in evil he is at home, and the world counts him entirely and completely its own, then something is wrong with his Christianity.

If a Christian wants to make his Christianity so acceptable to this world that this world is satisfied with it and regards it as organic to itself, then something very serious has happened to his spiritual life. This is not because Christians seek to shock people, but because there can be no organic unity between the Kingdom and this world that lies in evil. At least not until the world is completely transformed.

And the process by which the Kingdom enters the untransformed world cannot be natural and organic; it is always a conflict. Since the Kingdom enters the world through Christians, conflict with the world becomes an inseparable part of their own lives, and it becomes clearer the more actively they are involved in this process.

Paul understands this perfectly from his own experience, for he lived the life of the Kingdom in a fullness that was open to few in his time. He knew what he was talking about. But the breath of the Kingdom for him, as for every genuine Christian, was more real than everything connected with the untransformed world. And in it, in this breath, the apostle found the consolation about which he wrote. Not in fidelity to convictions or to faith, but in the new life that had opened to him in the Kingdom. The very life to which he bore witness to the end of his earthly path.

Several people think that the existence of sufferings and death makes the faith in Christ senseless (for the sake of justice, let’s note that not less people come to faith through the experience of suffering and death - somewhere there close).

How can we say that the Christ overcame the death, if we encounter almost every day with the death? What sense in the passions of Christ, if the sufferings of people were not abolished by it? The current passage points to such ideas: the most terrible in our sufferings is solitude; nobody can really share our suffering with us.

The care of relatives does not remove our internal pain, although it brings a certain consolation. But here through Christ, God Himself enters into the human suffering, fills it with His presence, and if we accept that by our faith in Christ, then our suffering is already not solitary, there is in it the suffering Christ.

He cares for us. In some sense, our sufferings are no more completely ours, but those of Christ, because Christ entered in these sufferings through our faith and care is to Him Jesus. So disappears then in this mutual care the main pain - solitude, pains that cannot be shared - and we can feel such consolation, which will be much more important for us, than suffering.

The words of the apostle about consolation in the sufferings can, at first sight, seem strange: because only a masochist can probably be delighted sufferings. Of course, the history (and not only Christian) knows many examples where people faithful to their idea, remained faithful to this one, in spite of all the persecutions and the trials, and were proud not to have changed their principles, no matter what. But if there is often joy here, it is not of course because of the very sufferings, and mostly not during the suffering, but when everything is already behind and one can, by summing up, notice the personal resistance in the trials for faith or for idea.

The apostle, according to his words, speaks about another thing: about the consolation at the very moment of sufferings, which the more it is, the powerful is the sufferings. It is impossible to explain it from the point of view of the laws of the non transformed world. But from the point of view of the Kingdom and of its life, everything falls in place. Of course suffering remains suffering, and it brings of course in itself no joy. But suffering is a part of the non transformed world, which is in evil, it is itself the manifestation of this evil, and it has no place in the Kingdom.

And indeed, the apostle speaks not only about sufferings, but also about persecutions for the Christ, for the testimony of the Kingdom. For the testimony, which is possible only in so far as much the witness himself was introduced the life of this Kingdom, of which he testifies. They persecute him in particular for the fact that he dares to live in the non transformed world according to the laws of the Kingdom and in more exhort the others. It is not surprising that, the deeper the rootedness of the witness in the life of the Kingdom, the more the world rejects him, more intense are the persecutions and bigger the sufferings.

But also the life of the Kingdom the deeper and more real is experienced, the deeper is rooted in it the witness! Here is he experiences this life of the Kingdom, as a consolation. Indeed, the Christian confession, quite as the martyrdom only superficially remind these sufferings and persecutions for the idea, which the history of the non transformed world knows well. The martyr suffers for the idea or even gives his own life only in exchange for the assurance in his own righteousness and to the right to consider himself as an inflexible spokesman and the carrier of his idea.

Of course, sometimes this enough: because certain ideas and certain principles are little taken away from the Kingdom. But the Christian confessor suffers, and the martyr gives his earthly life for the idea of the Kingdom, and for this fullness of life of the Kingdom, which he will lose, if he tried at the price of compromise (and in reality is the refusal of the Kingdom) to keep his pathetic earthly likeness. And Paul, as seen, witness of it as would say a modern philosopher, the existential dialectic, from the personal experience of the Christian witness, the confessor and the martyr.

Paul begins his second letter to the Corinthian church by mentioning the persecutions that fell upon him and his companions in Asia Minor (the Roman province of Asia, v. 8). And he begins with a discussion of what confession and martyrdom are for a Christian (vv. 3-5). To a person who does not know the Kingdom, they often look like the persecutions and harassment that preachers of new ideas or fighters for justice have often suffered in the past and still suffer today. In a certain sense such a view can be considered correct: all the apostles, including Paul, preached Christ and bore witness to the Kingdom, and here there was room both for new ideas and for demanding reminders about the Torah and about righteousness, without which one cannot enter the Kingdom.

But the apostles' witness was still not the presentation of new ideas or a call for justice as old as the world. The Kingdom brought into the world by the Savior is not an idea and not a call to a new life; it is life itself, which for the witness is as real and unquestionable as the life of our world, not yet transformed, is unquestionable for a person who does not know the Kingdom. And the very readiness to die becomes not simply proof of the truth of the witness's words, which he values above his own life, but witness as such, a visible example that the life of the Kingdom is for the speaker precisely a genuine and unquestionable reality, one that proves more real for him even than death, which places the final period in the fate of everyone whose life passes within the boundaries of our world alone, still not transformed. In a world stricken by sin, all are sentenced to death, and the only question is whether a person's life is limited to the bounds of this world, or whether he can still hope in the One who, having Himself overcome the sin of the world, can deliver His followers as well from the power of death (vv. 9-10).

Suffering and death in themselves, of course, prove nothing. Proof can come only from the evident fact that in the witness's life there is something not subject either to suffering or to death, a fact to which the witness is able to bear witness to those around him precisely during sufferings or at the moment of his own death. And such witness is possible only if the witness lives the life of the Kingdom, sensing it within himself even when a person who does not know the Kingdom has nothing left to count on. It is no surprise that those who are not directly involved in such sufferings can also participate in them: the matter concerns the Kingdom, which knows no boundaries (vv. 6-7). Of course, neither suffering nor death in themselves have any meaning or can have any, just as no evil can have meaning. But there is meaning in victory over death, and a Christian can bear witness to it. Then his witness becomes not merely witness to his own fearlessness in the face of death, but witness to the Kingdom.