NOTES for Co2 2:1-11

Paul begins his second letter to the Corinthian church by mentioning the persecutions that fell on him and his companions in Asia Minor (the Roman province of Asia, v. 8). He also begins with a discussion of what confession and martyrdom mean for a Christian (vv. 3-5). To someone who does not know the Kingdom, it often looks 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 this view can be considered correct: all the apostles, including Paul, preached Christ and bore witness to the Kingdom, so there was room here both for new ideas and for demanding reminders about the Torah and the righteousness without which one cannot enter the Kingdom.

But the apostles' testimony was still not a presentation of new ideas or an appeal to 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, as real and certain for the witness as the life of our still untransformed world is certain 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 testimony as such: a visible example that the life of the Kingdom is, for the speaker, a genuine and certain reality, one that for him proves more real even than death, which puts the final point in the destiny of everyone whose life runs within the bounds of only our still untransformed world. In a world stricken by sin, all are sentenced to death; the only question is whether a person's life is limited to the framework of this world, or whether he can still hope in the One who, having Himself overcome the world's sin, can deliver His followers too from the power of death (vv. 9-10).

Suffering and death in themselves, of course, prove nothing. Proof can come only from the obvious fact that there is something in the witness's life that is subject neither to suffering nor to death, a fact to which the witness is able to testify to those around him precisely during suffering or at the moment of his own death. Such testimony 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 rely on. It is no wonder that those who are not directly involved in such sufferings can also share in them, since this concerns the Kingdom, which knows no borders (vv. 6-7). Of course, neither suffering nor death has any meaning in itself, nor can it, just as there can be no meaning in any evil. But there is meaning in victory over death, and a Christian can testify to this. Then his testimony becomes not simply a testimony to his own fearlessness in the face of death, but a testimony to the Kingdom.