NOTES for Co2 8:13-15

Paul offers a simple rule: help should be a burden to no one, so that as a result of such help some become poor while others receive support at the expense of the ruin of those helping. In everything, says the apostle, there must be balance. The issue, of course, is not dividing everything equally, but each community giving as much as it can give without burdening itself. Such a rule fully corresponds to the spiritual condition called poverty in the Bible.

Indeed, a poor person, if poverty is understood precisely as a spiritual condition, considers nothing in this world his own. He does not think that he has a right to this or that property, or social position, or even to the talents and abilities he possesses. The poor person thinks that all such things were received by him for use, not as property or possession. But if so, he needs exactly as much of all that has been listed as will allow his life to flow freely and fully, not constrained by lack of what is necessary and not burdened by an excess of what is superfluous.

And since Paul looks at the Church as the body of Christ, the life of church communities must follow the same principle and obey the same logic. If in one of the church communities some surplus of material goods has formed, this means that somewhere in another community, or in other communities, there is a shortage of those same material goods. It remains only to understand where and how the surplus should be redistributed so that everyone has enough for normal life.

This happens quite naturally, just as naturally as the spiritual life of Christians is built in the Kingdom, whose manifestation on earth is the Church. The apostle, as is clear, does not consider it necessary to disrupt this natural process by creating, for example, any special structures specifically dealing with questions of material mutual aid within the Church. From his own experience he knows that the breath of the Kingdom breathes where it wills and how it wills. The main thing is not to hinder it, but to follow it.

In his letters Paul often turns to the theme of mutual help among Christian churches. And in his letter to the Christians of Corinth he mentions the help he received from the churches of Macedonia during his ministry in that province (vv. 1-6). It is clear that he is speaking not only about donations, but also about the participation of the Macedonian Christians in all of Paul's affairs that involved supporting his missionary work in Macedonia. And the apostle, of course, does not emphasize by chance that his Macedonian brothers gave themselves to God and to him himself as God's minister (v. 5). For him, it seems, precisely this attitude toward ministry is the true attitude of the inhabitants of the Kingdom.

From the point of view of our world, not yet transformed, one can invest everything one has, including oneself, only in an absolutely reliable undertaking with a guaranteed return, the kind that does not exist in a fallen world. And if a person decides to devote himself to something without reserve, he is clearly acting no longer according to the laws of this world, but according to the laws of the Kingdom. Yet if in other matters a certain half-heartedness in self-giving may sometimes be possible, following the principle "do not put all your eggs in one basket," in the matter of witness to Christ and to the Kingdom it is impossible and unacceptable. Here it is all or nothing.

And yet, in a way that at first glance seems paradoxical, complete self-giving does not in this case mean that the one who gives himself loses everything. The readiness to give everything turns into its opposite side: it proves not to be as burdensome as it might have seemed. When everyone is ready to give everything he has, it turns out that in material terms no one demands "everything" from him. On the contrary, in this respect a certain balance is eventually established, in which no one lacks anything, though clearly no one lives in luxury either (vv. 11-15). But the issue is not merely a fair distribution of material goods. For the apostle, it seems, such mutual help among the churches is nothing other than a projection of the relationships of the Kingdom into the material sphere. After all, only in the Kingdom, when you give everything, do you receive immeasurably more than you gave. And the fact that the laws of the Kingdom can determine people's relationships in our world, which is being transformed but is not yet fully transformed, was visible proof that the Kingdom truly had, in the Savior's words, "drawn near" - drawn so near that it can already shape people's relationships in our world, if only people themselves want it.