NOTES for Co2 12:3-5

People tend to experience their own weakness rather painfully. There is little they will not do in order to feel strong, significant, and worthy. We perceive weakness as our unfitness for anything good. And so we very readily use our own weakness to justify our unwillingness to resist evil. After all, what can we really do?

And now the Lord speaks these astonishing words to the apostle Paul. It is precisely in this weakness, when you yourself can do nothing, that the power of God reaches its fullness. This is very consoling: you need not fear your weakness. More than that, it turns out that a person's significance and strength consist in not seeking his own greatness, but in making room for this power of God. To do this, it is important to consent to being weak—for the sake of God and His power. It is also important to accept that whatever you do will be done not by you, but by God. And the merit will be God's. Thus you will become a participant in His life and His work, and they are eternal.

Paul, as always, expresses very deep and at the same time very ordinary things in an emotional and paradoxical form. And the point here is not only that the apostle simply gives vivid form to the most banal thought: "Well, pride is bad, while humility and sorrow are good." That is hardly the essence of the passage. After all, not all pride, or "boasting, self-exaltation," is the same, nor is all humility. The same is true of sorrows.

But the fact that various human achievements, even the most elevated and well-intentioned, very often can lead a person into the thickets of arrogance and conceit is well known. And all because these great accomplishments, whether the conversion of nations to Christianity, the building of almshouses and shelters, or the deepest mystical illuminations, mean nothing in themselves for the person carrying them out or participating in them. Only what changes the heart, making it more sensitive to evil and to good, to the pain and joy of each individual person we meet on our path, only this has any value. Thanks to this alone a person gradually becomes truly human, a person capable of becoming like Christ, the Universal Man and God-man...

Our own pain or life's hardships, received as a gift from God, bring us closer to ourselves and lower us from the clouds of fantasy to the ground of reality. They show human limitation and smallness and, at the same time, the great power of human courage and trust: everything that helps us sense, as fully as possible, the presence of the Other both amid gray everyday life and in extremely modest living conditions, in communication with the most ordinary people, during exhausting workdays, in every insignificant moment...

Speaking about his spiritual experience, Paul clearly distinguishes two different people within himself. Of course, this is not about some schizophrenic splitting of personality.

Here before us again is that objectively existing duality from which even those who live in the Kingdom cannot escape completely until the end of time. The apostle, of course, understands perfectly well that the person who was caught up to the "third heaven" (vv. 1-4) is himself. Plainly, the experience of being in the "third heaven" was an experience of the Kingdom, experienced by Paul with such vividness. But he also understands that his present spiritual state is still very far from what it should have been if he had been able to contain within himself the life of the Kingdom in the fullness that was revealed to him in his best moments (vv. 5-6). Paul, like every spiritually sober person, realizes that our spiritual state is determined not by what we can see, but by what we are able to contain. It is no accident that he speaks of a certain "thorn in the flesh," as he himself puts it, from which he never managed to be freed despite all his requests to God (vv. 7-9).

Plainly, the request was left unanswered for a reason, and the apostle understood this: if things had been otherwise, Paul could easily have thought that spiritually he fully corresponded to the revelations he had received. Meanwhile, he understands perfectly well that what is involved is, in essence, a kind of advance gift. An advance gift received by everyone who once comes to share in the Kingdom. This is not surprising: otherwise no one would ever be able even to see it. But the first sharing in the life of the Kingdom does not mean that the path is already complete. It continues further so that, once having shared in the Kingdom, the one who has shared in it would more and more contain it within himself, take into himself the breath of God with which the Kingdom is permeated, being spiritually transformed and growing. And the less strong and perfect a person feels himself to be, the easier it is for him to walk this path (v. 10). The path that leads to the fullness awaiting the inhabitants of the Kingdom at the end of time.