Canter Bridge

It is extraordinary that we should stand at a distance of two millennia and still retain insight into the drama that the apostle Paul delineates in these terms:

So I made up my mind not to make you another painful visit. For if I cause you pain, who is there to make me glad but the one whom I have pained? And I wrote as I did, so that when I came, I might not suffer pain from those who should have made me rejoice; for I am confident about all of you, that my joy would be the joy of all of you. For I wrote you out of much distress and anguish of heart and with many tears, not to cause you pain, but to let you know the abundant love that I have for you. But if anyone has caused pain, he has caused it not to me, but to some extent—not to exaggerate it—to all of you. This punishment by the majority is enough for such a person; so now instead you should forgive and console him, so that he may not be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. So I urge you to reaffirm your love for him. I wrote for this reason: to test you and to know whether you are obedient in everything. Anyone whom you forgive, I also forgive. What I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, has been for your sake in the presence of Christ.

People engaged in the consuming press of Christian ministry with flawed human beings, marked by a persistent hunger for conflict when it is the last thing that health requires, can sense the heartache on all sides that Paul’s lines entice back into our range of attention. Because we are so broken, this kind of conflict is generic, even—somehow—normal.

Yet Paul is not content to let it be. To the contrary, he pours heart, soul, and inky words into repairing a relational tear that has marred the tapestry into which his and the Corinthians’ lives have in such a short time become woven. This is the stuff of pathos, not the milky, sugared pathos that incites voyeuristic tastes but the real, chosen engagement of person to person when neither one will choose the convenience of withdrawal.

Paul has multiple reasons, one assumes, for writing these words and for pressing, pressing, pressing into health when cancer and rot are all around. He cites one:

And we do this so that we may not be outwitted by Satan; for we are not ignorant of his designs.

The apostle glimpses a nefarious shadow flitting almost imperceptibly upon the walls of a house that Christ has built. This mobile, hungry darkness is drawn to conflict, not because difference is in itself akin to the shadow’s own substance but rather because there is formed an environment in which darkness—schrewd, cunning darkness—has its finest moments.