Canter Bridge

Anyone inclined to doubt that the apostle Paul was a complex man who enmeshed himself in the most complicated relational webs need only peruse 2 Corinthians 12 to be set right. In a discourse impregnanted with the most dazzling emotional transparency, Paul struggles to articulate the relationship that makes restoration of equilibrium between him and the Corinthians a non-negotiable objective.

In the midst of the meteorics comes an enthralling claim. In order to mark the apostle off from hubris, a ‘thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan’ has been given him to to torment him. No mere irritation, Paul pleaded three times that this terrible thing be taken away from him only to discern a most amazing refusal:

My grace is sufficient for you, for strength is made perfect in weakness.

One gasps before the audacity of such a divine decision not to heal, not to rescue, not to provide whatever relief it was that might have liberated this most productive of emissaries from his ever-present deficiency.

It is not too difficult to conclude that arrogance lies at the core of moral derailment, of that self-elevation that here subtly and there spectacularly removes an effective human being from the field of his or her achievement. It is Cain recusing himself from responsibility for his dead brother’s life, protesting the severity of his punishment, wandering in Nod to the sound of the most exquisitely piped accompaniment, reveling in his own importance in almost heroic defiance of the call to live for others.

Paul would not become Cain, not because he lacked his predecessor’s competency for heroic folly but because a constant, enduring agony would anchor his identity in raw need.

The apostle, we are asked to believe, would be a pillar of strength as Christian faith spread throughout the western provinces of Rome’s domain. Many would find in his words instruction, valor, light, courage, knowing too little the weakness that—damp soil to the grain that springs from it—lay beneath.