[Each week, I present as many updates on my reflections and study of the Biblical texts on which our weekend worship celebrations will be built. The purpose is to help the people of the congregation I serve as pastor, Friendship Lutheran Church of Amelia, Ohio, get ready for worship. Hopefully, it's helpful to others as well, since most weekends, our Bible lesson is one from the weekly lectionary, variations of which are used in most of the churches of the world.]
Bible Lesson: Second Corinthians 8:7-15
7Now as you excel in everything—in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in utmost eagerness, and in our love for you—so we want you to excel also in this generous undertaking. 8I do not say this as a command, but I am testing the genuineness of your love against the earnestness of others. 9For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich. 10And in this matter I am giving my advice: it is appropriate for you who began last year not only to do something but even to desire to do something— 11now finish doing it, so that your eagerness may be matched by completing it according to your means. 12For if the eagerness is there, the gift is acceptable according to what one has—not according to what one does not have. 13I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of a fair balance between 14your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance. 15As it is written, “The one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little.” [Translation: New Revised Standard Version]
Other Translations: The New International Version, The Message]
General Comments:
1. For some sense of what this letter from the apostle Paul to the church in the Greek city of Corinth is all about, see here (look at "General Notes") and here.
2. Chapters 8 and 9 of this letter deal with a collection that Paul is receiving from all of the churches with whom he has relationships. In different letters, now books in the New Testament, Paul variously describes the recipients as the poor or the saints in Jerusalem.
3. In using these various labels, Paul isn't betraying some inconsistency that hides nefarious motives. He isn't of that ilk of TV preachers who tell people to send them $50.00 and he'll pray for them! In fact, Paul worked at his trade as tentmaker to support himself financially wherever he went. The offering he takes is for others who could be variously described as the poor or as saints living in Jerusalem. (In the New Testament, the term saint referred simply to someone who had turned from sin, believed in Jesus Christ as God and Savior, and were part of the fellowship of the Church.)
Apparently, a famine had hit Jerusalem and the Judean countryside. The original Christians were hurt by this event and it's part of the ethos of Christian faith that we're to love Christ, love our brothers and sisters in Christ, and love the world.
The offering Paul is soliciting is meant to be an active, practical way for the largely-Gentile Christian churches in places like Asia Minor and Greece to express their love for the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem. Historians and Biblical scholars also indicate that well before the date at which Paul sent this letter, the church was being persecuted, some of its members lashed or killed, in Jerusalem.
4. The offering has its roots in the famous conference at Jerusalem discussed in both Acts 15 and Galatians 2:1-10. As one would expect, the two authors of those accounts, Luke and Paul, respectively, have their own spins on the events there. (No two people ever look at things in precisely the same ways.) But from both, we know that the conference, which involved the acknowledged leaders of the Christian movement (still seen as being part of Judaism) and fresh from their evangelizing (literally, good newsing) efforts "in the mission field" outside of Judea, Paul, Barnabas, and Titus.
The issue: The insistence of some Jewish Christians that before Gentiles who had come to believe in Jesus Christ as God and Savior of the world could be part of the fellowship, their male members would have to become like them. Specifically, they said these Gentile believers had to be circumcised. Their argument was that in order to become a Christian, one must first become a Jew.
Two-thousand years later, it's too easy to dismiss the Jewish Christians who said this as being fat-headed legalistic. But that wouldn't be fair. In the whole experience of the Jewish people, the only ones who could be considered as being part of the Kingdom of God were those who had observed the rites of Judaism. They acknowledged, as Jesus taught and as the Church taught after Jesus had risen from the dead, that people are saved from sin and death and given new, everlasting lives because they repented of their sin and believed in Jesus. But for them, it was a massive paradigm shift to say that God's gracious acceptance of repentant believers didn't have to observe the same religious laws that had always been associated with Israel's God.
The purpose of the conference was to decide what obligations the Gentile Christians had. According to Luke, after prayerful consideration of the Scriptures, for the sake of amity and continued fellowship, the leaders of the Jerusalem church asked the Gentiles to observe certain practices out of love for the Jewish Christians among them. Paul says that the council also instructed them to "remember the poor," which Paul says was exactly what he wanted to do in any case.
5. According to the New Interpreter's Bible, for Paul, the offering mostly represents "a reciprocal partnership between Jewish and Gentile believers." (v.XI, p.114)
6. Paul calls for the Corinthians to display generosity not as some sort of payback to God for what He has done for humanity through Jesus Christ and not to get rewards, two reasons for giving often toted out by preachers trying to put the financial squeeze on their congregants. Quite simply, Paul sees giving as a practical way of loving. Giving allows us to be part of the mission of God in the world, helping us to work together with God. (Second Corinthians 6:1).
I hope to present a verse-by-verse look at the passage later in the week. We shall see.
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