II Corinthians 5-8

A Divine Fund-Raising Letter?

OK… Confession time: I don’t like II Corinthians. I hope you don’t think that’s blasphemy, but after reading the New Testament up to this point you can’t help but notice the difference. Paul is so defensive and harsh in this second letter to a church with tons of problems. (See I Corinthians!) In his first letter he handled one question after another and was pretty good about covering a broad range of topics with an even hand. But what happened in this letter? Paul sounds tense, nervous and upset – to quote an old TV commercial. He is constantly defending himself and trying to prove that he really does care and he really hasn’t cheated anybody. Consider these clips from chapter 5:

“What we are is plain to God, and I hope it is also plain to your conscience…”
“We are not trying to commend ourselves to you again…”
“If we are out of our mind, it is for the sake of God…”

The confusing fact is that we know that the guy behind these defensive rants has gone through Hades for the gospel. We watched him suffer and stand strong in Acts and heard him explain the story of redemption beautifully in Romans. He’s a hero! He’s Paul, the Apostle! So maybe part of the purpose of this letter is to let us see the human part of Paul. He gets his feelings hurt. He defends his character. He fights to be heard.

And here’s another strange fact: In the middle of all this he writes some of my favorite verses:
We live by faith, not by sight.
We fix our eyes not on what is not seen, for what is seen is temporary.
As long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord.
If anyone is in Christ he is a new creation.

So what is driving these impassioned pleas and this beautiful prose? The answer is one more strange-but-true fact: Its about fund-raising! Paul is trying to get this church to step up and support the ministry of the gospel. In some ways the whole letter leads up to chapter 8 where he challenges them with the example of the Macedonian church. That group so believed in the Gospel of Christ that they gave generously though they were in poverty. Paul knows that it takes money to fund missionaries and keep spreading the word. For that reason he pulls out all the stops to get the members of this presumably wealthy church in this prosperous port town to dig deep. He even uses some semi-Communist language to get the job done: “Our desire is not that others might be relieved while you are hard pressed, but that there might be equality.” Hard not to hear some socialist overtones in that! But Paul’s not thinking politically. He’s thinking missionally. It’s all about spreading the Good News. It’s all about showing love in Christ. For him, our giving is nothing less than a “proof of our love” for the Lord.

“You’ve got it and you know it! Now give it to advance the Kingdom!” That’s his message to Corinth in a nutshell.

I can’t help but wonder if he wouldn’t write the same message to us.


Jeff Walling
April 26