For in this we groan. — The “groaning” here, and in 2 Corinthians 5:4, may, of course, be a strong way of expressing the burden and the weariness of life, but taken in connection with what we have already seen in the Epistle, as pointing to the pressure of disease, we can scarcely fail to find in it the utterance of a personal or special suffering. (See Notes on 2 Corinthians 1:8-9.)
Earnestly desiring to be clothed upon. — The words have suggested the question whether St. Paul spoke of the “spiritual body” to be received at the resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:42-49), or of some intermediate stage of being, like that represented in the visions which poets have imagined and schoolmen theorised about, in the visions of the world of the dead in the Odyssey (Book 11), in the Æneid (Book vi.), in Dante’s Divina Commedia throughout. The answer to that question is found in the manifest fact that the intermediate state occupied but a subordinate position in St. Paul’s thoughts. He would not speak overconfidently as to times and seasons, but his practical belief was that he, and most of those who were then living, would survive till the coming of the Lord (1 Corinthians 15:52; 1 Thessalonians 4:15). He did not speculate accordingly about that state, but was content to rest in the belief that when absent from the body he would in some more immediate sense, be present with the Lord. But the longing of his soul was, like that of St. John (Revelation 22:20), that the Lord might come quickly — that he might put on the new and glorious body without the pain and struggle of the “dissolution” of the old. In the words “be clothed upon” (literally, the verb being in the middle voice, to clothe ourselves, to put on) we have a slight change of imagery. The transition from the thought of a dwelling to that of a garment is, however, as in Psalms 104:1-3, sufficiently natural. Each shelters the man. Each is separable from the man himself. Each answers in these respects to the body which invests the spirit.