CRITICAL NOTES
2 Corinthians 13:11.—Calm sunset after a stormy passage! Observe margin (better). Perfected.—As in 2 Corinthians 13:9. Comforted.—With the fuller meaning found, e.g., in “Paraclete.” Live in peace.—“Peacing it together,” like “truthing it” (Ephesians 4:15).
2 Corinthians 13:1-13.—[Good paraphrase, exhibiting connection of thought, from Stanley: “Once, twice, thrice, as in the Mosaic Law of the three witnesses; by my first visit—by this Epistle, as though I had accomplished my second visit—by the third visit, which I now hope to accomplish [this personifying the three (?) visits as three witnesses, somewhat forced and fantastic]—I warn you that I shall not spare my power when I come. You are always seeking for a proof of my Apostleship; you shall have it. For Christ who speaks in me, though in the weakness of humanity He died the shameful death of the cross, in the strength of God He lives and acts still; and in Him, weak and poor as I seem to be, I shall still live and act towards you. But why do I speak of myself? You yourselves, my converts, are the best witnesses of my Apostolical power; and long may you be so! If, indeed, you should have lost this best proof of my Apostleship in the reformation of your own lives, then indeed you shall have the proof of my severity. But my earnest prayer is that there may be no occasion for it. May my power and the proof of it perish if you prove that you do not need it. Against a true and blameless life the highest Apostolical power is powerless; and if you have this power of truth and goodness, I am well content to part with mine. It is to draw you to a sense of this that I write this whole Epistle, in the hopes that my Apostolical authority may be turned to its fitting purpose of building up, not of pulling down.”
HOMILETIC ANALYSIS.— 2 Corinthians 13:11-14
I. “Brethren!”—After all he has had to rebuke, to threaten, to denounce. If we wait for ideal men, or Churches, shall never have any Christian fellowship. In even the most imperfect embodiment of the Church ideal, or the ideal of Christian manhood, Christ sees, and the Christlike heart and judgment do not undervalue or overlook, possibilities of better things. Only Death is hopeless; imperfect life may be healed, trained, perfected. Ourselves are not ideal; we need that other “brethren” should be patient with, helpful of us; let us say and feel, to even the most imperfect: “Brethren.” Christ knew, when He first accepted them (and us), and still knows, whilst He continues to accept them (and us), very much more that is evil, than they or we know of each other or of ourselves. How patient He is; remembering what (Corinthian) training has been, and (Corinthian) surroundings are. Not tolerating, or conniving at, sin; yet not disowning or casting off (until all help is refused, all remedial grace spent in vain) His “brethren!” It will do us good, and will often enable us to help others better, to overlook, or underlook, the Actual, and believe in, and see, and work with, the Ideal in them. [See how taking the best for granted is made to regenerate the Earl in Little Lord Fauntleroy.]
II. Yet this charity to persons will not be laxity in regard to principles.—The Ideal must be held up in all its beauty—imperiously, exactingly, demanding that we should “obey” its truth (Galatians 3:1). Christian or Church well-being means nothing less than, nothing lower than, Peace.
1. A peace within, in the renewal of our own natures. No “peace” without “holiness” (cf. 1 Thessalonians 5:23; He who “sanctifies” is “the God of peace,” as here). “Peace” is only absolute when reached through “perfection.” [An artist says that beauty in his work includes and rests upon a perfect balance and harmony between its parts, nothing jarring or discordant; corporate unity (so to speak) is secured in the picture.]
2. Peace with the fellow-members. “Be (imperative) of one mind” [men can choose to be of one mind, if they will, to a larger extent than they do and are]; “one hope,” the Same “Comforter” in them all; one aim; one heart.
3. Peace with the three-one God, through grace, by love, in fellowship. There must be Personal Experience, Unity with the Church, Fellowship with God through His grace. (See Separate Homilies on 2 Corinthians 13:14.)
HOMILETIC SUGGESTIONS
2 Corinthians 13:11. “The God of peace.”—The names of God in Paul’s prayers are never chosen at random—however true in themselves—but always with a close relation of appropriateness to the blessing asked or the work He does. So here. What a name! No heathen divinity ever wore, or at any rate deserved to wear, it. God of Truth, of Power, of Holiness, of Peace.
I. Characteristic of His very being.—“Internal,” absolute harmony and rest, because of absolute holiness. The “peaceful” God. [God could not give His peace to, or plant it within, an unholy nature. Circumstances are not the root-disquiet of our life; our own hearts and their pride, or selfishness, etc., give us all our real trouble.]
II. He loves peace.—[Profoundly significant that we “like” what is “like” us.] He is grieved at, and can hardly “be with,” a Church that is not “of one mind.”
III. He works for peace.—All the drift of His providential and redemptive government of the world tends to, aims at, this. The Gift of Christ is the supreme witness to His heart in this respect. [So the “peacemakers” are pre-eminently “the children of God,” the Great Peacemaker (Matthew 5:9).]
IV. He gives peace: to our hearts by the Atonement of His Son, and by the Work of His Spirit. It is the “peace of God” which is to “guard heart and thoughts through Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:7, R.V.).
2 Corinthians 13:11. “Be perfected.”—Prayer for restoration to corporate perfectness.
I. Negatively.—Perfect recovery which would result from “not doing evil,” “doing what is honest” (2 Corinthians 13:7). The vices which infected Corinthian Church exhibit in epitome those which have been the bane of the Church of Christ generally from the beginning.
(1) Fundamental disorder was rebellion against the supreme authority of the Divine Revealer and the Divine Inspirer and their Apostolic representative. Paul’s aim is “to bring … into captivity,” etc. (2 Corinthians 10:5). His final appeal, in the hearing not only of Corinthians, but of Christendom to the end of the world, is “we have the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16). The Scriptures of revelation contain this. Rebellion against Paul—against these Scriptures—is a virtual rejection of Christianity. “As a principle in the individual, this is fatal to religious stability and growth. As a principle in the Church, it is the root of all disorganisation; and it must be put away, with all its forms of manifestation, before the community bearing the name of Christ can put on its ‘perfection.’ ”
(2) A direct result of
(1),—a lax maintenance of some of the vital doctrines of the Christian confession.” [E.g. in 1 Corinthians 15, with its bearing upon the Atonement, and the whole basis of Christian hope and salvation.] “It was not without reference to corruptions of doctrine that the dejected Apostle expressed his fear (2 Corinthians 12:20). His vehement desire to preserve them ‘a chaste virgin to Christ’ (2 Corinthians 11:2-4), undefiled by doctrinal error, as he himself explains its meaning, gives a peculiar tremulousness and tumult to his diction.… The integrity of their faith was in his thought when he ‘prayed that they might be perfect’ ” [James 1:4, a good equivalent of the word].
(3) “Neglect and irreverence in the Divine service invariably follow hard upon laxity of doctrine.” Disorganisation in worship … to an extreme almost inconceivable by us; the supper of the Lord so desecrated as to call down upon the Church such visitations as sickness and death. Second Epistle shows “the same leaven at work in other directions; and the final prayer included the removal of the spirit of disorder and the observance of all that was ‘honourable.’ ” Two kinds of dishonour are actualities, or perpetual liabilities, in Divine service: To take away its simplicity, and discern in the ordinances more than they have to show; to rob everything external and symbolical of its true value, and reduce religious ceremonial to the level of mere human arrangement. Both equally distant from Church “perfection.”
(4) Closely connected is the spirit of faction. He sets no limit to his righteous indignation against the disturbers of the unity of the Church. The first paragraphs of the First Epistle and the last in the Second Epistle unite in this. The strong references to his severity as the minister of the Saviour’s wrath … explained by his resentment at this deadly sin.
(5) Violation of Christian morality. In xii. there is obvious reference to those two classes of moral offence from which 2 Corinthians 7:1 exhorted them to cleanse themselves. Sins “of the spirit” are summed up here (2 Corinthians 12:20) more completely than anywhere else; and here only as marking the conduct of professing Christians. The true, only means of recovery were neutralised by infidelity and the haughty spirit of Rationalism.
II. Perfection positively considered.—His good wish is not to be limited to the removal of the “evil” marring “perfection”; he longed for their attainment of all the completeness that may belong to a Church. Note the wonderful fact that such a Church should be thought capable of perfect amendment, a restoration to soundness not at some distant time, but as it were immediately, and by an energetic co-operation with Divine grace.… Certain it is that for a season the Corinthian Church enjoyed great prosperity.
1. The bond of Church perfectness is … a compact organisation vivified and kept in living unity by the Holy Spirit. One regimen and discipline; factions suppressed, divisions abolished; all the Corinthian Christian sections one corporate body. To-day, whilst recognising the great divisions of Christendom, each section should cultivate this unity within itself. Perfection means that lawlessness within a Church, and bitterness toward other Churches, are gone.
2. A certain standard of perfection even in order of worship. This not unattainable, or of slight importance.
3. “Perfection” includes a noble theory of mutual help in the Christian fellowship. Corinthian Epistles a complete depository of the social principles of Christianity, and of the preceptive details of its system of mutual edification. This the purpose and beauty of chap. 13, “Charity.” “Every member of the body must in his vocation and stewardship render back to Christianity all that in Christianity he receives, and give to the community the fullest advantage of whatever talent he as an individual may possess.… A perfection not attainable by the community on earth, but the nearer the approach to this, the nearer the Church to the realisation of its calling.… No Apostolical test of ‘perfectness’ in the Church community more easily applied, or more generally forgotten.”
4. High standard of morality. “The Church that does not prosecute to [ecclesiastical] death every capital offence against its purity is very far from ‘perfection.’ But the more effectual discipline is a high standard in the common sentiment of the people through the sedulous instruction of the ministry.”
5. Strong spirit of charity in the community. Note the fulness of detail, and the great interest, Paul gives to the “collection.” The “corporate” is only worked out through the “personal.”—Condensed from Pope, “Prayers of St. Paul,” vii.
2 Corinthians 13:14. Final Benediction.—In homiletic use the stress may either be laid upon the threefold grace invoked, or upon the personal names and their theological suggestions. Accordingly two lines of treatment are suggested.
I.
1. Verse like a coin which often needs calling in and reminting, in our thought and heart. In constant, current use, much of the clearness and sharpness of the impression upon it, and something of the weight and value, are worn away and lost. We tend to use it also without much thought; as we pass a coin from hand to hand, without very distinctly adverting to its pattern or value.
2. An important text in point of doctrine (see next homily). This and the baptismal formula are the two most definitely orderly statements of what little we know [and perhaps could be told] about the doctrine of the Trinity of Persons in the Oneness of the Nature of God. [They are lamps in our hand flashing light backward upon, and downward into, obscurities in the Old Testament, which otherwise must have remained dark.] Many texts guard us from thinking of three or of many Gods; these two gather up into a focus rays of teaching found scattered and separate elsewhere, and give us three personal names; equal, or their co-ordination here would be blasphemous; Divine, for each is here prayed to to give His characteristic blessing; and yet, One standing mysteriously first amongst three equals, as if having Godhead so peculiarly His own, that He is specially called not “the Father,” but “God.”
II. Christ’s gift, grace.—
1. Bearing in mind the close connection always found between the doctrine of Trinity and the life of the soul, it is easy to see why “grace” specially associated with Christ. We might, we do, call the love of the Father grace, for it is free, unmerited favour to sinners who only deserved penalty and “wrath.” We do call the “communion of the Holy Ghost” grace. We might, with propriety, speak equally freely of the love of our Lord Jesus Christ, of communion with, and in, the Son or the Father.
2. But Paul, like John (2 Corinthians 1:17), specially associates grace with Christ. A double antithesis in John (loc. cit.); not only between grace under Christ taking the place of law under Moses, but between “was given” and “came.” Moses only “gave,” he did not make, nor do more than hand on, as any other man appointed ad hoc might have done, what he had received from God. But grace, though originating in the Father’s “good will to man,” in as true a sense sprung from the Son’s tender compassion for our lost and unhappy case. He did not simply convey, He wrought grace, as only He could have wrought. Moses was not indispensable to the Law; Christ is indispensable to Grace.
3. Sin meant alienation, separation, antagonism. Christ reconciled, bridged the gulf, made peace. To appreciate His grace, suppose Him and His whole work eliminated from the conditions of man’s life as related to a holy God. There must have been despairing certainty of wrath, instead of hope; helplessness, instead of moral power, which is from its earliest beginnings, through all its growth and activities, to its perfection, a thing entirely a gift ab extra, grace. To Him we owe days of grace, in a kingdom of grace, a life in an atmosphere of grace. He is pre-eminently the Lord and Giver of Grace.
4. Peculiar emphasis of blessing in all this to the ex-Israelite, Paul, remembering, and sympathetically understanding, his Israelite brethren’s case under the yoke of the law. “Good news for you weary and heavy laden men of Israel. A yoke and a burden for you still, indeed, easy and light. Rest to your souls in Jesus of Nazareth, the Lord Jesus the Messiah, in His grace.” [This is the primary connection of thought between Matthew 11:28, and the preceding part of chapter.]
5. For Gentiles, slaves of their sins, haunted by conscience, fearing the worst in regard to the unknown, dark future, morally impotent and condemning vainly their own impotence, he had no higher wish than: “I pray that Jesus Christ may show you, in all their fullest reach, all the possibilities of His Gospel of grace; that they may be the elements of your habitual life. Power, perfect and continuous; peace, perfect and undoubted; holiness, perfect and continuously growing, till grace merges in, broadens into, glory.”
III. The Father’s gift, love.—
1. Observe the significant, necessary order. The “grace of …, [then] the love of,” etc. Picture broad valley lying parched, scorched, beneath fierce sun-rays of weeks of unclouded, unbroken, midsummer weather. Picture high up in hills at head of valley huge reservoir, full of water, which would save and fertilise all below. But no outlet; dam is strong; doors are closed; waters cannot flow. “Thy love unknown has broken every barrier down, … O Lamb of God.” Illustration so far applicable as this, that though, naturally and unhindered, the “gravitation” of that love would have meant an eager outpouring of itself down to our level, the full heart of God could only (so the matter is revealed to us) empty its fulness upon a perishing, dying world through the work of Christ, which broke down the twofold “dam,” of God’s holiness and law, and of man’s sin. Now, by the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, in all its Divine fulness, may flow down in free unstinted abundance into our needy life.
2. Now: “May God give you the wealth, the honour, of His love in all its lavish fulness, according to your need, ‘according to His riches’; His love in every form that it can assume or that you may require that it shall,—comfort, or rebuke, or guidance, or relief in difficulty, or solution of perplexities. God puts Himself, in all that His love can be or do, at the call of your necessity, to bring all He has into operation for your welfare, if need be.” [Paul says, “My God” (Philippians 4:19).] The soul may say: “All He has, and is, is mine. Beyond the love I had from Him when I was forgetful and rebellious, I have the love of God.”
IV.
1. The “grace,” and the “love,” are personal blessings; a man may enjoy them alone. The Spirit’s gift, fellowship, reminds of a brotherhood in the love of God, a common sharing in the grace of Christ; no selfish isolation in the heritage of blessing.
2. This is more than a prayer that all fellow-Christians may share together in the gifts and graces of the Spirit. Not merely are they persons who have received the like gifts and blessings; not merely children sitting at same table, enjoying each a like portion; the bond is closer. All Paul’s and Christ’s teaching about the unity of the branches of a vine, the limbs and parts of a body, all is in concentrated implication in this: “The communion of the Holy Ghost.” “The selfsame Spirit who is in me is Himself also in you. You and I are members of the same ‘Christ,’ each of us alive, not with a similar life,—even exactly similar,—but with one and the same Life-giver, thrilling in you, stirring in me. [When your light shines, and mine, it is not as in old days of candles and lamps, each a co-ordinate, independent source of precisely similar light, but as now, when the basis of the light-giving is concurrently derived from one common reservoir and source, one common element distributing itself into each of us, without division of itself. (Illustration to be used with caution in presentation.)] If further, e.g., you love souls and I love them, it is the manifestation and working of the same Holy Ghost, and consequently the same ‘love in the Spirit’ (Colossians 1:8).”
3. Happy fellowship, closer, and binding closer, than common interests, temperaments, sympathies, tastes, affections, blood, so that they who have it are really nearer to strangers who have it, than to their very kin if these have it not. Wonderful the common understanding it sets up, and the oneness of instinct, love, purpose, He creates amongst these in each and all of whom He dwells.
4. What a remedy for Corinthian factions, jealousies; for all class or social divisions in any Church. Hand cannot hurt, and must help, hand in the same body. Foot and head must feel and work together for each other’s life and good.
5. In a family no unity like this; no such bond, no other absolutely secure bond between husband and wife, parents and children, employers and servants, but this common sharing in the indwelling of the same Holy Ghost.
6. Amidst all “conditions of membership,” whether proposed or actually employed, this is to be presupposed. It underlies all. It over-rides all other methods of Church discipline. He is admitted into the Church who has a part in the fellowship; he is automatically excluded who loses it; however the imperfectly accurate, imperfectly administered, arrangements of any particular Church may affect him.
Or thus: the occasion of a Homily upon The Trinity and Redemption.
I. Why do men hold the doctrine?—Because we believe it. We believe it because we find it in the Bible. It is, on our part, entirely a case of Faith in what, in the other, is a matter of pure Revelation. But for the Bible we should know nothing about the question. We know nothing of it except what we find in the Bible. No man can be expected to receive it to whom the Bible is no final authority. No man can be compelled to believe it to whom the Bible is not supreme. No argument can be held at all, unless on the common understanding that the disputants are not to go behind the Bible. The question is always, not “What thinkest thou?” but, “What readest thou? What does the Book—God, through the Book—say?” [And, Do read. Do not take beliefs on authority. And do not take doubts on authority, either! Be neither a believer nor a sceptic, merely as relying on some human teacher.]
II. What do we hold?—
1. First, we find the Bible very express in the sense: “One God, one only.” The Old Testament made “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord” (Deuteronomy 6:4), the creed of an Israelite. To this day it is nearly the first lesson in the instruction of a Jewish child. In the midst of a world given up to multiplying its gods—and degrading itself and them, as they were multiplied—very nobly, in its later history particularly, did Israel uphold that truth as its testimony. It is the emphasised part of the whole truth in the Old Testament. In this the Old Testament bore its witness against Israel itself. When the world’s danger was polytheism, and when Israel itself was always ready to descend to idolatry, this was the side of the truth which needed prominence and emphasis.
2. This Old Testament testimony has never been withdrawn or qualified. When we come to the New Testament we find just as clearly its doctrine, “To us … one God,” etc. (2 Corinthians 8:6). Yet in our text it is the same Paul who has given to the Church of Christ its benediction, beneath whose sweet spell the child is baptized, the Christian man and woman are wedded, the dead are buried, the assembly for Christian worship is dismissed. This verse, with Matthew 28:19, gives the most complete and explicit summary form of the Bible doctrine.
3. In the clearer light of the New Testament we see that Old Testament believers mainly knew God in Him Whom we call “the Father,” now that we have seen and known “the Son.” And, in fact, three names have come into view, “Father, Son, Holy Spirit.” Three, not more, not fewer. Here they stand all, side by side. They were for the first time ranged thus in significant co-ordination when Jesus spoke the words above quoted (Matthew 28:19). What are we to think of them? God; a man; an influence, which is not even a person? Is that likely? Or possible? Or are we to think of the third as “personal,” as really as the first and second? And the second and third, are they as truly Divine as the first? A believer in “the Trinity” thinks he finds this Book often speaking of each of the three as we speak of other personal names, and as we speak of the Divine Person Whom we call “the Father.” Not always: but a good reason can in every instance be found for that.
4. So, then, here is the fact: From end to end this Book says, “One God; one only”; whilst more and more clearly as the revelation draws near to its close, there emerge three Names, each a person, each God. Questions start up; speculations multiply; a child can see difficulties; every responsible teacher of the doctrine has had to see and discuss every one of them. His position is that he bows before this Book, with its two groups of statements. Without it he knows nothing; with it he does not know much, but he knows that much. 5. “Do not understand their relations to each other?” Nor does the believer in the doctrine. But he finds express statements, and teachings by the help of mutually supplementary, mutually complimentary analogies, which make it reasonable to say: “Begotten of the Father,” “Proceeding from the Father (and the Son).” Imperfect expressions, and needing guarding and qualifying exposition; all very obvious to criticism. But they have emerged from the controversies of the early centuries, surviving because found on the whole the fittest. “Person,” e.g., is confessedly a very imperfect summary expression of the facts it is connected with. But where we find a personal name, self-knowledge, and a will which can will and can do as it will,—the best word we have is “person,” though not in this particular case perfectly applicable all round.
6. Very many of our creed statements are only negations of assertions which overstate one aspect of the whole Truth, or which omit to take into account some group of Scripture sayings or facts. “You make three Gods?” No; for Scripture which reveals the Three, insists also upon the One. “One person, and that one He Whom in the flesh we know as Jesus Christ,” says the Swedenborgian form of the old Sabellianism, varying from its ancient model in making the Second, and not the First of the Three, that of which the others are aspects or relational presentations. No; for He says, “The Comforter, Whom the Father will send in My name,” as one person may speak of two others, not himself. The heart of the matter is there.
III. Why do we care to hold the doctrine?—“What does it matter?”
1. Generally, it may be said that Scripture never tells us anything as matter of mere correct doctrine, and of right information; but always so much, and in such a manner, as may be of practical service to our spiritual life.
2. The doctrine under notice is bound up most closely with (a) our distinctively Christian Worship, and (b) our Christian Experience. (a) The Mahometan and the Jew come in worship to our one God. The latter will not have our Mediator; the former accepts one who is (he thinks) a prophet come from God to reveal His will, but who is no priest to go in for him to God to make atonement for sin. The Scheme of Christian Worship is: “Through the Son we have our access by one Spirit unto the Father.” Isaiah and John both heard the threefold note in the heavenly worship (Isaiah 6; Revelation 4); earthly and heavenly worship agree in this. The old congregations were dismissed with a threefold blessing (Numbers 6:24-26); as our text has for ages been the best formula whose lingering sound may die away last of all that has been said, into silence and peace, when a Christian congregation breaks up, and departs to suffering, service, life. (b)
1. The most nearly external and relative initiation into the Christian life is stamped with the Name—three, and one (Matthew 28:19). And if the doctrine be not true, our Mediator is only a creature, perhaps only a man; our Sanctifier is only a figure of speech, the creation of our poetical faculty.
2. But, most of all, it is not upon a text here or there that the doctrine rests. The three names pervade, permeate, give form and colour to, whole passages of the Epistles. Look for them, and we find all the experimental work and language of the New Testament wrought with their golden thread running through all.
3. Nearly all the statements culled out, and urged against the doctrine, are explained by this fact: We are told next to nothing as to what, in the inner being of God and the manner of His existence, lies behind these three names, and the analogies which indicate or suggest the relations between them; everything is exhibited in connection with the working out of Redemption. With the slightest exceptions we only see the gracious work in process: “Let us make man anew in Our image.” “The Son says, ‘The Father is greater than I.’ ” So He is, in the same sense as a son, admitted by his father into a subsidiary partnership in his father’s work, must say it; because so far as he is acting under orders, to that extent he is only an employee of his father. As to manhood and manhood, father and son are equal. As between senior, managing partner, and junior, executant partner; the father is greater than the son. As to Godhead and Godhead, Father and Son are equals; as executant of “not His own will [independently, or possibly divergently] but the will of Him Who sent Him,” and as effectuating our Redemption, the Son yields precedence to the Father. And the Spirit reveals Himself more clearly in, and to, the soul He sanctifies, than He does in those Scriptures where His self-suppressing work is to exhibit and glorify Christ. We scarcely know anything of the Trinity except as active in the work of Human Redemption.
4. Our salvation, therefore, and our experimental life depend most intimately upon, and are most closely interwoven with, the specific offices of each “Person” of the Trinity. Our experimental life is full of the Trinity. Experiment shows that, as a rule, the doctrine has maintained, and been associated with, the fullest, freshest, most widely accepted hymnology, devotional literature, and religious life. For that reason, as well as for its truth, does the Church care to hold the doctrine.