The Message Remix (346 page)

INTRODUCTION
02CORINTHIANS

 

The Corinthian Christians gave their founding pastor
, Paul, more trouble than all his other churches put together.
No sooner did Paul get one problem straightened out in Corinth than three more appeared.

For anyone operating under the naive presumption that joining a Christian church is a good way to meet all the best people and cultivate smooth social relations, a reading of Paul’s Corinthian correspondence is the prescribed cure. But however much trouble the Corinthians were to each other and to Paul, they prove to be a cornucopia of blessings to us, for they triggered some of Paul’s most profound and vigorous writing.

The provocation for Paul’s second letter to the Christians in Corinth was an attack on his leadership. In his first letter, though he wrote most kindly and sympathetically, he didn’t mince words. He wrote with the confident authority of a pastor who understands the ways God’s salvation works and the kind of community that comes into being as a result. At least some of what he wrote to them was hard to hear and hard to take.

So they bucked his authority—accused him of inconsistencies, impugned his motives, questioned his credentials. They didn’t argue with what he had written; they simply denied his right to tell them what to do.

And so Paul was forced to defend his leadership. After mopping up a few details left over from the first letter, he confronted the challenge, and in the process probed the very nature of leadership in a community of believers.

Because leadership is necessarily an exercise of authority, it easily shifts into an exercise of power. But the minute it does that, it begins to inflict damage on both the leader and the led. Paul, studying Jesus, had learned a kind of leadership in which he managed to stay out of the way so that the others could deal with God without having to go through him. All who are called to exercise leadership in whatever capacity—parent or coach, pastor or president, teacher or manager—can be grateful to Paul for this letter, and to the Corinthians for provoking it.

 

 

From:
Paul wasn’t the kind of guy who impressed men and dazzled women. He was brainy and intense. He talked well, but tradition has it that he was short and bald. He lacked the celebrity glamour the Corinthians saw in other teachers. When he traveled with Barnabas, people compared Barnabas to Zeus, the king of the gods, and Paul to his sidekick, Hermes. When he finished talking, people admired Jesus, not Paul, and the Corinthians mistook that for a flaw.

 

To:
Even among the Greeks, who knew how to party, the Corinthians had a reputation. Greeks had the expression “to Corinthianize,” which meant to be incredibly promiscuous. They were used to religions that offered wild rites for attaining enlightenment and immortality but didn’t expect them to cultivate humility or give their hard-earned cash to the poor. They liked teachers with feel-good messages and religions that served the consumer. Paul was a shock.

 

Re:
Roughly A.D. 56. A “household” in Roman times wasn’t just parents and children. People lived, worked, played, and worshiped in households that included a matriarch and/or patriarch, one or more adult sons with their wives and children, unmarried daughters, slaves (there were many of these, some highly educated), ex-slaves (domestics, tutors), artisans working in shops attached to the house, the children of slaves and freedmen, and on and on. If someone lacked the money to be a patriarch, he and his family were usually the servants or “clients” of the patriarch who was their “patron.” Even independent tradesmen and day laborers often had informal ties to a larger household, as patronage was essential to get by in life. People usually worshiped the god(s) of their patron and household.