We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
—T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, “East Coker,” V.
If people know anything about 2 Corinthians, it’s probably the “thorn in the flesh” passage, 12:7-10. On the one hand, there are all sorts of ideas as to what the thorn in the flesh was, and those sorts of speculative disagreements always generate interest. On the other, this is where we get the oft-quoted idea that God’s power is perfected in weakness. Unfortunately, however, I think the standard interpretation of this passage misses what’s actually going on.
By way of context, Paul’s thorn in the flesh must be understood as part of his “fool’s speech” that begins in chapter 11. The Corinthian church was a difficult collection of people who were, on the whole, terribly impressed with themselves. As such, they were terribly prone to spiritual pride and spiritual arrogance, which may be the two deadliest sins in the book, and they had become captivated by a group of Jewish Christian teachers who pandered to the Corinthians in order to undermine Paul. We don’t know much about these false teachers except that they preached a triumphalist faith. That appealed to the Corinthians, who were all about flashy displays and worldly glory. The false apostles were smooth, well-spoken, well-dressed, successful in worldly terms, and had a commanding presence about them. They claimed to have had visions and other ecstatic religious experiences, and they used those claims to justify coming into the church and taking over on the basis of their superior knowledge and wisdom.
The Corinthians, predictably, ate it up. This was their idea of how a great preacher and teacher should look, and this was the message they wanted to hear: “I’m something special, I’m a spiritual superstar, I’m a big success, and if you just follow me you can be just like me.” (Or almost, anyway.) To deal with this, Paul has to address their claims of superiority. They boast about themselves, probably incessantly, and so he must boast as well.
Being Paul, however, he can’t just cut loose and boast about how great he is, though he would have plenty of material. Even as he seeks to trump his opponents’ high card—their claim of extraordinary spiritual experience—he can’t take it seriously. He knows this isn’t what really matters, so while he testifies that he too has had a profound visionary experience of God, he refers to himself in the third person, doesn’t go into detail—he says only that words can’t describe it—and moves on as quickly as he can. He turns the account of his vision from a main point into a mere setup for something he deems actually important.
What he says has provoked much speculation over the years. The purpose of the thorn in the flesh is clear: it’s to keep Paul from falling to spiritual pride because of the great revelations he had been given. That’s so important, he says it twice. What the thorn in the flesh was is not clear, since Paul doesn’t tell us. He calls it “a messenger of Satan” and says nothing more. The most common assumption is that the thorn in the flesh was a physical ailment; I’ve seen many interpreters argue it was an eye problem, for instance. I’d never questioned the idea until a colleague and friend, the Rev. Dr. Kent Denlinger, pointed out that the phrase “thorn in the flesh” is actually from the Old Testament.
Variations of this phrase occur in three places in the OT, all of them relating to Israel and the Canaanites. (The following quotes are all from the New International Version.) The first is Numbers 33. God tells the Israelites that when they conquer Canaan, they must drive out all the inhabitants and destroy all their idols and places of worship. In verse 55, he gives them the reason for this command: “If you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land, those you allow to remain will become barbs in your eyes and thorns in your sides. They will give you trouble in the land where you will live.”
The next comes near the end of the book of Joshua. The conquest of Canaan is largely finished (but not completely, which will come back to bite them) and Joshua is nearing the end of his long life. He gathers the leaders of Israel to give them instructions—and with those instructions, a warning. In 23:12-13, he says, “if you turn away and ally yourselves with the survivors of these nations that remain among you and if you intermarry with them and associate with them, then you may be sure that the Lord your God will no longer drive out these nations before you. Instead, they will become snares and traps for you, whips on your backs and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from this good land which the Lord your God has given you.”
The third comes in Judges 2:3. Though Joshua’s words should still be fresh in their memory, it seems the people of Israel have already forgotten them. In anger, the Angel of the Lord speaks directly to the people of Israel, declaring as judgment what Joshua offered as warning: “I will not drive them out before you; they will be thorns in your sides and their gods will be a snare to you.”
These verses are significant because Paul was a rabbi and the rabbinic principle is firm: if you want to know what a word or phrase means, go see how it’s used elsewhere in Scripture. Commentators generally assume Paul didn’t define “thorn in the flesh” because it was some obvious problem everyone knew about, but the biblical context suggests a different reason: he didn’t define it because it was a scriptural allusion he expected his hearers to understand.
Given this, it would make sense to interpret the thorn in the flesh as some sort of opposition to Paul’s ministry, especially as some scholars hold this position for other reasons. Kent took this in a different direction, however, and I believe he was right to do so. The key point is that the Old Testament isn’t concerned about the pagan Canaanites as opposition. It sees them not as a military threat but as a religious one. Joshua says, “they shall be snares and traps for you,” and Judges elaborates, “their gods will be a snare to you.” These “thorns in the flesh” are worshipers of false gods who threaten the spiritual health of the nation.
So what’s the analogy here? What is to the individual believer as the Canaanites were to the nation of Israel? Kent argues, I believe correctly, that the answer is a sin Paul couldn’t overcome—the sort of thing that would make him lament, “I don’t do what I want, I do the very thing I hate,” and cry out, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” as he does in Romans 7. In support of this is the fact that Paul doesn’t say the thorn was inflicted by a messenger of Satan, he calls the thorn itself a messenger of Satan.
Paul pleaded with God—maybe sounding a lot like Romans 7—to take away the thorn in the flesh. He begged God to enable him to overcome the sin that was whipping his butt, and God firmly told him “no.” Instead of doing what Paul asked, God told him, “My grace is sufficient for you.” (I’ll come back to this later, but this bit always used to confuse me. Why would God say his grace was sufficient for Paul to deal with physical suffering? It makes more sense if we understand the thorn in the flesh to be a besetting sin.)
Moving on for the moment, why does God say his grace is sufficient for Paul? According to our English Bibles, it’s “because my power is made perfect in weakness.” Here I owe a huge debt to the late (and much-missed) Marva Dawn from a class she taught at Regent. Marva was one of the most physically battered people I’ve ever met. She told us in class that she was blind in one eye and deaf in one ear; the good part, she told us, was that they were on opposite sides, so if she couldn’t see the car she could hear it coming. As you can probably guess, she was a feisty lady and not one to back down from a challenge. Unfortunately, for that class, one of the challenges she faced was the building.
The enrollment of that particular class was so large that the only room that would hold all of us was the chapel. The Regent College chapel is a long room with the floor descending in steps—shallowly from front to back, steeply along the sides—from the entrances at ground level to the podium area in the front. Marva’s legs were held together with screws and bolts, one of which was causing her serious problems at the time. Simply getting from the door down to the front each class period was painful, anxious work.
At one point, Thena Ayres, the dean of students, asked Marva’s permission to pray for her for healing. Marva accepted Thena’s offer, but noted she’d had many people pray that she would be healed, and her physical situation had never changed. That time was no different, but Marva was undaunted. She told us she had to believe God was on about healing something more important than her body, and then she started talking about 2 Corinthians 12:9.
First, she noted, the verb usually translated “made perfect” (or something of that sort) is teléō, which basically means “to bring to an end.” To give one example, this is the verb used in 2 Timothy when Paul says, “I have finished my race.” While teléō is sometimes used to mean “perfected,” in most cases that meaning is carried by the closely-related verb teleióō.
Second, Marva pointed out an interesting fact: the word “my” is in our English Bibles, but it isn’t in the Greek. Put that together with her observation about the verb, and she contended that the most natural reading of this clause is not “my power is made perfect in weakness” but rather “power is ended in weakness.”
For Marva, this answered the question of why God would leave her in pain and struggling to get around instead of healing her: he left her that weakness to set an end to her power so she would learn to rely on him. I think she was right, but if Kent’s insight is correct (as I believe it is), this passage doesn’t just bear on physical weakness. It also tells us something about why God allows us to continue to sin.
Paul’s visions presented a profound temptation to spiritual pride. By leaving him to struggle fruitlessly with a sin he hated in himself and could not overcome, God deflated that temptation. Paul’s inability to conquer his sinful behavior made it impossible for him to see himself as a spiritual success. When he went to God to ask forgiveness for his sin, his self-honesty prevented him from negotiating with God the way most of us do. When we ask God to forgive us because next time we’ll do better, next time we’ll get it right, we aren’t really asking for grace, we’re trying to earn it. Paul couldn’t do that with integrity because he couldn’t even pretend to himself that he would be able to keep that promise. He could only tell God, “I’m probably going to go out and commit the same sin all over again, but please forgive me anyway.” When you can do that is when you know in your bones that God’s grace is sufficient for you.
There’s a common assumption—common because it’s comfortable—that when we follow Jesus, God goes to work to give us victory over all the temptations and sins that we recognize as temptations and sins. 1 Corinthians 10:13 is often invoked to support this: when you’re tempted, God will make a way of escape so you don’t give in to it. The problem is, as maybe you’ve noticed, God often doesn’t seem all that obliging about that. I believe God has an agenda for my holiness, but it sure doesn’t look the same as mine. We don’t imagine he would give us a commandment we’re powerless to keep and leave us to fall over and over in agonized failure, but I’m convinced this is exactly what Paul is reporting.
That sounds negative, but there’s a positive side to it: if God is allowing my struggles and failures for his own greater purpose—if he’s at work in them, using those struggles and failures and sins to make me holy in some way I can’t see—I don’t need to fear that he’s sitting and watching for me to sin just badly enough that he can crush me in judgment. We don’t need to believe anyone guilty of a particular sinful behavior will automatically go to Hell, whatever that behavior might be. We do suffer consequences for the evil that we do, but if we are God’s children, he is at work in our sins not as our judge but as our teacher.
Is this hard for you to believe? If so, don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you to just work harder—I’m with you. I know this is true, and I still struggle to believe it. I pray for hope, I pray for faith, I ask God to destroy my shadow with his light; I sin again, I feel despair at my failure, I fall to my knees, and God says, “No, I’m not going to fix you so you can be happy with yourself on your own.” It seems on my knees with no hope but a desperate plea for his profligate grace and spendthrift mercy is right where he wants me. Whatever he is on about fixing in me, it seems that’s where it needs to happen.
Sometimes God deals gently with us; sometimes he takes up the hammer and chisel and knocks our block off, or at least knocks a lot off our block—and it’s no “tap tap tap,” he hits hard. An awful lot of the time, the chisel he uses is our own sin. However he does it, he’s shaping us to the same point, where we’ve given up faith in our own power—our strength, our skill, our goodness, our wisdom—and are clinging to him for dear life. He wants us to trust him deeply, and that only happens when we have to trust him desperately. The path to true faith leads through times of desperation; the end of me is the beginning of God’s work. In my end is my beginning.
Henry Ossawa Tanner, Study for Jesus and Nicodemus, 1898-99.