Our church has been reading from the

Our church has been reading from the “second” letter of St. Paul to the Church in Corinth and—in this Year of St. Paul—I would like to continue talking about him and his theology. But first, something about these letters to the Corinthians. We know from the two documents we possess that originally there were more than two; in fact, there were five. After spending two years in Corinth, Paul moved on to Ephesus. It was from Ephesus that Paul wrote to the Corinthian congregation as news of problems reached him. The “first” letter to the Corinthians (5:9) mentions an earlier one, so what we call the first letter is really the second, and the first is lost. The third letter, referred to by Paul himself in II Corinthians as the “letter in tears,” is also thought to be lost, but a fragment of it may be contained in what we call II Corinthians. The fourth and fifth letters combined—but in reverse order—are what make up most of the document we call II Corinthians.

First, how did this all happen? It seems that an important Corinthian city official named Erastus was the first to begin to gather and compile Saint Paul’s letters near the end of the first Christian century. It appears that, as he found copies of letters probably forty years old when he found them, he simply put them in a file and arranged them as best he could.

So why am I telling you all this? It sounds like the old joke, “Who’s on first.” To begin with, it upholds the fact that the Catholic Church is not a fundamentalist church and the Bible is truly God’s revelation, but the agents of this revelation are human, and working in a human manner. Apparently the Holy Spirit did not think it necessary to produce the Bible like a “user’s manual” in our sense of the term. The Bible was, and is, something that follows revelation as such and is a witnesses to revelation and not itself the revelation.

It proves again the quip attributed to St. Thomas Moore that “God created us to serve him in the tangle of our wits.”

But let us put all that aside to look at what today’s reading (II Cor. 4:6-15) has to say, for St. Paul, far more than any other writer in the New Testament, puts his chief emphasis on the fact that we—you and I—not only make up the body of Christ but as individuals have Christ living in each one of us by virtue of our baptism. How did he arrive at this idea? Remember that at his conversion, he was on his way to Damascus to arrest Christians and bring them back to Jerusalem for trial when he was knocked to the ground. He heard a voice saying, “Saul! Saul, why are you persecuting me?” He asked the voice, “Who are you?” and was told “I am Jesus whom you persecute.” This was Paul’s first introduction to the teaching of Jesus found in Matthew’s Gospel, “whatever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters you do to me.” As time passed, Paul would come to understand this reality in a far deeper and awesome way, so that in his letters he teaches it more boldly than anyone else in the New Testament.

Consider the line in today’s reading, “We carry in our mortal bodies the dying of Jesus so that his living may be seen in our bodies.” Jesus is living in each one of us by virtue of our baptism, so what whatever is done to us is done to Jesus, and whatever we do to each other is done to Jesus. More than that, Jesus continues to operate directly through us, so that Paul can say in another place, “I finish in my body what is missing in the Passion of Christ for the sake of the community.” So let us take this to heart. Although, as today’s reading says, we carry this treasure of Christ’s abiding in us in something no stronger than a clay flowerpot, in spite of our limitations, our fears and faults, our sins, let us strive to worship Christ by the way we treat others and to bear and forgive all as he did on his cross. This is what will make that light that he lit in our hearts at our baptism—as the opening verse of the text says today—shine for those who come in contract with us and provide glory to God.