This week we are studying 2 Corinthians 3:5-18. It is part of our series of lessons on “hope in the Lord,” so I surmise that we are meant to focus on verses 17-18:
Now the Lord [Christ] is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.
2 Corinthians 3:17-18
That is hope, indeed.
The difficulty for me personally is that those lovely verses come at the end of a text that is, if not the most explicitly supercessionist text in the New Testament, then at least in the top five. So the challenge for a reader of Christian Scripture committed to a post-Holocaust anti-anti-Judaic ethic is how to hold fast to the hope without making it depend on the supercessionism. This is something like a gymnastic trick of difficulty 11.
The Apostle Paul couldn’t even stick that landing (see Romans 11), and that was without the added difficulty of having to treat his own previous letters as the Word of God. With that in mind, here are my [few and insufficient] notes [with some questions for class discussion here] on our text:
BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT: The letters to the Corinthians (1st & 2nd, as they’re labeled in our canon) are letters from the apostle Paul to the church in Corinth. Scholars think they were written in the early 50s CE – so, before the letter to the Romans.
Corinth was at that time already an ancient city with a long history, a big city, a Roman provincial capital, and a trading center. I think of some place like Chicago, in a way, or Atlanta. Bible Odyssey has several concise background articles on Corinth, along with a map showing its geographical relationship to Ephesus, where people think Paul was when he wrote the letters.
There were clearly wealthy people in Corinth, and there seem to have been at least some wealthy people in the Corinthian church, although many of the Corinthian Christians seem to have been poor or even slaves. So distinctions of class and status evidently play a role in the conflicts that Paul’s letters bear witness to.
2 Corinthians, according to study Bibles and seminary professors, reads like it’s been edited together from several letters. In particular, it refers to a letter that has been lost. Most of the text deals with issues Paul was having with the church at Corinth, that had even led to some harsh or “severe” words.
The seemingly fragmented character of the larger text makes it harder than usual to read smaller parts of the text “in context.” However, our text seems [to me, at least] to belong to a fairly extended presentation of ideas about the ministry of the gospel, at least from 2 Corinthians 2:14 through 6:13.
Then there’s an abrupt taking up of what seems to be the topic of mixed marriages, with unbelievers, before returning (?) to an appeal for Corinthian forbearance. Then come a couple of chapters about finalizing the collection for the “saints in Jerusalem.” The letter finishes off with dramatic warnings about the misleading teaching of the “superapostles.” (2 Corinthians 12:11 and its context.)
The more general remarks in chapters 2-6 may, or may not, be related to the conflict reflected in chapters 11-12. Paul’s litany of self-defense in 2 Corinthians 11 might, however, suggest that the superapostles were first century advocates of what we might [anachronistically] call strict halakhic Torah observance, who emphasize their Jewish credentials [“See, WE’RE 100% authentic Jesus’s people”] to their largely Gentile [culturally clueless] audience in Corinth. If that were what was going on, it might help explain the supercessionist rhetoric of chapter 3. And give us a few grains of salt to take it with.
Christians have been reading this text as if it were an unproblematic statement of the superiority of Christianity over Judaism for a long long time. We have probably read it and heard it preached and explained that way plenty, especially if we’re old enough. Let’s consider the history and the consequences of those readings, and see if we can’t come up with something more charitable.
Most of this text is in the lectionary one way or another, either in ordinary time Year B (vv1-6), or Transfiguration Year C (vv12-4:2). So we wouldn’t even know that vv7-11, where “the ministry of death” is being “set aside,” is in the Bible if all we knew were the lectionary. That might feel like a relief, especially to some preachers, but Bible Content Examinees probably need to beware anyway, especially if they think they’ll ever want to participate in some interfaith dialogue one of these days.
CLOSER READING: In vv4-6, the root word translated “qualified” (2x) and “qualifications” often carries the connotation of “fitness” or “worthiness” – we’d probably say, at least informally, “good enough.” The phrase “ministers” – elsewhere translated “servants” – of a “new covenant” fits a grammatical pattern that suggests the new covenant is the entity being served.
The “letter” in v6 is a letter of the alphabet. A letter of recommendation (as in v2) would require a different word. In the same verse, the capital letters on “spirit,” come from the translator, not the author. But maybe they are implied, or inferred from context. And maybe they make a difference in the meaning of this text. The translator(s) evidently read it with capitals.
The phrase “the letter kills but the spirit gives life” may be making a specific reference to the language of Hebrew, which is written entirely in consonants. If the “letter” of the recorded revelation kills – literally by killing speech, committing what was once the face-to-face spoken word to writing – the “spirit” gives life – by returning the breath of the vowels to the [dead] written word, making it once again living speech. [This is precisely the opposite of what Jacques Derrida says about the relationship of writing and speech in Of Grammatology. But Derrida would have been happy to reverse St. Paul.] For Paul, the “letter” of the written revelation kills spiritually, too, by convicting people of sin. The spirit of the Lord gives life, by reconciling the sinner to God through Christ.
The “ministry of death” language should remind us of Paul’s lament about the “law” in Romans 7:7-25, and the discussion of the “curse” of “the law” in Galatians 3:10-14. The background story, about Moses’ face glowing, and striking fear into the Israelites in the wilderness, and Moses putting on a veil, is told in Exodus 34:29-34. There, Moses’ radiance seems to reflect the glory of God, and represents that glory to the listening assembly. It is, however, frightening. [Holiness scares us. Given what we know about it from the Bible, with good reason.]
Here in 2 Corinthians (v13), Paul seems to be suggesting that Moses’ veil also veiled the waning of that reflected radiance, between encounters with God. Making that radiance like the effects of a spa facial. But also presaging the diminution of that glory, when compared with the even greater glory of the “ministry of the spirit” or Spirit. “The permanent” that comes in glory vs. the impermanent of “what was set aside” should probably also remind us of Paul’s discussion of “the law” as a “disciplinarian” in Galatians 3:23-4:7.
Referring to the other letters, we could even get the impression that Paul is working out his understanding of the precise relationship of the gospel to earlier divine revelation across the decade or so during which he was writing these letters.
The one comment I have read about v13 that softens the impact of the next verses is a reminder that Paul [later?] regards Christ as “the end of the law” – the telos – so perhaps the whole point of all these next verses is the hiddenness of Christ in earlier revelation.
In v14, what we think Paul is saying may depend on who we think “they” are whose “minds were hardened.” The nearest reference, in v13, is “the people of Israel,” making the problem of mental sclerosis very general. However, at least one reader attaches it to Paul’s opponents in Corinth, keeping the disparagement within much narrower bounds. [It’s a stretch. But as long as we’re doing gymnastics …]
Another possible reading of vv12-18 – more direct, and still drawing on the background of the Exodus story, as well as on that contrast between living present speech and dead absent letter – is that Paul is casting Christians, individually and collectively, as direct successors of Moses. Being recipients or beneficiaries of the “ministry of the spirit” or Spirit is, in effect, like entering the tent of meeting and speaking directly, veils off, with the Lord. The way Moses did.
As opposed to listening to a record of that revelation – what Moses learned from those conversations with God, and then wrote down. In other words, filtered and at a distance from the source. [Doing more gymnastics, this could even mean that Paul is not just saying Torah study is a complete waste of time. But rather, that the full glory of the ultimate living endpoint of Torah remains implicit in it, rather than explicit.]
This would mean that the glory that Moses encountered is now visible to “all of us,” reflected “as in a mirror.” Reflected where? In the Christians’ assembly? Maybe. Because, that glory is in Christ – who is not only the record of revelation, or its prophetic spokesperson, but its source. And Christ is there. Where the Spirit of the Lord is.
Making Christians’ faces shine like Moses’ did, presumably, with the reflected glory of divinity.
If that reading is correct, however, then Christians individually and collectively should probably be scaring a lot more people a lot more of the time, in a whole other way than we actually do.
Images: “Casa de Convalescència, arrambador ceràmic” Enfo, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Close up of Veil Nebula, NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration. Acknowledgment: J. Hester (Arizona State University), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
