Corinthians 15:1-11
This is one of many places where Paul strives to point out not only the power of God’s grace to transform human life, but the love involved in doing so.
It is this love, overall, that Paul wants the community to recall. All that is necessary is for them to remember who Paul previously was, and they somehow are expected to have an instantaneous testimony to God’s ability to transform people by love.
It is essential for Paul that the message of the gospel be relayed as much and as often as possible. This is not unusual within the pre-monarchic Judahite tradition of Moses and Joshua, but to the Corinthian community Paul is playing the role of a Judahite patriarch. With every generation of leadership, it was always essential for Judahite leadership to remind the assembly (ekklesia) of God of what their story of deliverance was. The story of the exodus from the land of Egypt was critical to their mission.
Paul is not explicit here, but this is one of many texts that affirms the position that Christ holds in his mind with regard to the revealed plan of salvation. Jesus is in fact the prophet like Moses whose life, death and resurrection are essential to the faith that this life of sin and death is temporary, and that in Christ one will find a path through the darkness of death into the resurrection.
It is thus essential that Paul talks about the role that the apostles play in this plan. He is effectively showing them through cultural idiom that Jesus provided the Apostles, and the hundreds afterwards, with the evidence that He had completed the exodus across the desert of death and that if they were to follow him, they must REMEMBER the gospel PRECISELY: both in content and transmission – everything! They must learn and remember – not simply learn. While to a seasoned Judean Paul’s model of leadership here is clear, for the Corinthian it would not likely be so. All the more reason for Paul to use this approach on them, as it would be relatively new.
He goes so far to clarify that his own involvement was by God’s choice – that like Moses or Jeremiah or any other prophet, his person was originally unfit for apostleship, and yet the presence of God and the revelation of Christ’s purpose made Paul an apostle and now drives him forward in the declaration and custody of this victory.
This is something else to watch for in Paul’s writings – the apostle is both the declarer and custodian of the assembly. The apostles’ job is to teach those who will listen and remind those who already know.
In Paul’s own case, as one of ‘untimely birth,’ Paul refers to himself perjoratively as one who was not worthy of God’s grace at all, but nevertheless as one who was chosen by God to be an apostle. There is a question of vanity here: Is the transmission of grace ever a futile endeavor?
Paul’s own deliverance by the grace of God was not in vain. It is Paul’s hope that his own transmission of grace to the church of Corinth was also not a waste of time.
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© 2006 Jacob Gorny