Flooded with love for Christ
Dear People of St. Boniface,
You probably realise I didn’t actually write my own letters; a scribe did it for me and I signed them. Sometimes given my hot-headed nature he must have raised his eyes to heaven and thought: “Paul’s going to put his foot in it!”
And this was certainly true for my stormy relations with Corinth, where after my second visit when I was gravely insulted [2 Corinthians 2:5-11] I wrote them a letter “with many tears”, determining not to visit them again [2 Corinthians 2:3-4; 7:8-9] – this letter has disappeared; maybe they tore it up or danced over it.
My friend Titus patched things up and I was finally able to write to them again in a happier frame of mind, from Macedonia.
Rather than further bickering and rowing, I focus purely on Christ whose “love overwhelms us” seeing that we were all as good as dead and did not deserve his love.
I say that I am not interested in making earthly judgments – “who was right?” It is true that I wanted the Corinthians to appreciate my ministry, but that was for the sake of the message, not of myself. And if at times I seemed “out of my mind” [2 Corinthians 5:13] that was because I was simply flooded with love for Christ.
I say I “once knew Christ according to the flesh”, meaning not that I had known Jesus during his public ministry (which I obviously hadn’t) but that I had once not looked on him with the eyes of faith, and so had been a persecutor. And so to you all I say: you are not called to know about Christ, so much as to KNOW CHRIST!
My blessing, from Heaven, PAUL.