James Nisbet's Church Pulpit Commentary
2 Corinthians 11:30
A PARADOX
‘If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things which concern mine infirmities.’
What a strange saying, what an astonishing paradox, and from such a man! St. Paul is one of the very few men, everyone must admit, who have exercised a real influence on the whole current of the world’s history. There are some scholars who would set down almost the whole of Christ’s teaching as we have it now to him. There are many who still discuss and dissect his writings to find in them a system of Paulism which shall be set beside the great philosophies of ancient and modern times. And there can be no doubt at all that, system or no system, what he taught as he taught it has had far more influence on the world than any of the philosophies. It certainly does sound strange that such a man, when he looks back upon his experience, for the purpose of helping others by what he has seen and done and suffered, should find the best part of it all to lie in his weaknesses.
I. If we were to look into this strange paradox we should not find it so inexplicable.—Why does St. Paul glory in the things that belong to this weakness? Not, I imagine, in themselves. He does not say that, like some of the mediæval ascetics or the ancient monks and hermits, that he thought pain, illness, and hunger, others’ treachery, his own failure in themselves good—that he rejoiced and gloried in them as they were. He was quite ready, I think, to avoid them when they did not mean giving up the great object of his life—the effective preaching of Jesus Christ. But he gloried in his weakness, surely, because of the use, when it came to him in its different forms, he put it to. It is because all these things—poverty, distress, failure, sickness—throw the soul back unto God; they all demand and cry out for faith in God. It is not that man in weakness realises the needs more than in health and strength, but that he knows better that he needs when he is thrown back upon the ultimate realities, the spiritual and the eternal. And the man or woman who will feel this most profoundly is the man or woman who has suffered most. Let us look at St. Paul’s experience; it explains what he says. The great impression of his life, if he were to sum it up after studying it carefully, would be, I think, how much he had lost. So far as we can judge, he had lost, as life went on, everything he had, and, most of all, all his friends. His life was a continual surrender.
II. There are two ways in which to bear trial and weakness.
(a) The one is to let them drive us into ourselves, to dwell on our own sufferings, our own sorrows, the things that we have lost and the shadows that close slowly round us. That way always makes men hard and cruel, though they do not know it; always makes them dwell on the faults of others and not on their own; dwell on them and find a strange sort of pleasure in fancying—for it is a fancy—that others are less wise, less thoughtful, less good than themselves. That is the way to increase unhappiness, not to lighten it.
(b) The one way to find happiness, however much you suffer, is always to look out for the good points in other people, always to think the best of them; for, after all, if you are honest, you know the worst about yourself.
III. There is a wonderful power that comes with weakness and loss.—It comes not only to the heroes and saints, but to men and women who seem cast in quite different moulds. Life, history, as you look below the surface, are full of this great wonder—how men grow strong through weakness and happy by what they have had taken away. So we enter the deepest lesson of weakness—the lesson that comes from the Cross. If you feel that you are losing your sense of the nearness of God; that when the things you have been brought up to believe in are questioned, denied, mocked at, you have no answer ready because the questionings have eaten into your own heart; even if you feel as if the love of God was failing you, because you cannot tell if there be a God at all—then remember the things that you do know, that to be brave and true and pure is better than to be cowardly and false and foul. You do know that right is right; that the serious work, the happy companionship, the unselfish sympathy with others who, perhaps, are not strong or industrious or happy does bring its own reward. Your time of weakness, for weakness it is to be for the time bereft of God, may bring you to see clearly what is real goodness, real work, real duty—what lies behind all these overlaying cares in our beset and hurried life. Only let your true desires be set on character, duty, goodness, and God will bring you to them—through the weak things that are temporal to the things of power that are eternal. That is the lesson of the Cross. It was a great victory. Weakness, failure, desertion—so it seemed; but not one word from the Lord of blame of others, not one word that does not mean love and patience and forgiveness and trust. Those are the greatest things in the world because the links between us and God. They are the strongest, because they cast the soul simply and entirely on Our Father Which is in heaven.
—Rev. W. H. Hutton.
Illustration
‘St. Paul’s view is not what we find in the opinions of other great men. Who can imagine the great Napoleon, or Bismarck, the creator of modern Germany—why, they would not have acknowledged that they had any weakness. Who can imagine Darwin, almost the greatest of all men of science, or even that great statesmen of ours who so deeply influenced the politics of fifty years of Queen Victoria’s reign, saying that—saying quite that—that the weaknesses in their lives were the things they most gloried in? No, most great men, most good men, even, would say that their glory came when they saw something that ought to be done and had strength to do it. But here is a great thinker, a great man of action, a man who by his particular presentment of the truth as it came to him has almost certainly more deeply and enduringly influenced the world than any of those four I named, laying a special stress on the very thing that would seem to conflict with his power to make the truth effective. His weakness, his physical “thorn in the flesh,” the messenger of Satan, as he calls it, his continual suffering, labour, peril, apparent failure, the greatness of his task so heroically undertaken and seemingly rewarded with such infinitesimal success—that is a thing that he will glory in.’