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1 Corinthians 15:
42-44
May 16, 2010 ST.
PAUL: “A THORN IN THE FLESH” In this series of sermons we are trying to see what we can learn about this man by the name of St. Paul who is responsible for about half the pages of what we call “The New Testament”, most of which is a compilation of letters that he wrote to the early Christian communities. When I started researching this subject, I was surprised at how much we know about this man, given the fact that he was born about 2007 years ago and given the fact that he wasn’t all that self-referential or self-revealing in the letters that he wrote. These are a few of the things we do know. He was born in about 3 AD and so even though he did not know Jesus, he would have been almost an exact contemporary. Like Jesus, he was also a Jew. We also know that before he became known as St. Paul, his name was Saul, Saul of Tarsus, a city that is now in Turkey. We know that he was a member of the Pharisees – a highly legalistic group who adhered (and wanted everyone else to adhere) to the Jewish law, and not just the 10 commandments, but all the other thousands and thousand of ordinances and regulations that were extrapolated from them. This was religion for them, this was “organized religion” and by God and by force they would make people equally “religious.” He was a zealot, a self-appointed guardian and protector of the law, one who sought to bring to justice and severe punishment, perhaps even capital punishment to those who deviated from his definition of what it means to be “religious”, including those who belonged to this small, seemingly inconsequential group of Jews who followed the life and teachings of a man by the name of Jesus. We are also told that he was a Roman citizen; although, some scholars question whether or not he was. We also know that by profession, he was a “tent maker”, a skill that he no doubt learned from his parents and grandparents. I rather like the idea that this scholar, this intellectual, this man who knew so much about the intricacies of the law was also one who could work with his hands. We also know that he had a very dramatic, traumatic experience on the Road to Damascus, in which he was blinded by a light, fell off his horse, and in this mystical experience he heard Jesus say to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” Temporarily blinded, he was received warmly but with some understandable suspicion by a community of Jews in Damascus who were followers of “The Way” -- “The Way” being the name for those who followed Jesus; ultimately, this group would come to be known as “Christians”, but not for a few more years. Now, there’s one more thing we know about him that for centuries has been the subject of considerable speculation. As I said, he wasn’t particularly self-referential in his letters, but in his second letter to the church at Corinth, situated in what is now the Peloponnesus of Greece, he let the veil slip just a little bit, by saying: To keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh. Look through the pages of his letters and the Acts of the Apostles, and try as you might, I don’t think you’ll be able to find very much that would give you much of an insight on what that “thorn in the flesh” might have been, but human nature being what it, we always like to speculate about those things we know nothing about, particularly with regard to the frailties of other people. So, for what it’s worth, here are some of the speculations and you’re free to take your choice or make your own speculation. I know of at least 3 scholars – John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg and before them, William Ramsey, a Scottish professor at Oxford a number of years ago, who argue that “malaria” was the thorn in his flesh. Growing up in Tarsus as he did, at the foot of the mountains, he lived in a swampy area where there would have been an abundance of mosquitoes, and so long before there was treatment for this disease, Saul or St. Paul might have been a victim of malaria. Some have even argued that his “revelations” his ecstatic experiences may have been a result of the delirium brought on by this disease. While I’m always fascinated by such attempts to find biological causes for spiritual experiences, ultimately I have to say I find them a little sad and spiritually enervating. Moses on Mt. Sinai: It’s not really a “mountain top experience” you’re having, it’s only a function of a hyperactive pituitary gland. St. Paul on the Road to Damascus: It’s not really a mystical experience; it’s just that doggone malaria acting up again.” …So on and so forth. Similarly, other New Testament scholars have come to a different diagnosis. Not malaria, they would say, but epilepsy was St. Paul’s “thorn in the flesh.” All I can say is that I’m glad and grateful that my doctors use a little more of the scientific method before they commence with their medical treatment for whatever my infirmities might be. I mean I would hate to go in to see my doctor and as soon as I say that I have this “thorn in the flesh”, the next thing I know the alarm is sounded; the lights are flashing and I’m wearing a light blue gown with no back to it! There are also those who have taken a more psychological approach to this, and given all of what St. Paul supposedly said about human sexuality and his admonitions that it would really be better if one chose not to get married, that this might indicate that he was afraid of something within himself, uncertain, maybe even fearful of his own sexual identity or orientation. While there might be more evidence for this than either epilepsy or malaria, that evidence is tainted by the fact that as I said last week, later editors, those with their own peculiar ax to grind, might very well have altered what St. Paul had said. So, maybe St. Paul was sexually repressed; maybe he wasn’t, but maybe his editors and historians were. The truth is, we don’t know, but when he spoke of his “thorn in the flesh”, this was but one of a number of speculations that people have made. Others have taken a more holistic approach, if you will, and they have said that Saul may have had a dramatic, life changing experience on the Road to Damascus but it wasn’t as if he left everything behind. Some of his old character traits – good and bad – would have stayed with him in his new persona as St Paul. It was Socrates who said, “The unexamined life is not worth living”, and one of things St. Paul may have learned about himself was that both before and after his dramatic experience he was still the same hot blooded zealot he always was, prone to fits of anger and righteous indignation. I mean, to the church at Galatia, he lost his temper, saying to them, “You stupid Galatians!” …not exactly words they teach in Preaching 101! And so, St Paul came to realize this frailty of his, his tendency to lose his temper, and so he came to speak of this as his “thorn in the flesh.” …Maybe… While this speculation seems perhaps more plausible than some of the others, I try to resist psychoanalyzing someone from the distance of 2000 years. As for me, I’m rather glad he left it open-ended and rather mysterious, for in leaving it vague, it makes it possible then for all of us to identify with him, for I would suspect that we all have our own “thorn in the flesh”, some infirmity, some weakness, some idiosyncratic fault, some frailty or foible. For all of us, our bodies, our physical bodies do not always cooperate, and no doubt we all have our own emotional or psychological issues that can sometimes feel like a “thorn in the flesh.” And so, rather than speculate on what St. Paul’s “thorn” might have been, as interesting and as entertaining as that might be, perhaps it would be better to concentrate on how St. Paul seemed to suggest that one’s thorn in the flesh, one’s human frailty might help us to become better, more compassionate, more fully realized, more fully spiritually realized human beings. Now, we need to be very careful here, for I do not want to suggest, and I don’t think St. Paul was trying to suggest that God sticks a thorn in each one of us “on purpose”, as part of some grand design in order to accomplish some higher purpose. There are some who preach and teach such a theology and frankly, I find it ghastly this notion that God causes human pain, causes terrible things to happen to us in order to teach us a lesson. Nevertheless, I do believe that God is omnipresent, as we say, present in all things, and such is the nature of God’s love that even our own “thorn in the flesh”, whatever it may be, can be used by God to help us become the children of God we were created to be. Speaking of his “thorn in the flesh”, St.
Paul goes on to say, Three times I besought the Lord about this, that that Thorn should leave me, but the spirit said to me, “my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness… For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong. But these are just words on a page and they don’t mean very much if we don’t flesh them out, and I use the word “flesh” quite intentionally. There was a woman by the name of Emily Dickinson who lived all by herself in her family home up in Amherst, Massachusetts. We know that she was thwarted in love, rejected by someone that she thought she loved. She was also a brilliant woman who lived at a time and place where women were not respected as equals, and who knows, there may have been other “thorns in the flesh” as well. And yet despite these infirmities, maybe because of these infirmities she would go on to write some of the most exquisite poetry the world has ever known, saying as she did in one of her poems: Will there really be a morning? Is there such a thing as day? Can I see it from the
mountains O some scholar!, O some sailor! O some wise man from the skies, Please to tell a little
pilgrim Somehow she was able to take the source of her greatest pain and turn it into something quite beautiful, and even though she lived alone, isolated from others, imprisoned by her loneliness, through her poetry, she was able to connect with so many others who have been wounded in love, those who have known what might be called, “the long night’s journey into day” those awake at 3 AM, sleepless, wondering to themselves, “Will there really be a morning? Is there such a thing as day? And if you read her poetry, you will see that she answered those melancholy existential questions in the affirmative, saying in her own delightful, elliptical way: I tell you how the Sun rose
-- And then later in life she would write about her spiritual conquest, how her spirit had not been defeated by her “thorn in the flesh”, saying, as she did: Bind me – I still can sing
-- And thank God she did, for her “chanting” has opened the doors of Paradise for us as well, and in her self-revealing, soul-revealing poetry she has helped us to see that we also can rise above whatever our own infirmities or weakness might be. Here is yet another example of someone who had to come to terms with a very different “thorn in the flesh.” But as that old cliché says, “what can you tell about a book from its cover.” Even if you were close enough to read the title, I Shall Not Hate, it wouldn’t tell you very much about the author. And, if you saw the author’s name, Isseldin Abuelaish, provincialism and name–recognition being what they are, we all might be tempted to say, “never heard of him” and then we would put the book back on the shelf. And then, if I were to tell you that Isseldin Abuelaish is a Muslim, those of us who are zealous in our Christianity in the same way that Saul was zealous in his Judaism, might say, “ah, there’s nothing I can learn from a Muslim, for Christianity is superior to Islam. But if you were to overcome these things, and if you were to pick this book up and read it, you would be richly rewarded, for you would see once again that within us all there are spiritual capacities that are largely unexplored, that we are each one of us a strange combination of two different identities, a physical one and also a spiritual one, and sometimes, it is a “thorn in flesh” that enables us to rise to our true stature as children of God, capable of enormous love and goodness. Izzeldin Abuelaish is a medical doctor who has served in some of the most prestigious hospitals in Israel, and his specialty is infertility, working with young couples who yearn to have children. His own “thorn in the flesh” came in the form of an Israeli missile, a missile that landed in his children’s bedroom in Gaza, killing all 3 of his daughters. Ironic, is it not, that a doctor who works on issues of infertility should lose his own children in such a tragedy, and yet, Frederick Nietzsche was exactly and terrifyingly right when he said, “that which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” And from my perspective, there’s no scientific explanation, no way to explain or explain away how this man has come to terms with his own “thorn in the flesh.” I mean, after such a devastating loss, how can anyone possibly say this: If I could know that my daughters were the last sacrifice on the road to peace between Palestinians and Israelis, then I would accept their loss. I don’t care what the language of his own faith may be; I don’t care whether he’s a Muslim, a Jew, a Buddhist or a Hindu, for me those words are the voice of Christ present within this remarkable man, a man who has taken that terrible thorn in the flesh and turned it into a symbol of hope for all humanity. He has proven exactly what it means when St. Paul says, “when we are weak, we are very, very strong.” I can’t explain what happened to this man anymore than I can explain or explain away what happened to Saul on the road to Damascus. All I can say is, “we’re not in Kansas anymore.” We’re in that strange land, that point of intersection between the physical and the spiritual, and in Dr. Abuelaish and Emily Dickinson and St. Paul we have an illustration of what St. Paul meant when he spoke of the “resurrection of the body.” It is sown a physical body; “Body” is a very poor translation of the Greek word, “Soma”, which is the word that he used, and it’s a word that means not “physical body” but rather, “spiritual personality”, and “Christ” for St. Paul was not just in the person, the physical body of Jesus, but is in fact, the “soma”, the authentic spiritual identity of each one of us, and our task in life is to shed the physical cocoon in which we were born and to become the glorious butterflies we were created to be. Speaking of cocoons, the picture on the front cover of your bulletin is from a 4th century sculpture of St. Paul. Whether that is how St. Paul really looked or how he looked to himself in the mirror, we don’t really know, but it’s hard to look at this gargoyle of human being and not have sympathy for whatever his “thorn in the flesh” may have been. The only physical description we have of St. Paul is from an apocryphal book entitled, Acts of Paul and Thecla. It’s in this book that we find the only physical description of the apostle: He was a man of middling size (about 4 and ½ feet tall) and his hair was scanty, and his legs were a little crooked, and his knees were projecting, and he had large eyes and his nose was somewhat long, and yet, he was full of grace and mercy; at one time he seemed like a man, and at another time, he seemed like an angel. And so it is with us as well. Our self-portraits, when we are truly honest with ourselves, are never very flattering. We see ourselves in all our frailty and imperfections. We know all too well the “thorns in our own flesh.” And yet the good news is, to borrow the words of St. Paul, “we see through a glass darkly”; “we see through a mirror dimly”. With these eyes, we see ourselves in all of our woundedness and imperfection, but if we were to see with what St. Paul called “the eyes of the heart”, we would come to see our true humanity. We would see the resurrected “Soma” of Christ, “full of grace and truth.” Amen. David W. Good Old Lyme, Connecticut
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