Tuesday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 360

Today’s first reading from 1 Corinthians 1 as rendered by the New Revised Standard Version:

As surely as God is faithful, our word to you has not been “Yes and No.” For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we proclaimed among you, Silvanus and Timothy and I, was not “Yes and No”; but in him it is always “Yes.” For in him every one of God’s promises is a “Yes.” For this reason it is through him that we say the “Amen,” to the glory of God. But it is God who establishes us with you in Christ and has anointed us, by putting his seal on us and giving us his Spirit in our hearts as a first installment.

 

Saint Paul often wrote with intense excitement as his brilliant mind generated new insights. Well educated in his Jewish religion he pondered and preached the Gospel with the fire of the Holy Spirit. Born of that enthusiasm, his words and sentences sometimes fell all over each other. I could not quite understand the Catholic lectionary’s (NABRE) version of 2 Cor 1:19d which reads: “but “yes” has been in him.” 

So I went to the NRSV and found the same Greek expression rendered, “…but in him it is always “Yes.”

The “it” is “the Word of God,” which is to say, God’s essence is creative, affirming, enthusiastic, and edifying. There is no negativity in God. The Gospel (it) is spoken to worried and harassed humankind from that beautiful essence of God.

Saint Francis of Assisi with the same excitement, twelve centuries later, would praise God, “You are good, all good, supreme good, Lord God, living and true!”

There is not much room for pessimism in Saint Paul or Saint Francis. Like all the saints they received the Gospel and gazed directly into its source, the brilliant sunshine of God. They saw no shadows. Even the cross, which seems to human beings like unspeakable horror, has no darkness. The faithful can see only the purity of God’s mercy in it.

Coming from that ecstatic place, the Apostle speaks defensively of a former message to the Corinthians. In 1 Corinthians he had spoken rather severely. He then received news from them, perhaps a series of troublesome questions, and his reply was direct and sharp. Their response, by letter or messenger, accused him of changing his tune. He seemed positive one day and negative the next.

He swore “as surely as God is faithful,” that was not the case, “…our word to you has not been “Yes and No.”

It’s not hard to understand what was happening: the Corinthians heard Paul’s message with their own preconceptions of what God should say, and with those misunderstandings he sounded contradictory. They had not yet learned to hear the Word of God.

But, on the other hand, every preacher can tell you of the time they preached their heart out only to learn, a week later, no one in the congregation had understood what they were saying. They were, in one sense, preaching to the wrong audience, the one in their mind rather than the one in the church. In this case, Paul was writing from the confinement of jail to an imaginary audience and his Corinthian people didn’t know what to make of it.

But his Gospel was 100% accurate. It takes much effort, knowledge, experience, and courage to read it with Saint Paul's clarity of mind.  We pray that we too might gaze upon the face of God like Paul, Francis, and Theresa of Calcutta to understand God’s word in the 21^st century. We pray that we might hear the Gospel clearly for the Holy Spirit will not permit even twenty centuries of change and upheaval to muddy God’s word to His people.