2 Corinthians 12

Second Corinthians 12 contains the strangest boast in the Bible. Paul has been pushed by rivals into listing credentials, and he does it in a way that undoes the whole exercise. He knows a man, he says, who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven and heard things that cannot be told. He will not say it was himself, though it was, and he will not boast of it. He will boast instead of the thing that came with it: a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, given to keep him from conceit. He asked three times for it to go. The answer he received is one of the most quoted sentences in Scripture, and it is a refusal. My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is perfected in weakness. Paul's response is not resignation but delight: when I am weak, then I am strong. The rest of the chapter is less famous and just as revealing. Paul defends the fact that he never took the Corinthians' money, insists that he wants them and not their possessions, and admits that he is afraid of what he will find when he comes: quarreling, arrogance, disorder, and sin no one has repented of. The apostle who saw Paradise is also the pastor who lies awake over a difficult church. The chapter holds both, and it is the thorn, not the vision, that he wants remembered.