12 Since, then, we have such a hope, we act with complete frankness, 13 not like Moses, who put a veil over his face to keep the people of Israel from gazing at the end of the glory that was being set aside. 14 But their minds were hardened. Indeed, to this very day, when they hear the reading of the old covenant, the same veil is still there; it is not unveiled since in Christ it is set aside. 15 Indeed, to this very day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds, 16 but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. 17 Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. 18 And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit. 4:1 Therefore, since it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart. 2 We have renounced the shameful, underhanded ways; we refuse to practice cunning or to falsify God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God.
2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2 (NRSVue)
In 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2, the apostle Paul encapsulates his ministry as a transparent and principled dependence upon God’s Spirit to persuade others to embrace the freedom the Spirit offers. For where the Spirit is, there is hope which yields freedom, forthrightness, patience, and vulnerability .
Paul has been engaged in a conflict with pretenders to apostolic authority in order to preserve access to this dynamic. Paul insists he has engaged in nothing devious over the course of his apostolate, nothing that would bring shame upon his mission or his Lord and consequently call into question the legitimacy of either. Moreover, he insists the Corinthian Christians know this.
He summarizes what he has done for and among them and the character he has demonstrated. He also owns his weaknesses and vulnerabilities, as these testify to the One who has called him. In keeping with his practice of treating his audience as morally accountable subjects, he urges them to compare his account to what they can recall of his ministry among them.
Paul’s opponents, on the other hand, pander to the Corinthian Christians as they make much of themselves. Their self-presentation earns Paul’s mocking title of “super-apostle” in contrast to him, a man with little charismatic flair, humble in appearance, and of contemptible physical prowess. These individuals maximize qualities that the world finds attractive and minimize the frailties and liabilities that characterize all of us in the present fallen order. But they are different, they assert, and more promising therefore than Paul.
They make much of others so as to be made much of in turn. They pursue “greatness” in the form of charisma and prestige and encourage their hearers to do the same. They tell the Corinthian Christians that they are enough in themselves, that they are already great, that they are not pilgrims on the way and do not need to submit to Paul’s demands for humility. peddle these qualities as substantive, rather than relative, goods, capable of conferring freedom and glory. But can they actually deliver it?
Paul insists they cannot because their program is not grounded in God’s Spirit and the hope that engenders. Those who insist they are already enough or can secure ultimate blessing for themselves are without the substantive hope Paul stewards in the gospel. And when we are without such hope we will not allow for the deferral of our desires. Our desires motivate us and yet they often pull us in directions contrary to our good. We may be conscious of desiring a status or position that we think will command the respect of others or an object that we think will satisfy us but the end result, by itself, disappoints us. The apparent causes of our desires cannot fulfill the longing that shapes our subjectivity. God must do this..
Fixation upon and demand for our desires opens the door to treating others as means towards an end, as things that can either further our goals or hinder them. If we view others as means to an end we will flatter them or otherwise manipulate them to secure the aid to which we have reduced them. Flattery will not tell the truth, because it will treat others as better, more upright, wiser, or more accomplished than they actually are. Paul, conversely, speaks freely, saying what needs to be said in the specific contexts in which it is called for.
If we view them as hindrances, we will do everything in our power to remove them and check on our aspirations that they represent. In neither scenario are we acting out of integrity. We are not dealing with others as moral subjects worthy of both dignity and scrutiny. Paul, however, loves his congregants by persuading them of important matters rather than crushing them with the full weight of his authority. He leads by example by refusing high honors and by working to make his living rather than exploiting their generosity. He does not incite friends against each other with lies or betray those to whom he has made promises as cunning influencers often did and still do. He will speak sternly at times, but he is always prepared to forgive and to reconcile on the other side of his reproval. Paul’s hope is always that rebuke will shake a person out of their stupor and inspire repentance, and nothing makes him happier than when a person who has behaved in a manner that contradicts the Lord they confess is restored to fellowship.
Paul in this passage is not only defending himself but urging his hearers to take up the same substantive (and not merely formal) freedom out of which he acts. Such a freedom is more than the availability of options, but the ability to do what is right. And it isn’t the privilege of an apostle alone but the prerogative of all Christ followers. It is a domain of right and responsibility that humankind was created to enjoy but forfeited. It is the freedom of Jesus Christ himself, and it cannot be accessed by the means Paul’s opponents advertise.
It’s this freedom that allows Paul to forgo a “fortified mind,” as his Stoic contemporaries would counsel, one that is closed off against vulnerability and disappointment. Instead he is open to the agonies of relating to his congregations, suffering their contentiousness and moral ineptitude as he seeks to persuade them of a better way rooted in a common Lord and Spirit.
He is also free to forgo the tenets of Epicureanism and other views that maximize self and pleasure. Paul has instead embraced the self-abandonment of turning to the Lord, as it is in this fundamental reorientation that the burden of creating a self and achieving its ambitions is relinquished.
Turning to the Lord is a turn from the self for the sake of the self and of the One who is calling it into existence. Hope is grounded in this One rather than in our efforts or our potential. Neither of these can shunt us into eschatological wholeness, due to both our finitude and our fallenness.
However much we tell ourselves and believe that focusing on ourselves yields freedom we are nurturing a lie, one that distorts our character and splinters community. We are already divided in mind and spirit; clamoring after prominence and possessions only deepens that division. It cannot heal it.
It is when we are destitute of such hope that underhanded ways become attractive. Desperation is the injurious edge of unchecked desire and will justify things that we should know not to do. That we do them shows that deviousness and malice are within us already and that we are in need of transformation, the same kind of transformation that overturned Saul of Tarsus’ desire to eradicate the Christian sect and made of him a sacrificial leader to the same movement.
Paul fittingly compares his situation to that of Moses’ to draw both a parallel and a contrast. Moses veiled his face to hide the consequence of his face-to-face visits with the Lord. He did this, though, not to conceal something important from the Israelites but to turn their attention away from the ephemeral effect of his turning to the Lord. When he would return to the assembly the people would fixate on his shining face rather than the particulars of the covenant he was mediating.
Similarly, the Corinthian Christians are in danger of focusing the entirely wrong objects of attention. The “super-apostles” invite clamor for their rhetorical proficiency, their letters of recommendation, their prestige, their attractiveness. But these qualities are not borne out of beholding the Lord and so do not reflect the glory Paul knows is worthwhile and lasting.
Paul however does not conceal the effects of his continual turning to the Lord as these are not temporary changes that distract people from the substance of the covenant he mediates. Rather, Paul’s ongoing transformation in Christlikeness is the subjective aspect of these mysteries, an authentication and imprint of their reality and power.
The glory of God reflected by Paul and by all who turn to the Lord is no incidental diversion. Rather, it is a testament to the subjectivization that opens onto new possibilities. That transformation of the subject accordingly renounces the typical means of political strategy, ones that typify the “super-apostles” and other bogus leaders to this day.
Moses did not mislead the Israelites by veiling his face. Paul is lamenting how it was expedient for Moses to do this to overcome their fear. It was glorious that Moses reflected the glory of God as a result of his encounters; the fact that his face shone is not in itself a diversion. That it became one reveals more about the subjectivity of his audience than it does the covenant he ministered.
Paul sees something similar in the frivolous enthusiasm over worldly credentials that his opponents exploit. His criticism is of the attitude that ignores substance and devotes its attention to trivialities and extravagances, thinking that they reflect greatness. The tragic truth, however, is that the glory prized by such an attitude is not a lasting glory. It will fade and worse, our integrity will fade with it. We become like what we behold and we behold what we value, for better or for worse.
Paul situates himself within a history that began with Moses and contrasts the covenants they delegated not as worse and better but as promise and fulfillment. There was glory and true speech in the Mosaic covenant just as there is in the new covenant: we do violence to Paul’s text if we say otherwise. The sole substantive difference between these administrations of God’s liberating reign is the gift of God’s Spirit provided through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The freedom that was conferred in the Exodus was formalized and given conceptual clarity in the covenant that followed it. The Mosaic legislation showed the subjects of the Exodus ends of freedom and the proper object of hope.
But the ability to will and to do were still limited by the subjectivity of fallenness that intervened upon that formation. These limitations have always awaited a messianic reconfiguration of the world and humanity and their shared possibilities. The covenant arrangement mediated through Moses was always keyed to and anticipated the covenant that would unleash the Spirit of God, that covenant that Paul heralded.
The Spirit is the decisive factor in any ethical and political existence that would strive for truth, for justice, and for a mode of persuasion that can challenge the world’s assumptions of what is possible without rhetorically pulverizing those who do not yet agree or pretending that we are better or wiser than we really are.
The Spirit is the intervention into human subjectivity that accomplishes what we most need in these overlapping realms. The Spirit disrupts the death drive that undermines our activities and our ambitions, that brings about consequences contrary to our aims and to our self-interest. The Spirit does this by sharing the life of God and the mind of Christ with all who turn from the ways of life the world offers as life-giving and wise to the Lord.
This is why there is such urgency in Paul’s appeal. He calls upon his hearers to remember rightly how he had conducted himself among them in order to contrast his exercise of authority and its consequences from the actions of those who presume or who usurp apostolic leadership. Those who heed them remain themselves, but only themselves: without transformation, without impetus towards the good, without any organization of their skills for a project of substantive change. They are content instead with the flattery that funds their leaders’ positions, with the illusion that they are complete in themselves. And it is so in the present for all who heed such leaders and thinkers.
Paul’s listeners, on the other hand, have never been afforded such deception or otherwise told what they wanted to hear. They have always received the admonishment and the consolation that comes from Jesus Christ, that addresses their real frailties and defects and needs.
Whoever we are, we are subject to indoctrination into various fears and desires. We are formed to fixate on products and projects that cannot confer upon us ideal selves. We also habitually spurn criticisms that lay bare our incompleteness. We hate the discovery that we are not yet what we should be.
But refusing the imperfect present is an imprisonment we cannot see because we have accepted it as the condition of our freedom. And however much it leads to pain, strife, degradation, and the destruction of bonds and even life, our grip upon this illusion holds tight so long as we do not take up the freedom that comes from turning to the Lord. We hurt ourselves and others, fixated on the objects of our desires, which are routinely no object at all and so evades our grasping and scheming.
“Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom”: a freedom that exceeds our desires, that relativizes them and unveils our true calling and need. The freedom of the Spirit assures us we are free by belonging to Christ and not by prioritizing our ambitions over the needs of others or maximizing our options by avoiding commitments or exhausting ourselves with overwork. It is in exercising such freedom that we are freed to become the ones we were created to be. No manipulation, no deception, no connivance is necessary when we live within this sphere offered in and by the Spirit.
