As Sorrowful Yet Always Rejoicing

A Meditation on Suffering and Joy in Paul and Luther

^{Part 1  – The Strange Partnership of Sorrow and Joy in the Life of Paul}

³ We put no obstacle in anyone’s way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry, ⁴ but as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: by great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, ⁵ beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; ⁶ by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, the Holy Spirit, genuine love; ⁷ by truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; ⁸ through honor and dishonor, through slander and praise. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; ⁹ as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold, we live; as punished, and yet not killed; ¹⁰ as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing everything (2 Corinthians 6:3-10).

This is not the kind of thinking we are used to, even in the church. Aren’t suffering and joy opposites? So what is Paul talking about here?

Paul is reflecting on the contrasts and struggles – and indeed the jarring contradictions – of his life in ministry as an apostle of Christ. He says he is honoured yet dishonoured, slandered as well as praised, treated as an imposter even though he is genuine, as unknown yet well known, as dying yet alive, punished yet not killed, as sorrowful yet always rejoicing, as poor but making many rich, as having nothing yet possessing everything. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians is rich in this kind of material, and it appears in plenty of other places too, Philippians, Romans, 1 Thessalonians – you name it.

You don’t have to read far in Paul’s letters to notice that suffering and joy are actually almost always found in close proximity to one another in his spiritual teaching and experience, not just as co-incidental realities, not as dramatic contrasts, but as close partners; not merely as adjoining, but as mutually interlocking beams in Paul’s life and ministry.

Note that this is not just about being joyful despite the bad stuff that is happening to us. Neither is it just about enduring and living through the suffering so that you can be joyful afterwards, when it’s over. It is about joy in suffering, that is, in the very midst of it.

Later on in 2 Corinthians (12:10) he says:

Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in needs, in persecutions and distress, for when I am weak then I am strong.

In Colossians 1 and Romans 5 he writes about rejoicing and even boasting in suffering. 

What is really going on here? I think what we find in Paul’s suffering passages in the New Testament takes us well beyond the kind of pious platitudes we often hear about this in church circles, into the reality, the actual lived experience of this strange partnership of sorrow and joy.

This is clearly more than a patient acceptance of suffering; Paul’s rhetoric here takes us way past that. He is not showing off his own heroic apostolic love for Christ, which is so great that he is able and willing to endure all kinds of hardship. He is telling us not about something that he is doing, but something that Christ is doing with him, in him.

So when Paul exhorts us to adopt the same attitude to suffering, what does this mean? What does it show us about the nature of the Christian life? What mysterious spiritual dynamic is at work here? Can we really be sorrowful yet always rejoicing?

Paul and his Afflictions

There is a rich background narrative to all this. When we first meet St Paul in the NT, before his dramatic conversion in Acts 9, he is of course an evil and frightening character – Saul of Tarsus, Jewish zealot, persecutor of Christ and his church. He is not suffering but inflicting suffering on Christians. In Acts 7-8 he aids and abets the execution of the deacon, Stephen, and then is reported to have ravaged and persecuted the church in Jerusalem, entering house after house and dragging out Christian men and women and having them thrown in prison (Acts 8:2-3).

‘Sub Contrario’ (under the sign of the opposite)[1]

There is no minimizing the evil Paul did, nor should we downplay the suffering he inflicted on others, as the young Saul of Tarsus. And yet, as we reflect on the transformation that followed with Paul’s conversion and apostolic ministry, we see even in Paul’s evil the hand of the hidden God, working sub contrario, bringing what Paul had intended for evil, yes even that, to work good and blessing.

Acts 9:15-16 narrates what happens immediately after Paul conversion on the road to Damascus. Ananias is told by God to go to Saul after his encounter with Christ in order to lay hands on him and open his eyes. This narrative is charged with almost unbearable tension and irony. Ananias is understandably terrified; he knows only too well who Saul is and is afraid he too will end up in chains if goes to him revealing his Christian faith. We can hear in Ananias’ words how astounded he is that God is sending him to this man of all men – this evil and dangerous man. But God answers to reassure him, and in this answer that God gives to Ananias is the whole fulcrum, the turning point which shows the meaning and the power of Paul’s whole future life, and of his future suffering in ministry. God says to Ananias:

Go, for he (Paul) is my chosen instrument, to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel. And I will show him how much he must suffer for my name (Acts 9:15-16).

Lets consider this. God is not merely saying ‘Well Paul, you have dished out so much suffering against the church that it is now time for you to get some in return’ – as punishment or as due chastisement. God’s hand is at work much more profoundly than this, overturning human realities, redeeming human evil, transforming sinful hearts. Even as Paul intended harm to those he hurt, yet Christ, working ‘sub contrario’ – under the sign of the opposite – intends Paul to suffer in order that he himself may know more and more deeply, preach more and more passionately, witness more and more powerfully to God’s grace, mercy, freedom and joy.

Paul’ suffering for the name of Christ is the mirror image of the suffering he inflicted on Christ’s church, that is, an opposite image, an image reversed, an image sub contrario. Paul suffers not for the expiation of his sins, in order to redeem himself. Christ had dealt with those sins himself once and for all. He now suffers for the sake of the Gospel, for the proclamation of Christ in the world.  And over the years of Paul’s apostolic ministry, God’s words to Ananias are fulfilled many times: he will suffer greatly for Christ’s name, that name he had once reviled and persecuted.

We read about this in 2 Corinthians, chapters 4, 6 and 11. Paul is flogged, imprisoned, stoned, starved, shipwrecked, humiliated. He once bound Christians in order to drag them into prison, now he is bound in chains and in prison in order to set others free in Christ.

This is the dynamic at work in Paul’s sorrowing yet always rejoicing: the gracious divine irony and severe mercy – the strange double-headed mystery of God’s works – what Luther later called his ‘alien work’ and his ‘proper work’.  

What men intend for evil, God turns to good, as Joseph (Genesis 50:20) explains to his brothers who many years before had left him for dead. This is the sub contrario dynamic that drives Paul’s rejoicing in his sufferings. And it of course all flows directly from the cross, that central fulcrum of all human history, the crucial sub contrario itself, which reverses the sin and death of all creation – the most horrible crime in human history transformed by God, as Luther once put it, into ‘the greatest miracle that has ever taken place’.[2]

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[1] This Latin term, which Luther first coined in his 1518 Heidelberg Theses (WA 1, 353-374), the way it is used grammatically, more accurately means ‘by opposite means’ or ‘under the appearance of the opposite’.

[2] WA TR VI, 6618