Week 11 Friday (Year 1)

Readings: 2 Corinthians 11:18,21-30; Psalm ; Matthew 6:19-23

In some translations Paul says to the Corinthians that he did not come to them with any 'show of oratory', any 'lofty eloquence' (1 Cor 2:1). But the passage we read today, along with others in 2 Corinthians, show us that at least in writing Paul has rhetorical and oratorical skills second to none in the ancient world. He puts them at the service of a form of literature common in many cultures, whereby the heroic deeds of an important person are sung, building in a crescendo to some dramatic climax, some remarkable achievement or action which crowns the person's heroism. Bards in Ireland did this for their chieftains, praise-singers in Africa do the same.

So Paul is singing his own praises, he is boasting, as he says himself. Ironically, though, his litanies record, not any achievement or greatness of his own, but the disasters that have come on him, his deepening knowledge of his own fragility and a list of things undergone, 'suffered'. The litany we read today is cut off before it reaches its climax in the most humiliating of his experiences, when he fled Damascus by being lowered in a basket from a window in the city wall (2 Cor 11:32-33). 

It is all in order to exalt the grace of God which is 'made perfect in weakness ... for when I am weak, then I am strong' - this is how he concludes the next such litany, the one we find in 2 Corinthians 12:1-10 and which we will read at Mass tomorrow.

Paul is living fully in the light of which Jesus speaks in today's gospel reading. It is the light of truth, which shows Paul, as it showed Catherine of Siena and all the great mystics of the Church, that God is the One who is and she (or he) is the one who is not.

It may seem like bad news at first, to be reminded of our weakness, fragility and nothingness. But this is the light that fills the whole body, for then we see that everything we have and are, everything we do and undergo, is received and lived by God's grace. All is gift, not only what is easily seen to be so but all that comes our way, because it comes from the same hands, from the Lord, in whom we live and move and have our being. We can add: in whom we suffer and fail and lose our way, for we can never fall outside the care of those merciful hands.

So let us boast of what we have come to see. If we dare! For we cannot praise God's amazing grace without revealing also the weakness of the poor man, the poor woman, who sings its praises.