In a March column from this year, the journalist Nicholas Kristof considers the transition from “ink on dead trees” journalism to online news. While it is possible to argue that proliferating online news exposes readers to a greater diversity of viewpoints, Kristof argues the opposite: “When we go online, each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about. Nicholas Negroponte of M.I.T. has called this emerging news product "The Daily Me.”
Kristof goes on to describe a study in which Democrats and Republicans were both offered mailings purporting to contain political research. In the study, both sides were eager to see on the one hand, research that would confirm their own views, and on the other hand, “manifestly silly” arguments in favor of views they oppose.
Kristof’s conclusion is that it Americans increasingly live in insulated chambers, and that our access to media can reinforce, rather than puncture, social divisions. He cites statistics that almost half of Americans live in “landslide counties” that vote overwhelming Democrat or Republican: a change from the 60s and 70s. As a result, Kristof recommends that readers regularly engage with partners with views unlike their own, and ends with a joke that he is off to read the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page.
I submit that a similar dynamic can often play out in American Christian communities. One can imagine the above research study playing out along similar lines if “Evangelical” and “Liberal” were substituted for “Democratic” and “Republican.”
Continuing in 2 Corinthians, this week’s lectionary reading contains a passage that, like the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan, has become a universal trope in the English language: the thorn in the side, or, depending on the translation, thorn in my flesh. The context, as I described earlier, is a series of letters to a Corinthian church in the wake of conflict. Paul sarcastically derides the “Super-Apostles” with whom he disagrees, and makes a series of appeals to mend the relationship with the Corinthians. We do not know exactly the nature of this conflict—Paul was writing to an audience familiar with the details, and thus does, like a character in a play, launch into a monologue answering the Who What When Where Why questions. Similarly, the nature of the “thorn in the flesh” is never made clear:
7To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. 8Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. 9But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness."
Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. 10That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong (2 Corinthians 12, 7-10).
In the context of this passage, Paul is making an appeal for the legitimacy of his teaching. Just as Ezekiel does in the lectionary passage from Hebrew Scripture, Paul claims that he received divine revelation to validate the truth of his words. His rhetorical aim is: “don’t believe what these others (“Super-Apostles”) tell you; believe me.” While the context is not explicit, the book of Acts describes the kinds of conflict that early Christians faced; at one point, Paul argues that circumcision is not essential for those who want to follow Christ.
Yet Paul interrupts his description of visions, making an abrupt switch from the 3rd person to the 1st person. He emphasizes that he is not telling the Corinthians about his revelations just so they will admire him and think him extremely fortunate: “To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me.”
While there has been much speculation as to the nature of the actual condition Paul refers to metaphorically as a thorn, it is simply not clarified in the letter. One possibility is that Paul is nursing an injury from physical abuse he survived on his missions. Just before this moment he writes, "Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in the deep" 2 (Corinthians 11:25). However, the mysterious nature of the thorn invites readers who have undergone chronic pain of any kind to identify with Paul.
In an essay called The Bible and Suffering, Rev. Peter Gomes draws attention to the line in which Paul states that the thorn comes from “Satan,” not from God. Gomes describes how frustrating it can be for victims of a great loss when well-wishers come up and say, “This is God’s will.” He quotes a man who had undergone a great loss saying, “God was the first who cried.” Gomes writes of Paul, “The source of his trouble, whatever it is, is not God” (Gomes, 216, 218).
However, Paul is able to reinterpret his suffering. He perceives the thorn, not as a meaningless burden, but as a steady source of humility in the context of his mission. Paul’s thorn links him to the pain Christ endured on the cross:
“This is not suffering for sufferings sake; it is suffering for Christ’s sake, so that Paul and all who see and learn from him might learn of the strength that Christ supplies. We learn as well that God’s role is not to relieve suffering or to spare us from it, but to enable us to bear and endure it so that even our suffering is redemptive for ourselves and others” (Gomes, 218-219).
In the passage, Paul does not immediately accept his suffering. He describes appealing three times to God to relieve the thorn—implying faith that in some instances, God responds to prayer for healing. The many narratives in which Christ heals those who appeal to him arguably emboldened Paul to also ask directly for healing in prayer. Yet Paul does not understand the absence of relief from the thorn as a sign that God has abandoned him. Gomes writes,
“Thus, God will not interfere despite the three appeals of the apostle. Why not? So that Paul will learn that he can rely upon Christ when he needs him, that is, in his weakness. The sufferings, the persecutions, the calamities, the insults and hardships, all of these are not ends in themselves but means to a greater end, the demonstration that Christ gets us through such things” (Gomes, 219).
After reading Nicholas Kristof’s article about the polarization of American civic life, I decided to try harder to understand religious traditions outside my own, even if I do not share their beliefs. In the nonfiction book God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission, Marie Griffith describes her fieldwork attending meetings of Women’s Aglow Fellowship International, an interdenominational organization of charismatic Christian worshippers. While Griffith takes an analytical, academic approach in her project of describing the group to a larger audience, the portrait that emerges does not depict women who passively embrace second-class status in a religious patriarchy. This complexity is evident in the chapter discussing how members respond to sources of pain that, like Paul’s thorn, do not recede with prayer.
In one example with which I will conclude, Griffith describes the account of a young woman, “Joyce,” diagnosed with cancer. Although she and her family and friends pray for healing, her symptoms worsen. She describes how her faith helps her, not to heal her disease, but to take pleasure in the life she has that remains: ‘The difference is . . . I’m living again. I’m watching the flowers bloom. I’m hearing the birds sing. I’m cuddling (my children)” (Griffith, 90). Summarizing common themes that appear in the evangelical women’s accounts of suffering, Griffith writes,
“Here again, the lesson to be learned about faith is not about the fulfillment of physical healing but about accepting death and appreciating everyday pleasures in the meantime. Her wistful closing words about her husband and children, ‘And they will remember me when they laugh,’ are poignantly suggestive of the heartache entailed in forsaking her family for the promise of heaven, a task that Joyce suggests is ongoing and perhaps never wholly finished until death” (Griffith, 90).
Other lectionary readings for this week are: 2 Samuel 5: 1-5, 9-10 or Ezekiel 2:1-5; Mark 6: 1-13; and Psalm 48.
--Elizabeth Fels
Sources:
Gomes, Peter. The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Heart and Mind. HarperSanFrancisco: San Francisco, California, 1996.
Griffith, R. Marie. God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission. University of California Press: Berkeley, California, 2000.
Kristof, Nicholas. “The Daily Me,” published at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/opinion/19kristof.html?scp=2&sq=kristof%20wall%20street%20journal&st=cse
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