This is hardly the most immediately accessible passage in the New Testament. If you have just dropped in here by chance, you may be saying to yourself (or even murmuring to your neighbour) They can’t be going to spend the next 25 minutes looking at that – don’t be ridiculous – it’s too ancient, too obscure, too irrelevant! Well, I’m afraid we are – but I think we’ll all need help, even those of us who have worked our way through the letter to this point; and certainly those who are coming to it completely fresh and new at this moment. So let me pray, and then we’ll do our best with these verses.
Father God, please take us back into the mind of your apostle Paul, as he wrote these words all those years ago. Help us to learn from them lessons about you and about ourselves for our lives today. We ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Introduction: ‘All the way up to the President’
You may have noticed that ‘Unmasking the Enemy’ is our title, and I think it is a good title for this passage. Because we saw last week that here in this letter that we call 2 Corinthians, Paul is defending himself against opponents – but they are a bit of a phantom as far as we are concerned: we 21st Century readers of the letter. Because we have to guess at what they may have been saying from what Paul is saying in response. We can’t hear them. However, in today’s passage the plot thickens and the denouement comes in verse 13: ‘For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, masquerading as apostles of Christ.’ It is like one of those films where you just don’t know who the real enemy is at first (Conspiracy Theory; Clear and Present Danger – there must be hundreds of other examples where as the film unfolds you gradually realise, Whoa! This is a bit more serious than we thought. It’s not just, say, a drug cartel in South America: maybe it’s the Government; maybe it’s the FBI; maybe it goes All the way up to the President. Some will remember that great film about Watergate: All the President’s Men, the way that just unfurled and unfurled and unfurled and unfurled). Well, Paul is doing that here, and at this point he unmasks Satan himself.
But I want to warn us again against too much guesswork about precisely who these men were and exactly what they were teaching. We simply are not told in detail. And if we needed to know, we would be. There is heavy ironic innuendo behind much of what Paul wrote; we can’t always be certain exactly what he meant. For example, verse 1 drips with irony: ‘I hope you will put up with a little of my foolishness; but you are already doing that.’ It’s not clear whether Paul means, ‘Since you think that I’m an idiot anyway, I might as well act that way’; or whether he means, ‘You’re already putting up with foolishness in these other teachers, so please put up with a little bit in me, too.’ It’s ambiguous; and we’re going to try to focus now on the explicit clarities of this passage, rather than its ambiguities and implications. So I’ve called the first point ‘Spiritual Seduction’.
1) Spiritual Seduction – Another Jesus, a different spirit, a different gospel (verses 2-6)
Here is an unpleasant picture for a Sunday sermon: ‘I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy. I promised you to one husband, to Christ, so that I might present you as a pure virgin to him. But I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ’ (vv. 2, 3). Paul was the first person to bring the Christian gospel to Corinth. He came with the desire to present those in Corinth who believed it, to Jesus at the end of time, as Jesus’ pure virgin bride. It’s rather like the father of the bride presenting the bride to the bridegroom. But then the father of the bride goes in to say goodnight to his engaged daughter, only to find a previous boyfriend in bed with her, on the night before the wedding. The Christian faith is as exclusive as marriage, and can as easily be betrayed.
Notice, it is the mind of the Christian that is liable to this seduction: ‘I’m afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ’ (v. 3). We may be familiar with the idea that Satan can blind the minds of unbelievers to stop them understanding the gospel. But here we are warned that it’s the minds of Christians which may be led astray (or corrupted – it’s a strong word in the Greek) from our sincere and pure devotion to Christ, after we have been converted. Paul is clearly referring to their conversion in verse 4: ‘For if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it easily enough.’ Having heard about Jesus, having received the Spirit, having accepted the gospel (what it is to be converted, to become a Christian), they have moved on because someone has come and told them about a subtly different Jesus, a different Spirit, a different gospel.
Notice again, we are not told how this new preaching/teaching differed. But the fact is it differed. So what are we to learn? That we are to hang on tight to the gospel that first converted us. In the Christian life we never get away from the basic facts, the basic Christian truths that bring a non-Christian into being a Christian – that bring us back into relationship with God: the gospel that converts.
As one of your preachers here in this church, I cannot warn you against all the possible corruptions of Jesus that abound in our world. They are too numerous. They are everywhere. You and I will encounter them this week, as we encountered them last week. But I can tell you that they exist; and I can encourage you to keep a clear picture of the New Testament Jesus before your eyes. That is why you may sometimes feel that we never get away from the basics, here at St. Andrew the Great – because it is the basic, simple gospel message of God’s Son coming to this earth to die for our sins; and thereby making it possible for each of us to return to God’s rule over our lives and to live in His kingdom by His Spirit—it is that gospel that saves us and that will take us all the way to heaven. And if we do not keep that clear, we will be led astray from our sincere and pure devotion to Christ and will fall prey to preachers of another Jesus and a different Spirit and a different gospel.
If I may say so, I think this may have particular relevance for those of us here today who grew up in a Christian home. It is a glorious privilege to look back and to be able to think, There was never a time when I did not know Jesus. Praise God that is true probably for quite a high proportion of us here this evening. But your very familiarity with Jesus for the whole of your life (if you are one of those people) may blur the distinctiveness of the Jesus who saves you. It may make you a little more prone to be led away to another Jesus and a different Spirit. Others of us will remember very vividly the Jesus who first spoke to us in our adult lives, and brought us to repentance and faith. And we need to keep that memory always fresh.
There are always other Jesuses trying to get into the frame. It is like that moment at the end of a soccer or a rugby match when the TV is trying to interview the Man of the Match, or the coach, or the captain, down on the touchline. And there’s some wally in the background jumping up and down trying to get his face on TV. We need to be sure we recognise the real Jesus, and that we will not get distracted.
Now there may be a hint in the next two verses of our passage, that these other Jesuses may be humanly more impressive than the New Testament Jesus: more sensational, more appealing, more fashionable, closer to the culture of our society. For there is, in verses 5 and 6, an indication of one clear difference between Paul and these rivals of his: ‘But I do not think I am in the least inferior to those “super-apostles”. I may not be a trained speaker, but I do have knowledge. We have made this perfectly clear to you in every way.’ Now Paul isn’t saying that he is a bad speaker (he’s using a technical term there where he says he’s not a ‘trained speaker’). He is saying that the content of his sermons mattered more than their form. That’s what the first part of verse 6 means: ‘I may not be a trained speaker, but I do have knowledge.’ He didn’t care whether they were impressed by his sermon, but only whether they listened to what he said. It is a feature of babies that at their first birthday they show much more interest in the wrapping-paper than they do in the birthday present it contains. I remember 21 years ago our oldest reaching his first birthday and, to my amusement – and slight disappointment –as Chris attacked the wrapping paper of his First Birthday present with great vigour, he showed no interest whatsoever in the carefully chosen selection of cuddly toys that Fiona and I had acquired for him. So it is the infantile Christian who is impressed by the outward trappings of the Christian faith – by the ‘super-apostle’ with his eloquence and his high profile, with his impressive CV and long list of publications and academic qualifications and distinctions. We are an image-conscious, feelings-led society.
I was ill in bed on Friday (when I should have been writing this sermon). And one dear friend came round with some very expensive orange juice and a magazine. Not a magazine, I have to say, that I think I had ever seriously opened before. She said it would help me with my sermon preparation. Well, I looked at it closely, and – forgive my naivety, as you may be a regular reader of ‘Hello’, and you may be familiar with it’s pages – but it is phenomenally glamorous. The images inside a magazine like this are superlative. They’re not pornographic. They are just wonderful photographs of wonderfully beautiful people. As for their intellectual content – well, we’ll draw a veil over that. Because that’s not what I’m wanting to focus us on. The image, the power of the image, very powerful, very evocative – and, it seems to me, completely superficial. I think the orange juice probably did me more good.
Well, let’s bring this home to roost, if we may: there are two sorts of remarks that people sometimes make to encourage us at this church, and I want you to ponder them if you would. One of which I find encouraging, but the other is subtly discouraging to me. There are some who say, “I like to attend St. Andrew the Great because the preaching is good.” And there are others who say, “I like to attend St. Andrew the Great because they take the Bible seriously.” Do you detect the difference between those two remarks? There is a huge difference. One has penetrated beneath the surface of things and begun to see what is going on. The other is, in the terms of this passage, ripe for seduction by Satan. Forgive me if you’ve told me that you like to come to St. Andrew the Great because the preaching is good. I will, for the sake of charity, assume that what you meant by that was that you like to come to St. Andrew the Great because they take the Bible seriously.
Please be someone who comes because we take the Bible seriously, and not because you like the wrappings – you like to be in a fuller church, you like the buzz, you like the music, you like the preaching. Or, if you are presently coming for those reasons (and they are not in themselves bad things – please don’t misunderstand what I am saying), please ponder why we take the Bible so seriously. Please ponder why every one of your preachers spends the major part of every one of his weeks with a commentary, studying the passage he’s going to try to teach you on Sunday – and why that is so much more important than the numbers who attend, the atmosphere, or the people we see when we are here.
Now one part of Paul’s disagreement with these impressive ‘super-apostles’ concerned pay. That expression ‘not a trained speaker’ (as it has been translated in verse 6) meant an amateur: someone who was not paid for his speaking. So my second heading, covering that second paragraph of the chapter, is this:
2) Money – Preaching the gospel free of charge (vv. 7-12)
‘Was it a sin for me to lower myself in order to elevate you by preaching the gospel of God to you free of charge? [by lowering himself, Paul probably meant doing manual work – maybe as a tent-maker – in order to support himself] I robbed other churches by receiving support from them so as to serve you. And when I was with you and needed something, I was not a burden to anyone, for the brothers who came from Macedonia supplied what I needed. I have kept myself from being a burden to you in any way, and will continue to do so’ (vv. 7-9). Now it was probably Paul’s strategy to use financial support from the churches that he had founded to enable him to work in new, pioneering, missionary situations without asking for support from the non-Christians there. He was determined to offer the gospel free of charge to those who’d not yet heard it. That’s why we try to avoid collections at Guest Services, for example. But, for some reason, Paul wanted to continue this practice with regard to Corinth, although they were no longer a pioneering missionary situation: ‘I have kept myself from being a burden to you in any way, and will continue to do so. As surely as the truth of Christ is in me, nobody in the regions of Achaia [Greece] will stop this boasting of mine.’ (vv. 9b, 10). It was because of his love for them: ‘Why? Because I do not love you? God knows I do!’ (v. 11). It sounds as if someone had been suggesting that Paul did not want to be too dependent on the Corinthians because he did not want to be that intimate with them; he did not want to be beholden to them. So he had refused to accept their money out of a lack of love for them. No way! said Paul: ‘Why? Because I do not love you? God knows I do!’ But there was clearly more to it than that, because he goes on in verse 12: ‘And I will keep on doing what I am doing in order to cut the ground from under those who want an opportunity to be considered equal with us in the things they boast about.’
We’re back to those opponents again and to how their values not only differed from Paul’s, but they differed from the gospel. In fact, they were against the gospel. Paul was determined that there could be no possible comparison between his ministry and that of men who thought you could put a cash value on spiritual things (that you could judge a preacher by the size of the collection). One relation of mine when he heard how much I’m paid as a vicar in the Church of England said, “It’s always the same: if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.” (It was very salutary for me to hear that). But Paul would have agreed with the commentator who wrote on this passage: ‘If a preacher is not willing to preach for nothing, he had better not preach at all.’
Conclusion – An unwelcome warning
Now we come to that devastating denouement when, as it were, Paul finally pulls the veil away and, in some of the strongest language he ever uses, writes this: ‘For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, masquerading as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising, then, if his servants masquerade as servants of righteousness. Their end will be what their actions deserve’ (vv. 13-15). Please, when you hear that word ‘Satan’ don’t let yourself be confused by images of a figure in red tights with a goatee beard. Rather let’s let the severity of this unwelcome warning sink into us.
May I remind you what this passage has said to us so far? We don’t know precisely what heresy these men taught. We know from verse 4 that they will take us away from what converted us. We can guess from verses 5 and 6 that they put more emphasis on style and image, on what the culture found acceptable and thought was important, than on content; and from verses 7-12 we can guess that their attitude to money was suspect. We must guard ourselves on all those points.
But I want particularly, as we close, to note this (it’s a quotation from another commentator on this passage): ‘When Satan wants to injure the church, he invariably dresses himself up as a Christian.’ Paul does not lament the emperor Nero. Are you aware of that? Nowhere in the New Testament do you find him tearing his hair out about Roman persecution. Even though they crucified Christians upside down, Paul doesn’t complain about it. But again and again in his letters we get this insistent message: that when Satan wants to injure the Church, he invariably dresses himself up as a Christian.
The real danger is not unbelief, according to Paul, but wrong belief – a whole network of leaders installed in the Church, actively working against the gospel in the name of the gospel. Seducing people to another Jesus, in the name of Jesus. And instilling a deadly self-centred triumphalism in the name of Christian maturity.
Is this not alarming? I am criticised at times for being a barking and hectoring preacher – and I am (I’m sorry about that). And so I would love to end today on a strongly warm and encouraging note instead. And I cannot do so! Paul does not name names, and I’m not going to name names. But if you are not alarmed by this passage, you ought to be! You may not yet be a Christian, and this is not that disturbing for you. But if you are a Christian you must find this disturbing.
But can I say to all of us that we must heed the warnings of the New Testament, and not read it with our eyes shut? We’ve got to use our Bibles and we’ve got to use our minds; and we must not be seduced.
Let’s pray:
Father, that is a difficult passage from long ago, and I don’t know if I’ve preached it right this evening, or that I’ve understood what it is saying to us at the beginning of the 21st Century. It is an extraordinary thing that we are still looking, 20 centuries later, at these words – and pondering them. And that the Church is still here on this earth, despite all that has gone on to overthrow the simple gospel message that has brought us back to know you – Christian believers tonight, who have come through Jesus into a knowledge of God and the forgiveness of sins and the power of the Spirit in our lives. We praise you for the power there is in the gospel. And we pray that we may heed the Bible’s warning and walk where you lead us, warily, with our eyes open and our minds engaged – looking to the Jesus who saved us, to keep us to the end. In His name we ask it. Amen.