Wednesday, July 19, 2023

Victor Paul Furnish on the Collection for Jerusalem in 2 Corinthians 8-9

  

Why was Paul so concerned that his churches contribute to this fund for Jerusalem, and even send their delegates to accompany it? What was its importance for him, that he should finally decide to take it to Jerusalem himself, thus further postponing a long-delayed trip to Rome and mission to Spain? Several factors seem to have been operative.

 

First, Paul was undoubtedly concerned to provide needed economic assistance to “the poor among the saints in Jerusalem” (Rom 15:26, RSV). In this respect, the so-called “famine-relief” mission he and Barnabas had carried out for the Christians at Antioch could well have been prototypical. Thus, in 2 Cor 8, 9, Paul does not hesitate to commend the collection as a genuinely charitable act, those who have much sharing with those who have little (8:13-15), assisting those who are in need of material support (9:12). It is hardly surprising, then, that one of the terms the apostle uses to identity the collection is the word diakonia (Rom 15:31; 2 Cor 8:4; 9:, 12, 13; the corresponding verb in Rom 15:25; 2 Cor 8:19, 20), in these instances used by him in the technical sense of “relief work” . . .

 

However, several of Paul’s other terms for the collection show that it also had important theological significance for him. In fact, he refers to it as a “collection” (logeia) only in 1 Cor 16:1, 2 (RSV: “contribution[s]”). More frequently, he uses words which have rich theological associations; these include eulogia (2 Cor 9:5; sometimes “blessing”), charis (1 Cor 16:3; 2 Cor 8:6, 7, 9; sometimes “grace,” as in 2 Cor 8:1, 9; 9:14), leitourgia (2 Cor 9:12, and the verb in Rom 1527; sometimes “priestly service”), and koinonia (Rom 15:26; 2 Cor 8:4; 9:13, and the verb in Rom 15:27; sometimes used to mean “partnership” in Christ, the Spirit, the gospel, faith, etc.). . . . The last term is especially important. Above all, Paul seems to have promoted the collection among his largely Gentile congregations as a tangible expression of the unity of Jew and Gentile in the gospel. It was to be further evidence, now offered by his congregations themselves, of that “partnership” (koinonia) he and Peter had once celebrated with a handshake in Jerusalem (Gal 2:9). The “relief work” is at the same time a work of “grace” and an act of Christian “partnership,” and it is described as such in 2 Cor 8:4, where all three terms are used (literally: “the grace and the partnership of the relief work for the saints”). Paul can also think of it as an expression of live (2 Cor 8:8, 24), and he compares one’s participation in it with the utter self-giving of Christ for others (2 Cor 8:9). For he is convinced that participation in the sufferings, death, and resurrection of Christ (e.g., Phil 3:10-11; cf. 2 Cor 1:5-7) both bestows and requires a community of caring and concern. That partnership in Christ transcends even such apparently unbreachable barriers as those between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female (Gal 3:27-28). Paul’s collection, then, was also an ecumenical act, an act of Christian fellowship, an enactment of the partnership of Jew and Gentile in the gospel of Christ. (Victor Paul Furnish, II Corinthians [AB 32a; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1984], 411-12)