Chronic Suffering

2 Corinthians 12:2-10

Introduction

I am no medical doctor, although I have had plenty of experience with the medical care system, both with my own health concerns and those of family members. We have had to face a number of health issues from injuries to illnesses that have been caught to those that probably had a genetic component. Again, this does not make me an expert but I have observed some things.

There are basically three types of conditions that you can have. One is a terminal condition. This is a condition that will end in death. That could be in a short time or a long time. My father had a condition in which his bone marrow stopped producing blood. There was no way to fix this and they could only prolong his life with transfusions. He lived much longer than was expected. Another type is the kind of condition that we experience very regularly and that is an acute condition. An acute condition is something that affects one part of the body and it responds to treatment. We experience this all the time, through injuries or illnesses. When I broke my ribs in my ATV injury, that was an acute condition. Even though I have had much more serious health conditions, that injury was probably the most painful I have experienced. The final kind is what is called a chronic condition. To be honest, this is where most of my experience is in. I have multiple chronic conditions, something that has its own name: Multimorbidity. A chronic condition is something that lasts over time and which does not fully respond to treatment. It may go into remission and then reoccur multiple times. This could be something like diabetes. Diabetes can be treated with medication, diet, and exercise, but none of that cures diabetes. It is something that one has to deal with throughout their life, the daily impact varying from individual to individual. Interestingly, diabetes was once considered a terminal condition but now because of treatment, it is a chronic condition. It is possible that in the future, there will be a treatment for the pancreas that will make it an acute condition.

As I was looking at these conditions, I noticed something that rang true to my own experience. Along with the physical conditions, there was much discussion about the impact on mental health. An acute condition can make you feel rotten but a condition that affects you day-after-day and year-after-year can really wear a person down. One of the worst times in my mental health was as I was dealing with the onset of a new chronic condition. I will add that mental illness itself can be a chronic condition and when paired with a physical condition, can make life rather difficult.

Why am I talking about this and what does this have to do with anything about the Christian faith? Christianity, in part, is a way for us to life our life in this world. Unfortunately, we cannot predict what life is going to throw at us. We all know that we will experience some suffering in life. When we imagine this, we are probably thinking of something along the lines of acute suffering. By that I mean suffering that refers to a fairly short-term experience. It does not have to be a physical illness. It could be a breakdown in a relationship or the loss of a job or something along those lines. We know those things will happen. Just like we can endure through an acute illness or injury, we can usually muster up enough emotional or spiritual strength to get through it. But what if that suffering does not lessen after a week or a month or a year or a decade? This is part of what I want to look at in this message.

A Thorn in the Flesh

The passage that we are going to look at is rather confusing and anyone who claims to fully understand everything in the passage should be approached with some skepticism. What I am going to do is summarize the passage, point out what we do not know, and highlight what we do know.

In this passage, Paul is writing to a church that values both knowledge and strength. In many ways, Corinth would be not that different from many churches today as we have been shaped by the culture around us. Paul tells us that something happened to him fourteen years previous to writing this letter, a spiritual experience that was more powerful than the types of spiritual experiences that a certain group in the church were proud of. Connected to this experience in some way was a negative experience that Paul refers to as a thorn in the flesh. Being a person of prayer, Paul repeatedly asked the Lord to free him from this negative experience. The Lord refused to take away the thorn and instead insisted that Paul rely on grace and embrace his weakness. That is the basic story.

Here is what we do not know.

1. What exactly the nature of Paul’s spiritual experience was. Paul also seems unsure.
2. Why Paul refers to his spiritual experience in the third person.
3. Did the thorn in the flesh come from God or Satan or both?
4. What exactly was the thorn in the flesh?

There is plenty of speculation about the answers to these questions but we do not have to know all the answers to understand Paul’s point.

So what do we know? Paul was experiencing something negative that was bad enough that he was asking the Lord for help. Even if we do not know the exact nature, it seems like it is some kind of chronic suffering. Not necessarily a physical illness, but something that was going to be long lasting and not easily fixed. If it was going to go away, it would require the Lord’s intervention. We also know that Paul prayed for deliverance from his suffering and he was refused. Paul not get the answer that he was hoping for. We also know that the Lord did not ignore Paul’s prayer. There was a promise of grace to be offered through suffering and a reminder that there is strength to be found in weakness. All of this would have been difficult for the Corinthians who valued knowledge and strength.

Experiencing Our Thorns

Whatever the Corinthians thought of this, we need to consider how this affects us. I want to begin by encouraging you not to focus so much on the connection between Paul’s vision and his thorn. Paul seems to indicate that they were connected and that the third in some way was helping Paul not to get puffed up over his spiritual experience. It is unlikely that we will experience anything like he did in this life and what he shares here was his experience and not ours. I find that people seem to dwell on the why of suffering a little too much. Is God punishing us for some sin with our suffering? Is God making some really bad things happen to us to teach us some spiritual lesson? I do not find these questions all that helpful, even if they are normal to ask.

What we need to focus on is how we respond when we experience suffering, especially chronic suffering, however that might look. Most likely we will pray for healing or deliverance from our suffering. The Bible tells us to do this and we should. I have been a part of faith communities that have taught that we can always get our healing or deliverance, as long as we pray in faith. This passage is a problem for that teaching. There is no indication that Paul lacked faith or that he had a secret sin that he had not repented of. For those of you who feel like there is something wrong with you because of a longstanding prayer that has not yet provided the desired result, I encourage you to consider this passage.

However, just knowing that Paul experienced something similar is not always enough. I remember being in my twenties and having a chronic health condition that was wearing me down. It affected me both physically and mentally. I would pray and pray and pray and hear nothing. I remember feeling very frustrated that it would take such minor effort by God to make a radical change in my life. It really bothered me. Have you been there? Are you there now? Do you get tired of praying the same thing over and over? Do you wonder if God is even listening? I will tell you that those questions are healthy and they are even found in Scripture.

I cannot tell you the key to getting that which you have prayed for or even being able to discern when or if that will happen. But what if Jesus’ words to Paul are applicable to us? ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.’ What if the Lord will give us the grace to endure our chronic suffering, whatever it may be. And what if the weakness that comes from suffering is not all bad? One of the themes of both 1 and 2 Corinthians is a reorienting of what it means to be strong or weak. Culture tells us one thing. But the incarnation of the Son of God in Jesus and his death on the cross seems to point to a different way of understanding these themes. We say that victory was achieved on the cross but no one who observed that event would have thought that was a demonstration of strength. It was obviously an experience of weakness. But God redefines all those terms and we can no longer rely on the world’s measurements.

Conclusion

When you read this passage and hear Paul’s pleading with the Lord to free him from his thorn, how do you feel? Can you identify with Paul’s experience? Do you have your own thorn in the flesh? Perhaps it has appeared recently or is something that you have suffered with for a long time. It is chronic in that it is not likely to depart from you any time soon, without some intervention from the Lord. God could make it all go away and yet it is still there. 

‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.’ That is not necessarily the answer that we want. Whether we like it or not, God is God and we are not. We do not understand God’s ways. It may be that the solution is years away or will not be made available in this life. Most often these details are not given to us.

But what does it mean for God’s grace to be with us? That does not have to mean that every day is a good day or that we have to mask our sorrow. The Bible is often more encouraging of an honest display of emotion than the church is. Perhaps the grace is simply getting more comfortable with our weakness. Everything around us tells us that weakness is a bad thing. But God has redefined strength and weakness through Jesus on the cross. What looks like weakness to the world is often a strength that the world does not recognize. You may or may not be able to get to the point that Paul landed but it is important that we hear his voice: “Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.”