Blessing (2 Cor. 13:11–13)

Editor’s note: This article is an adaptation of a sermon preached on June 14, 2014.

Most of  you, I am imagining, would not easily guess a part of the service of worship I especially anticipate. It is the benediction. No, not for the reason you think, because it marks the end of the service! I wait for it because I need it. I need God’s blessing to deal with whatever might lie before me as I walk out the sanctuary doors. And because I need that blessing, I always feel cheated if the benediction is simply supplanted by a charge—instructions about something I am supposed to do. Charges are all right in themselves, but it really is not lack of information that keeps me from being what I should be; and more information, with or without accompanying motivational speeches, will not much help me make progress. What I need is power from beyond myself to do what I already know. That is what the raised hands of the minister pronouncing the benediction symbolize, a conveying of God’s blessing, properly given and received with the eyes open, for the benediction is not a prayer but an act. It does something, at least insofar as it pleases God so to honor it.

Even our own words do, of course, accomplish things, whether trivially, as when our dogs come when we call, or terribly significantly, as when words spoken by a parent or a teacher stick with a child for a lifetime, echoing in his or her mind and carrying hope and purpose or anguish and rage with them. We see the idea in Scripture when Isaac, by mistake and because of Jacob’s deception, blesses his younger son, Jacob, instead of his older son, Esau. When Esau cried out in despair, the distressed Isaac said that he could not take back the blessing he had given (Gen. 27). It remains true: we cannot take back even human words once they have been spoken.

Words spoken by God do still more. In the beginning, they had power to create all that is (Gen. 1). The Word of God spoken by the preacher, says Paul in Romans 10:17, creates us anew, for “faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ” (NRSV). Through hearing. In the same way, we need to hear the blessing, coming from God through another: we cannot bless ourselves any more than, in the most important sense, we can forgive ourselves. So the benediction is not a minor or dispensable part of the service of worship.

The Scripture benediction

Of all the benedictions used in Christian worship, the one given in 2 Corinthians 13:13 is probably the most common: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you” (NRSV). This verse is striking for many reasons, not least because it comes at the close of a letter in which Paul has had a great deal to say about his disappointment with the Corinthian Christians. A model church they emphatically were not. We get a sense of the preceding discussion from verse 11: “Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace.” You do not need to say such things to folks exhibiting exemplary behavior.² It is to people who have been behaving badly, really badly, that Paul first gives the encouragement that “the God of love and peace” will be with them—the only way they are going to have strength to do any differently than they have been doing—and then offers this wonderful blessing. You do not shape up and then get the blessing; it is the blessing that will enable you to shape up. Never do you need blessing more than when you know you do not deserve it or when you are most afraid that maybe it is not for you. A little child, in a residential home for children, wrote to God, “Sometimes I worry about my self. What do you thik about me? mabe I will be ok. will you please help me to not be skaird.”³ The child, like us adults, desperately needs blessing, confirmation that God is positively disposed to us and offers help. And if we are still scared, it may be because we do not rightly grasp the character of God. That possibility leads to consideration of the form and the content of the blessing itself.

Doctrine of Trinity in Scripture

Form first. Most of us have probably been well instructed that there is no “doctrine” of the Trinity in Scripture. The term never appears. But there are lots of data in Scripture that point in its direction, including this blessing, which is explicitly Trinitarian in its form. Paul speaks entirely naturally and unself­consciously of Father, Son, and Spirit, all in one breath. Interestingly enough, though, he does not begin with the First Person of the Trinity, the Father, but with the Second Person, the Son, incar­nate in Jesus. Probably that is because our deep knowledge of who God is begins with our encounter with Jesus Christ. It was encountering God in Jesus in a way that could not be denied that led—we might almost say forced—the church to the conviction that God must be triune, the Third Person having been encountered in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. This move to a Trinitarian understanding of God was not an easy one for those coming out of a Jewish conviction of strict monothe­ism. They made the move because their experience meant they could not avoid it. Language once rigorously reserved for the One whom we call “Father,” namely, “Lord,” came naturally to the lips of those speaking of Jesus and of the Spirit. While the Father is generally spoken of as Creator, John 1 speaks of the Son as the One through whom all things were made; and we also speak and sing of the Creator Spirit (e.g., Ps. 104:30). And so on. Although true that in our historical experience, the Three Persons have different roles—the Son, not the Father or the Spirit, died on the cross—it is not true that the essential attributes of the One God are differently distributed among the Persons. Any time you hear people speak as if God the Father is angry and judgmental but Jesus the Son is merciful and loving, you know for sure that they have made a mistake of the most serious kind in Trinitarian theology.

Here in this text, Paul switches language about grace and love. Perhaps most often we speak of the grace of God and the love of Jesus—for instance, the gracious act of the Father in sending the Son, and the love the Son manifests in freely giving Himself up for us. This time, the blessing begins with the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and then moves to the love of God. Again, the reason is probably experiential: we know God to be gracious because we encounter grace—forgiveness and help that are in no way deserved—in Jesus. As a friend once insisted, we know what God is like not by looking at the world but by looking at Jesus. If we look at the world—at the suffering of so many in a way that seems wholly unrelated to their virtue or lack of virtue or to anything else that makes any sense to us—our questions about what kind of God we are dealing with can quickly overwhelm us. When we look at the One who said, “ ‘Whoever has seen me has seen the Father’ ” (John 14:9, NRSV), our doubts are eased. They do not go away, any more than the evil of this present age goes away; but we may become willing to believe that there are mysteries in play that are beyond our ken. If Jesus shows us what God is like, that does not mean things will be easy, but it does mean we can trust Him.

Also worth noticing is that only a single word is used in speaking of the “communion” or “fellowship” of the Holy Spirit, while ministers pronounc­ing this benediction often use both words. Both translations are perfectly possible, and both terms may carry the connotation either of communion with  the Spirit in the sense of a real participation in the life of the Spirit or of fellowship with one another enabled by the Spirit. Well then, is the point fellow­ship with God or with each other? Which meaning one emphasizes depends on one’s interpretation of the grammar, but the distinction may, in any case, be too finespun. Real communion with the Spirit must bear fruit in right relationships with our neighbors, and the deepest fellowship with our neighbors is made possible in this broken world only by the Spirit.

The benefits of redemption

So much, then, for the unworthy objects and the Trinitarian form of this benediction. Now for what it offers us—“all the benefits of redemption,” as one old commentator put it.⁴ But do we really see them? In a Frank and Ernest cartoon, Frank says to the pastor at the church door, “I’m tired of blessings in disguise. If it’s all the same to you, I want one I can recognize immediately!” Blessings like the ones Frank wants, though, would be very much smaller than the ones God actually offers us, which are and remain God’s good gifts and not possessions of our own.

First, “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.” That is where it all starts. If we did not believe that Almighty God is gracious, we sinners would be fools even to think of approaching Him. But for Christians, grace is not just an abstract concept, with respect to which we close our eyes and hold our breath and dare ourselves to believe the utterly implausible. No, we look at Jesus—at the life He lived, at the death He died, at the resurrection that confirms that the life and the death were not the noble but ultimately futile path of a starry-eyed, idealistic martyr, but rather revelation of the truth about all reality. It is a truth by which power is overcome by weakness, sin is met with transforming mercy, death is utterly defeated by life. Pause here. Do not swallow all this without tasting it! This grace is a huge surprise, as if you gathered up all your courage to bite into the hottest of chili peppers and, instead of gasping and weeping copious tears, tasted ice cream. In merely human terms, it is altogether impossible. It is the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the most wonderful thing in all the world, made known to us by the God who came into our world for our sakes, to do for us what we could never have imagined on our own. Just do not forget the surprise. It can sneak up on us, come from unexpected directions, even ambush us. We cannot control grace, or earn it, or understand it, or predict it. We can only receive it. So receive it. Receive the freedom and power to live a whole new life, governed by altogether unlikely values. May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you.

A God who loves

Then, the love of God (“God” here referring to the Father). The God who gives Himself to us in His Son can only be a God who loves us. God does not need us, as if He lacked anything. That is one reason we find it so hard to conceive of God’s love, for we are in fact needy creatures, needing nothing more than we need love. But we get confused about it, since we use the word in so many ways. We “love” chocolate cake and kittens and particular movie stars and nice weather. Sometimes we do get hints from human experience, though. Consider how a parent loves a child—perhaps an entirely ordinary child, for all anyone else can see, not especially beautiful or smart or agile— but still his own child, whom he would protect with his very life. He does not cherish the child to get something back or for any list of reasons he might try to enumerate, but simply because he loves her. Consider how a lover perceives her beloved—an altogether ordinary fellow, not well featured or rich or well born—but who seems to her the most handsome, splendid man in all the world. She sees him that way because she loves him, and good luck if you want to insert mere rationality into the discussion! And here is the thing: the child and the beloved, because they are loved, may be transformed into something far more than they ever were before. They may start to become what the one who loves them sees in them. That, of course, is the deeper meaning of the fairy tales where frogs that are kissed turn into princes. No one would say that the frog deserved to be kissed. That is the whole point. The love of God, like the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, comes precisely to the undeserving. If you feel deeply that you do not deserve God’s love, you are quite right that you do not, but quite wrong if you think this love is not for you. Receive it. The love of God be with you.

The fellowship of the Holy Spirit

And then the communion, or fel­lowship, of the Holy Spirit—that sharing in the very life of God that unites wildly different people into one body, not just in spite of their differences but in a way that makes precisely those differ­ences an asset to the whole. Frederick Buechner said, “The best moments any of us have as human beings are those moments when for a little while it is possible to escape the squirrel-cage of being me into the landscape of being us.”⁵ That, it seems to me, is a wonder­ful picture of the church (or any group!) functioning as it should. I attended a meeting recently in which discussion about a particular issue was dominated by the “what’s in it for me” refrain. This discussion was cramped and narrow and selfish and altogether unedifying. Yet apart from the life of the Spirit in us, we seem to get trapped in that squirrel cage, unable in our own strength to break the walls of self-interest. Even love and grace can be understood in a merely individualized way if it were not for the Holy Spirit who insists on binding us together. Still, whatever we say in theory, it can remain hard to rec­ognize the desirability of operating any differently. An old Hasidic story tells of a fiddler who “played so sweetly that all who heard him began to dance, and whoever came near enough to hear, joined in the dance. Then a deaf man, who knew nothing of music, happened along, and to him all he saw seemed the action of madmen—senseless and in bad taste.”⁶ When we are trapped in ourselves, unable to hear, someone else—the Holy Spirit—must release us. Receive the possibility of new life in fellowship with one another. The communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.

Receive God’s blessing, and as a result of His very own life within you, you will, individually and together, be a blessing. “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”