May 19, 2002 -- THE DAY OF PENTECOST
Color: Red Title: “Spiritual gifts.”
1 Corinthians 12:3b-13
Among the questions Paul is answering in this section, questions presumably sent to him by members of the Corinthian community, is the one about “charisms” or “spiritual gifts.” In verses one to seven, he gives some general principles regarding spirituals gifts. Then, in verses eight to ten, he discusses some of those gifts and in verse eleven, he returns to general principles. In verses twelve to twenty-six, of which we have only the first two verses in our reading Paul compares the Church to a human body and in verses twenty-seven to thirty, he applies all he has said to the role of spiritual gifts in the Church.
The position of the Corinthian Church on spiritual gifts and the specific questions submitted to Paul are nowhere clearly stated, so they must be, tentatively, deduced from what Paul says. The underlying question seems to be the role of emotion in spirituality. Paul would hold that emotions are vehicles that carry spiritual gifts and can serve to express them, but they are not to be confused with the gifts themselves. He is especially thinking of the “gift of speaking in tongues,” without excluding the role of emotions in the other gifts.
The gifts - especially tongues - were causing problems in Corinth. There was, apparently, a belief that some gifts were greater than others, giving those who possessed them, especially “tongues,” an air of superiority, a feeling that they were better Christians because of their special gift. Others without the gift in question would become dissatisfied with their own gift or lack of any apparent gift and, perhaps, consider themselves and others like them to be inferior Christians. Then there is jealousy: “I wish I had that gift, another’s, rather than the one I have.”
So, Paul emphasizes that they are gifts, not achievements and not derived from natural qualities. Their purpose is to serve the Lord, not to puff up the person so “gifted.” They are given for the common good, not self-gratification or aggrandizement.
In verse three, “Jesus is Lord,” except in the Spirit: If the strength or intensity of the emotion is not a guarantee of the authenticity of a gift, then there is need for some “objective,” criterion to determine what impulses come from the Spirit. The standard is put quite succinctly: Jesus Christ and what he teaches and stands for. The relationship between Jesus and the Spirit is, of course, reciprocal. It is the work of the Spirit of God to bear witness to the lordship of Jesus Christ.
In verses four to six, different gifts...same Spirit...ministries...Lord...Works...God: The terms “gifts,” “ministries,” and “works,” are not separate categories. They are different ways of saying the same thing. A different word is used assigning them to different names for God to make the point that charisms are ministries and works. Now Paul had an experience of the Triune God, but he did not have a “spelled-out” theology of the Trinity. That would come much later in the Church’s history. Yet, it is clear that his experience of the Divine manifested the reality of God in ways that could be described under three general categories or relationships: Father, Son and Spirit. His point is that there is a variety of ways in which God reveals himself and we relate to him, but the same reality of God underlies this diversity. Christians who experience and express the meaning of Jesus Christ in their lives in a variety of ways receive the grace to do that from the one God who is also Lord and Spirit if and only if they are in union with Christ and his teachings. It is not the “variety,” that is the problem, but the “unity,” in Christ that may be questionable.
In verse seven, to each person the manifestation of the Spirit is given: Every member receives some “gift,” as Paul understands “gift.” Remember he has just used “ministries,” and “works,” as synonyms. One gift does not necessarily manifest or make visible and tangible the Spirit more than another.
For the common good: The gifts are not for the individual’s “glory,” but for God’s. The common good means the Church’s benefit. Any behavior parading itself as a spiritual gift which rends the community because of it or puffs up the individual is bogus. Having said that, we must remember that the Church has no “common good,” distinct from the individual members, since the community exists to enable each one to be conformed to Christ.
In verses eight to ten, having established the fundamental framework within which the impulses of the Spirit are to be understood, Paul moves on to illustrate what he means by giving some examples of “gifts.” The list is illustrative, not comprehensive. There are other such lists in the New Testament (1Cor 12:28; 29-30; Rom 12: 6-8; Eph 4:11). The individual “gifts,” mentioned overlap to a certain extent, but none of them contains all of the other gifts given in the other lists. There are nine enumerated in this list. They are difficult to explain because they are only named here and maybe in another list, but they seem to have needed no explanation to Paul’s audience.
Expression of wisdom, expression of knowledge: These two gifts refer to intelligible speech to explain truth. While the terms sophia –wisdom, and gnosis –knowledge, were big in the mystery cults and natural philosophy of the times, Paul uses them in the more biblical sense. He clearly wants to make a distinction between the two terms, but we do not know what it is.
Faith: This does not refer to the saving faith but a special endowment of faith for a special purpose. Clearly a job for the Holy Spirit! Remember that Jesus almost always required “faith,” before he would heal.
Gifts of healing: This is to be distinguished from ordinary medical skills.
Mighty deeds: These works of power seem to be different from healings, but we are at a loss to know what the difference is. These were terms obviously so familiar to the Corinthians that they needed no explanation.
Prophecy: Prophecy, the divine interpretation to the human situation, was traditionally associated with the Spirit.
Discernment of spirits: Not every “prophecy,” was genuine, hence the need to discern on the basis of fidelity to Jesus’ teaching or, in the case of the Old Testament, that of Moses.
Varieties of tongues: This would be speech unintelligible to both speakers and hearers. Paul put this gift next to last. He obviously had a much lower opinion of tongues - in the hierarchy of gifts - than did the Corinthians. Paul never questioned the reality of the gift of tongues, but was well aware that it had its dangers. Ecstasy and self-hypnosis are hard to distinguish.
Interpretation of tongues: Someone had to interpret the unintelligible speech. As Paul would put it, he would rather say five words that mean something than a thousand in a tongue.
In verse eleven, the Spirit chooses what gift shall be given to each Christian, so that none has occasion for boasting or a sense of superiority.
In verses twelve and thirteen, Gifts are signs of the free grace of God by which the Church exists. A consideration of them naturally leads Paul to think of the Church which he compares to the human body, with its diversity of members, variety of functions, yet unity of form. The Spirit unites people regardless of ethnicity that is Jew or Greek, social status, slave or free, or gender male or female, as stated in Galatians 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Unity, not uniformity, lies in the Spirit. Diversity is good. Squelch that and you squelch the Spirit.
Sermon
Diversity within unity is both God and the church. Unity is not uniformity. God as Trinity is not uniform, but one.
Jesus prayed that we be one, not uniform. The presence of the Holy Spirit of God makes diversity, encourages diversity, expresses himself in a variety of ways and wants the Church to do the same- to do the same thing or things - to love, forgive, establish peace, be charitable, etc.; but not all the same way.
The human body is a good metaphor for what Paul both experiences and expresses. The hand cannot do without the stomach and vice versa; but they do different things. One brings food to the mouth, without that the stomach is unemployed. Eventually, the whole body will die. They have different functions, different ministries, different works, but the same body. They also have the same general purpose: the sustaining of life and life energy and extending that life by reproducing or bearing fruit.
There was a story told in ancient times about how the different parts of the body complained about the stomach. They thought they did all the work and the stomach just sat around and fed off the fruits of their labor. So they went on strike. All the members agreed to do nothing and starve the stomach. It would get no food. Well, we can all guess what happened. Eventually, the various members learned that they were inter-dependent on each other. No member was greater than any other, even though some members had more exciting functions and other more public and glorious ones, they could not do without the members whose tasks seemed minor or were unseen or inglorious like excretion.
What a great metaphor for Paul to use to describe the Church as well as the gifts given it by the Spirit! No gift is more spiritual, more from the Spirit, than any other. Some gifts may be more exciting, more public, more obvious. Yet, none are unnecessary and none are less important in God’s eyes. What is necessary for everyone to receive, everyone receives - like faith, hope and love. What everyone does not need, everyone does not get. Whatever gift one gets is not for oneself, but for the common good. It is a gift, not an achievement, much less an entitlement.
We are to show our gratitude for whatever gift by using it well and for the service of the Lord, his mission and his church. We are not to be jealous of others’ gifts or think we are less endowed by the Spirit if we do not have the seemingly glamorous ones.
Finally, people can fake gifts. They can see how they work and imitate the behavior. This is merely hypocrisy, not a measure of holiness. The Spirit breathes where he will and how he will. The intensity of emotion can accompany the Holy Spirit’s presence. It can even be a sign of it, but not necessarily so. The real standard in discerning the authenticity of a gift is behavior. Does the person behave consistent with Christ? As Jesus would put it: “By their fruits you shall know them.”
The one God expresses himself in a variety of ways, both in creation and in human beings.
“Spiritual gifts,” charisms, “forms of service” and “workings” are but different ways of saying the same thing, namely, “when grace becomes incarnate in a believer.”
Anything done authentically in the name of Jesus or by the power of his Spirit, two ways of saying the same thing, is also done for the common good or upbuilding of the Church. Absent either of those aspects, the work of ministry and its gift is not truly spiritual.
Variety, whether of people Jews, Greeks, slaves, free or of actions ministries-works-charisms, need not be a sign of or criterion of disunity. Look at the Trinity.
Spiritual Gifts: We should not make more of spiritual gifts or charisms than Paul does. He situates these phenomena within the context of God, Lord, Spirit, that is, the Trinity. Though Paul has no fully developed theology or explanation of the Trinity he does have an experience of the Triune God who reveals himself to us and relates to us in a variety of ways and on a variety of levels. He also calls spiritual gifts “ministries” and “works.” Now that Jesus is risen and ascended he, God, reveals himself in and through a variety of human beings doing a variety of works. In other words, spiritual gifts are incarnations of grace. So are ministries and any other actions done in the name of Jesus and by the power of his Spirit. They cannot be properly and completely explained otherwise. So, they are not to be confused with natural gifts or giftedness, talents, knacks or expertise. “Spiritual gift,” is a term Paul uses as a synonym for ministry and works in order to point to the grace that is necessary to explain the plus, the more, the other-than-merely-natural giftedness of any person. These incarnations of grace may range from the ecstatic, as in the case of “speaking in tongues,” to the mundane, as in the case of helping or administering. And anything in between. So long as a Christian recognizes the role of grace in his or her activities he or she will experience some form of gift of the Spirit and thereby be even more effective than if he or she depended on natural endowments, as must non-believers. Of course, strictly speaking, even natural endowments are graces from God, only a person may not recognize them as such and claim credit for what God has granted. That seems to be what was happening in Corinth, especially in the case of the gift of tongues. The fact that there are four lists of such ‘charisms,” in the Pauline letters and that they are not exactly the same illustrates that the lists are not exhaustive, only illustrative of how any activity can be charismatic if rightly recognized as such.
Speaking in Tongues: We should not make more of this “gift,” than Paul does. He seems to regard it as among the least important manifestations of grace. Perhaps this is so because Paul’s criterion for a spiritual gift is that it is given for the common good and not for the person’s aggrandizement. Surely, this manifestation of divine presence and power is the most open to abuse and fakery. Paul gives us four “charisms’ pertaining to speech. There is the discourse of wisdom and the discourse of knowledge, both speech intelligible to humans. There is the discourse of tongues, unintelligible to both speaker and hearer, except to one with the parallel gift of interpreting tongues, another form of intelligible speech. So only one of the “speech” gifts is unintelligible. The matter is complicated by the account in Acts 2 whereby the apostles received and expressed a gift of tongues which was presumably unintelligible to them, speaking one sentence in a Galilean dialect but being understood by people who understood them in their own dialects or languages, and at the same time intelligible to their listeners. Given the nature of these phenomena we must humbly admit that we neither do understand them nor can understand them. The very nature of “unintelligible,” rules out an intelligible explanation, though not an interpretation of what is meant. God’s language, if we can speak this way, is unintelligible to humans when spoken directly, that is, “in his own native tongue.” When God communicates to a human in that language it comes out as ecstatic and unintelligible speech. It should be a humbling experience to us all that we reach a point in prayer where our words no longer make sense and words are no longer needed. We find ourselves babbling. If we are speaking out loud and other people are present they will hear this babbling. Someone else may be inspired to interpret it for the group, but we should not expect predictions of future events from either the babbler or the un-babbler. In both cases it is the power of God overloading the human circuits of mind and speech. At Corinth some were using what should have been a humbling experience as a witness that we are only on the same wave length as God when God graces us to be. It is not of our own doing, praying or contemplating There is no cause for becoming proud because some can babble and other can not. Thus, there is a “common good,” that comes from this ecstatic, even exotic, phenomenon, but the Corinthians were missing it. And they were elevating tongues to a status in the community that it should not have. Because we have God’s word, the divine interpretation of the human situation and indeed of all reality, we can easily take it for granted or, worse, think that we figured it out for ourselves. The gift of tongues reminds us that we can never understand the speech of God without the simultaneous grace to interpret it. This gift of interpretation is given to the apostolic office or Pastor in the church in most cases. However, Paul’s treatment here of the gist of interpreting tongues reminds the officials of the Church that that gift it freely bestowed by the Spirit upon whomever he will and is not limited to the apostolic office. Thus Paul neither dismisses the gift of tongues as fakery or quackery, though in many cases it is, nor does he exalt it to the level of “higher gifts.” He leaves that honor for faith, hope and love, charisms given to all Christians. Amen.
