Today starts the season of Lent, and Ash Wednesday is about the impact of our own sin and the cost of saving us that Christ paid on the cross, observed as Lent ends and Easter comes. We have a lesson from the king of Ninevah, who was not a Jew, demonstrating humility and repentance and leading his people to the same.

Paul seems to be knocking the legs out from under the bragging of

"super apostles" by being a littlle sarcastic. Of course, he did go through extensive troubles, but he's 'acting the fool' because making your troubles into a humble brag is distracting from the cause of Christ.

Paul must have gotten some criticism. Bolder in letters than in person? It seems that he wants to discourage the believers from getting tied up in the drama of personality and keep their focus on expanding the gospel.

Sharing resoources between churches in the region was a way that the early Church came together, and Paul used this to establish the personality of this new kind of organization. Not in obligation or under threat like the rule under the Romans, but in love to one another.

Taking care of the body of Christ sometimes has practical implications, including money. This was one way that early believers could learn to be that body. "The one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little.”

Transforming pain is not easy. We tend to think of God's working as being all positive, because God does indeed work to make things whole. There are still times when our distance from God, a product of our sin, produces the opposite feeling. The sorrow we feel for our sins is the work of the Holy Spirit, and this is also God.

The oddness of the Christian faith is outlined in Paul's letter to the Corinthians. In his previous chapter, he talked about being reconciled to one another to be the body of Christ. Now he moves to this section, talking about the struggles that form the faithful and the need to transform that pain through the life we share.

Paul's vision is on eternal life, but that doesn't start at death. Eternal life is a style of life, focused on Christ, aware of his sacrifice, with a new point of view.

It's almost as if Paul realized that he might have drawn too wide a contrast between the death of the Law and the life of the new covenant, so he comes back again to the foundation of it all: Jesus. The closeness we share with Christ is what sustains us through troubles, and resurrects us at the end of days.

The difference between the Old and New Testaments is literally life and death. Where the function of the law is to point out our sin, which leads to death, the Spirt which moves through the new covenant brings life.