What is the thorn that St Paul talks about?
Here is the passage in question from the Apostle’s second letter to the Corinthian church (12.7):
“And to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too elated.”
You wouldn’t believe how many theories have been suggested about just what that “thorn” means in this verse. Some have suggested a temptation to fleshly passion, like lust or gluttony. The main Protestant Reformers (Luther and Calvin) said that the “thorn” was a temptation to unbelief, or lack of faith. Tertullian (the Latin teacher from the second century) said that St Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” is a reference to recurrent eye or ear pain. Theodoret of Cyr (a fourth century bishop) disagreed with this diagnosis, and said rather that the thorn referred to the many persecutions and pains that St Paul suffered for the Gospel.
I remember, some fifty-odd years ago, going one night to a revival service in my family’s evangelical church. The hour-long (at least) preacher went totally off the rails in his attempt to explain the “thorn of the Apostle Paul.”
He got into one of those extemporaneous rabbit holes that I always warn my homiletics students about. One starts off talking about a risky subject, and then one cannot keep away from the trouble lurking just around the sermon corner.
Such a thing happened painfully to this preacher: “I know what Paul’s thorn is. It was probably his wife, always nagging him to come back home.”
An uncomfortable pause ensued. We all looked at his wife in the pew. And at that moment he probably remembered that he had brought her along, and was more than probably sorry that he did.
Then he tried to dig himself out of the rabbit hole (which is even a worse mistake than the first): “I mean, that is just my own guess as to what Paul was talking about, since I’m married too.”
His wife just shook her head. And we all felt sorry for him.
Anyways, he was dead wrong. St Paul was celibate, as is abundantly clear in 1 Corinthians 7.8: “To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do.”
Still, the question remains: just what was that painful thorn of St Paul’s? Some commentators say that it was a “general internal infirmity,” like some anxiety or depression that visited the Apostle once in a while. At the beginning of the same letter, he wrote that some of his recent missionary travels (in present-day western Turkey) were so wretched that “… we were so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself” (2 Corinthians 1.8).
But these persecutions and travel difficulties were not the worst: “And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure for all the churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to fall, and I am not indignant?” (2 Corinthians 11.29).
Still, it seems that the “thorn” that was given to St Paul goes beyond even these extremities. These anxieties and despondencies would come and go. This “thorn,” however, just stayed.
St Paul says that he prayed on three memorable occasions, and the thorn did not, or would not, go away.
That sounds like painful memory to me – that is, a memory of past sin. God forgives and is always merciful. But the memory of a wrong, or of a failure, or of a falling away into unbelief … such memory has a terrible reality – that while God forgives, you and I might not be able to forget.
Think of what might have been lurking in St Paul’s memory:
He had stood by the garments of those who needed full range of motion so as to throw with greater strength stones at the First Martyr Stephen (Acts 7.58). Before his conversion, it is said that he had “ravaged the church, entering house after house, dragging off men and women and committing them to prison (Acts 8.3). Even when the Lord Himself told Ananias of Damascus to go and heal the repentant Paul after his conversion, poor Ananias protested: “Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to Your saints at Jerusalem; and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who call upon Your Name” (Acts 9.13-14).
How much blood had fallen on his hands? How many faces appeared to him in daydreams and nightmares – faces of those he had put in chains, faces of those who were “disappeared,” lost indefinitely in detention (or worse)?
Faces like St Stephen?
I know one thing. That kind of memory would have kept me up at night.
And I would certainly call those persistent memories of sin – even though I prayed for and received forgiveness over and over again – thorns … thorns in the flesh, even (as St Paul said), “a messenger of Satan” just to remind me of what I was, and how meek I should be.
It seems that St Paul used the word “thorn” from his better, healthier memory of the Psalms (which was the prayerbook of the Prophets and the Apostles, and of the Lord Himself). The great Psalm of Confession and Absolution – Psalm 31(32) – actually refers explicitly to a thorn:
For day and night Your hand was heavy upon me,
I was turned into agony when the thorn pierced me.
I confessed my sin, mine iniquity have I not hidden, saying:
Before the Lord I will confess iniquity against myself.
And You forgave the ugly unholiness of my heart” (Psalm 31.4-5).
This is the Greek Septuagint translation of the Psalms. You will not find the “thorn” in the usual English translation (like the KJV, NKJV, NIV or Good News Bible). But, then again, St Paul (and the other Apostles) used the Septuagint, if only to preserve these older words.
So it appears that thorns are memories of sin that don’t want to go away. But St Paul, having memorized the entirety of the Psalms, called this crucial fact immediately to mind from his memory of Psalm 31.
So did Mary of Egypt, as she wrestled with thousands of memories in the desert, during her wandering alone in the desert for forty-seven years. The sufferings she experienced did not come from the wilderness: indeed, the animals (even a lion) and the plant life helped her. The pains, rather, came from the thorns. And there were many of those.
In the Great Fast of Lent, we fast and pray and work for love, as we all – like St Paul and Mary of Egypt – seek relief from sin and memory of sin, and from the “iniquity and strife of the City” (Psalm 54.9 LXX).
This is the City of Babel, of course, and it is opposed to the New Jerusalem. Babel is the place of tempest, usury, betrayal and deceit.
It is the place where thorns are sharpened.
So we follow St Paul and Mother Mary into the wilderness of retreat, and throw ourselves upon the grace of the Lord. We return to Him as the Prodigal at every pang of the thorn, and ask forgiveness for the old memories:
But I, when assailed, I put on sackcloth,
I humbled my soul with fasting,
and my prayer would return thus to my heart” (Psalm 34.13).
It is in this moment, when anyone who wrestles with the thorn in their flesh, that they need to pray (from page 11 of our Come to Me prayerbook, from the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese):
“Free me from the memories of sins long gone by.”
Amen.
Comments