Visible Goodness
Day 284 – 11 October
Known and Read by All
“You are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read by all men; clearly you are an epistle of Christ, ministered by us, written not with ink but by the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of flesh, that is, of the heart.” (2 Corinthians 3:2–3, NKJV)
A Letter in a Soldier’s Hand
Some time in the second century, a man named Aurelius Archelaus wrote a short letter in Latin to Julius Domitius, a military tribune. He was recommending his friend Theon, and he asked the tribune to receive Theon as he would receive Archelaus himself. Near the end comes a line that has survived nearly two thousand years on a scrap of papyrus from the rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus: “Look upon this letter, Sir, and imagine that I am talking with you.” The papyrus now sits in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
That was the whole purpose of a letter of recommendation in the ancient world. It travelled ahead of a stranger, opened a door that would otherwise stay shut, and let the writer’s voice be heard in a room where he himself was absent.
Paul Without a Reference
Rooms in Corinth had been hearing such letters. Teachers had arrived there carrying them, and Paul’s critics seem to have made something of the fact that he brought none. “Do we begin again to commend ourselves?” he asked. “Or do we need, as some others, epistles of commendation to you or letters of commendation from you?” (2 Corinthians 3:1). The phrase is systatikōn epistolōn (letters of commendation), the very kind of document Archelaus wrote for Theon.
Paul’s answer was disarming. “You are our epistle,” he told them, and the Corinthians themselves were the reference. Then he added that this letter was ginōskomenē kai anaginōskomenē (known and read), a play on two related words that both Ellicott and the Pulpit Commentary point out. The second is anaginōskō (to read, literally to know again), from ana (again, up) and ginōskō (to know). Bible Hub’s HELPS note explains it as knowing a thing over again through reading, and Thayer notes that in the New Testament it often means reading aloud to others, as when Paul asked for his letters to be read to whole congregations (Colossians 4:16; 1 Thessalonians 5:27). A letter in that world was usually heard by a roomful of people at once. Paul’s letter had a wider audience still: it was read by “all men,” hypo pantōn anthrōpōn (by all people), every passer-by in Corinth a potential reader.
Ink, Stone and Flesh
Every reader needs something legible, and Paul went on to describe how this letter came to be written. The church was phaneroumenoi (being made plain, being brought into view), “clearly… an epistle of Christ.” Christ was its author. Paul was only the courier, and his word for that role is diakonētheisa (served, delivered as a servant would deliver it); Ellicott described him as the scribe taking down a letter whose real writer was Christ.
The ink was the Spirit of the living God. That Spirit fills every place and had nowhere to travel in order to reach Corinth; what changed in that city was a company of hearts that opened to Christ, and in them His life became readable. The surface was flesh. At Sinai the law had been given on tablets of stone, and Paul set beside them “tablets of flesh, that is, of the heart.” That is the Received Text’s wording, which the New King James follows; many modern editions read “tablets that are hearts of flesh,” and the sense is the same. The Pulpit Commentary makes the point well in its own way: such tablets are soft and receptive, a surface that takes the writing deep.
Six Lines of One Letter
Deep writing takes time, and this past week has been writing six lines of it. Read them aloud, the way a letter was read in the ancient church, and see what they say together.
The first line tells of goodness that travelled on foot, going about from village to village with no throne behind it and no plaque left after it (Acts 10:38). The second describes a lending that keeps no record of what is owed and refuses to write anybody off (Luke 6:35). The third reports a kindness so steady that slander ran out of material (1 Peter 2:15). The fourth records evil answered by good, a fight won by refusing evil’s own weapons (Romans 12:21). The fifth shows a hand that copied its strokes from the right model and kept looking up from its own wobbles (3 John 11). The sixth bears the print of the nails, the mark of a goodness that took the worst blow and stayed itself (Titus 2:7; John 20:25).
Laid end to end, those six lines make a single letter of commendation. Each one, on its own, describes a good deed. Together they describe a Person, and anyone who reads the whole page comes away knowing a great deal about the One who wrote it.
Signed by Christ, Read for the Father
The One who wrote it is the whole point of the letter. Archelaus wrote because he would be absent from the tribune’s room, and his letter stood in for him. A letter of Christ works the other way round. He is never absent from anyone, and the goodness written into His people lets those around them recognise Someone already near. That is what anaginōskō (to read, to know again) suggests. People made in God’s image were made for goodness, and when they read it in a human life, something in them knows it again.
So the letter commends Christ, and its last purpose belongs to the Father. Jesus put it in a single sentence: “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). The verb for glorify is doxasōsin (they may glorify, they may give due weight and honour), and it finishes the whole movement of this week. The world sees, the world reads, and the praise travels past the page to the One whose love the page describes.
A Sunday Reading
This morning the church gathers, and in the earliest churches a gathering like this was when letters such as Paul’s were read aloud (Colossians 4:16). The congregation itself is the reading today. Every life in the room is a line someone has been reading all week, at the school gate, the checkout, the office, the family table, and the reading carries on whether anyone mentions it or stays silent.
Give thanks today for the lines already written, the goodness others have shown you and the goodness that has been growing in you. Then, before Monday, settle on one line you want this week to add: a visit, a debt forgiven, a word of welcome for someone kept outside. Carry it out of the building with you. The letter goes where you go, and every reader deserves to find Christ’s handwriting in it.
Declaration
Someone is reading me this week, line by line, and I want every line worth reading. I carry no reference of my own; my life is the page, and the writing on it belongs to Another. Where people see kindness in me, I want them to recognise who it resembles. I open my heart to be written on, and I give the pen room to work. When the reading is over and someone gives thanks, let the thanks rise past the paper, and let the signature at the foot of the page be plainly His.
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