It is fascinating and beautiful to me the way that Biblical typology, when it is appropriately taken on board, integrates with and gives birth to intensely practical application. Take the story of King Saul. Saul's life is a tragedy of a face-saving operation. He is from the smallest clan of the smallest tribe. Upon being chosen as king, he returns to his farm. When he is crowned, he is hidden among the baggage train. He has a sense of inadequacy that Samuel later refers to as being "little in your own eyes." This is good. We must depend on God for all things and sense our inadequacy. Yet our sense of smallness can be perverted and twisted into a sense that what we do does not matter- and when we are publicly confronted with our failures, being publicly exposed for a quality about which we are insecure can generate a truly dangerous response.
This is what happens in the story of Saul. He stammers and makes excuses when confronted in 1 Samuel 13 for offering sacrifice before it was appropriate: "So I forced myself, and offered the burnt offering" (1 Samuel 13:12). Samuel rebukes him and Saul is humiliated before his troops. When told that God would replace him, he is silent and passive. Later examples from David's life suggest that he ought to have pled for mercy and acknowledged his sin, as David did after his sin with Bathsheba. Yet he is silent. He feels embarrassed. A similar pathology is evident in 1 Samuel 18:7ff- Saul reacts to the song of the women about David's victories with anger and jealousy. In 1 Samuel 14, Jonathan's victories are so threatening to Saul that he promises to put him to death, overcompensating for his sense of inadequacy- yet he is again humiliated, as the people mourn and redeem Jonathan's life.
Saul is typologically related to Cain. Both Saul and David are spiritually begotten of Samuel, and are thus an instance of brother-brother conflict. When we feel embarrassed, we look down. We don't want to be exposed to the world. Our nakedness is revealed. And likewise, in Genesis 4, we are told that Cain's face was "fallen" (Genesis 4:6). Cain murders Abel because he has been publicly humiliated. With his face fallen, he seeks to rectify the situation and so "rose up" and murdered Abel (Genesis 4:8). Saul, likewise, begins as a man with a sense of intense smallness and inadequacy- the foundation of humility. But it is perverted. He overcompensates every time he is humiliated and becomes a violent brute, slaughtering the priests of Nob (1 Samuel 22:19), accusing them of "conspiring" with David (1 Samuel 22:13).
Saul of Tarsus typologically inverts the story of King Saul. The latter was replaced by David and persecuted him unto his own death- the former persecuted the Son of David but fell in repentance and rose up again, becoming the great herald of David's throne. And we find that not only are they typologically related in this abstract sense, they actually share a similar pathology. But Paul's is converted. Read 2 Corinthians. St. Paul is deeply sensitive about his "thorn in the flesh", his speech impediment. He feels humiliated and broken that the church in Corinth has mocked him. Tradition suggests he was rather funny-looking and short. 2 Corinthians reveals the heart of St. Paul. He takes his weakness, his humiliation, his sense of inadequacy, and he finds himself in Jesus Christ, and so becomes a co-heir with Christ. Everything I once held dear, says Paul, I count as dung compared to the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus Christ (Philippians 3).
The stories of Cain, King Saul, and the Apostle Paul are typologically linked in complex ways. These links all revolve around the promise of the seed of the woman. They are unified in Christ. But in the mode of their unification, we find all our individual stories inside of them. We find wisdom. We hear God's word to us about how to deal with a sense of inadequacy and humiliation. Many young men today, I believe, are in a similar position. They feel rejected by women (people laugh at this, but for a single man, being regarded with disdain by women universally- or *thinking* that this is the case- can be a genuinely crushing experience- these men need love and genuine pastoral care), small, pathetic, but perhaps good at one thing. For someone like the Apostle Paul, that one thing was his intellectual prowess. He surpassed everyone around him in Torah. In his twenties, he was the star student of one of the greatest Rabbinic Sages alive- St. Gamaliel. It was the one thing that validated him. Yet he crucified it for the sake of Christ, and sought to be found *in Him.*
2 Corinthians is, more than any other letter, St. Paul's spiritual autobiography. We meet in this text a man who is perhaps not so different than many young men today who become interested in the Orthodox Christian faith and are passionate about it in public. One night in 2016, reading 2 Corinthians and realizing this changed me. I saw myself and my relationship to everyone around me differently. By what I believe was an act of the Holy Spirit, I felt my social anxiety and sense of inadequacy begin to drain out of me. I could be vulnerable (vulnerability should be contrasted with pity-seeking, which is just another way of seeking validation from others- vulnerability is willingness to speak truth about oneself simply because it is true, not out of a desire to cause another person to feel about oneself in the desired way) for the first time in my life.
Typology and practical wisdom are not opposed to each other. We derive practical insights from the scriptures precisely because their typological patterns are filtered through Jesus Christ to become the typology and pattern of all human existence, such that when one begins to appreciate the divine patterning of the scriptures, one can begin, with guidance from the Church and the pastoral care of one's parish priest, learn to order one's life according to the pattern of Christ.
A speech impediment? Paul had always been this eloquent speaker in my mind. I’m gonna read 2 Corinthians with what you’ve said in mind. I’ve never looked at it that way