I desire to be present with you now, and to change my tone; for I stand in doubt of you.
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Cornelius a Lapide
AD 1637
I desire to be present with you now, and to change my voice. I would wish to say orally what a letter cannot sufficiently express; I would wish to coax, to beseech, to implore you, to treat you as a mother does her children, to manifest in every way a mother"s affection, that I might persuade you to do what I wish.
See what love makes men do. Paul makes himself a father, and becomes a boy with his children. So King Agesilaus, to amuse his boy, would lay aside his purple and his sceptre, to ride on a stick for him; and when one of his court remarked on his levity, he retorted: "Hold your tongue, for when you have children of your own, then I will give you leave to laugh at your king"s folly." So here Paul would say that a mother"s love knows no bounds, no shame; for it no toil is too great, nothing is too trivial or too shameful.
I stand in doubt of you. "I am ashamed," as some render it, but wrongly. The meaning is: I am perplexed; I do not know what to say to you to persuade you. Ma...
“I used coaxing words to you just now, … but for the sake of that love which prevents me from allowing my sons to perish and stray forever I wish that I were now present—if the bonds of my ministry did not prevent me—and change my coaxing tone to one of castigation. It is not because of fickleness that I am now coaxing, now irate. I am impelled to speak by love, by grief, by diverse emotions.” .
Holy Scripture edifies even when read but is much more profitable if one passes from written characters to the voice…. Knowing, then, that speech has more force when addressed to those who are present, the apostle longs to turn the epistolary voice, the voice confined within written characters, into actual presence. .
Let me show you how impatient, how incensed he is, how he cannot bear these things. For such is love: it is not content with words but seeks also to be personally present. “To change my tone,” he says, that is, to cry out and to make mournful noise and tears and to turn everything into lamentation. For in a letter it was not possible to show his tears and mourning.
For I am perplexed about you. I know not, says he, what to say, or what to think. How is it, that you who by dangers, which you endured for the faith's sake, and by miracles, which you performed through faith, had ascended to the highest heaven, should suddenly be brought to such a depth of degradation as to be drawn aside to circumcision or sabbaths, and should rely wholly upon Judaizers? Hence in the beginning he says, I marvel that you are so quickly removing, and here, I am perplexed about you, as if he said, What am I to speak? What am I to utter? What am I to think? I am bitterly perplexed. And so he must needs weep, as the prophets do when in perplexity; for not only admonition but mourning also is a form in which solicitous attention is often manifested. And what he said in his speech to those at Miletus, By the space of three years I ceased not to warn every one...with tears, he says here also, and to change my voice. Acts 20:31 When we find ourselves overcome by perplexity an...
Observe his warmth, his inability to refrain himself, and to conceal these his feelings; such is the nature of love; nor is he satisfied with words, but desires to be present with them, and so, as he says, to change his voice, that is, to change to lamentation, to shed tears, to turn every thing into mourning. For he could not by letter show his tears or cries of grief, and therefore he ardently desires to be present with them.
