Iii. Concluding Matters (5:12-28)
III. CONCLUDING MATTERS (5:12-28)
The basic substance of Paul’s letter has now been concluded. Nonetheless, the letter is not yet finished. What happens next is in some ways unique to the Pauline corpus; at the same time it reveals something about Paul that we find throughout — his reluctance to bring things to a final conclusion! “Signing
off ” between friends has a long-standing history, right up to the present. So the very length of this material should be thought of in terms of a relationship between “friends,” more than that of “mentor-student.” Any parent who has sent off a first child to university will understand very well this reluctance to let go, on the one hand, and the felt need to cover all the bases, on the other.
Thus after the long narrative of past and present relationships (chs. 1- 3) and the various ways Paul has been “supplying what is lacking,” by way of either correction or information (4:1-5:11), he concludes with a series of imperatives quite unlike anything else in his subsequent letters — at least in terms of length. One should note that only at verses 25-28 do we come to the more clearly formal parts of the letter closing, which themselves also exhibit evidence of friendship. But before that Paul offers a series of “summary exhortations” (vv. 12-22), which apparently cover a lot of necessary ground, before offering a final benediction which picks up the major concerns of the letter (vv. 23-24) — a commonplace matter that in Paul’s hands has also been transformed by the gospel and friendship.