Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 2 Corinthians · About this commentary
That There May Be Equality
2 Corinthians 8:13-15
13 For this is not that others may be eased and you distressed, · WEB
One word appears twice in two verses and sets the aim of the collection, and the precedent quoted is a miracle that redistributed itself.
Paul first rules out what he is not asking for: this is not that others may be eased and you distressed.
The sentence anticipates the fear behind every appeal — that giving means transferring the hardship rather than relieving it. He denies that the object is to move distress from one congregation to another, which would leave the same amount of it in the world.
What he names instead is a single word, and he uses it twice in two verses: but for equality, and again at the end, that there may be equality. The term belongs to fair dealing and even measure.
And the mechanism is stated with a time marker that keeps it from being charity: your abundance at this present time supplies their lack, that their abundance also may become a supply for your lack.
The phrase at this present time concedes that the direction of flow is temporary. Corinth is the wealthy party now, and the sentence explicitly contemplates the arrangement reversing. That is not how patronage works, and it is why the appeal can be made without either party being humiliated — the giver is not a benefactor but the one who currently has the surplus.
Then the precedent, and its choice is the sharpest thing in the passage: he who gathered much had nothing left over, and he who gathered little had no lack.
That describes the manna in the wilderness, where the amount a person collected turned out not to determine the amount he had. The evening measure came out the same for the diligent and the slow, and nothing could be hoarded.
So the model offered for the collection is not generosity as a virtue but a miracle in which effort and outcome were deliberately uncoupled. What the Israelites experienced by an intervention, the churches are asked to produce by handing things around — which is the only sense in which the quotation is an instruction rather than a memory.
And equality remains the stated end, not sacrifice. Nobody in the arrangement is asked to end up with less than enough.
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