Mystery
When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. (1 Corinthians 13:11–12)
It’s a phrase that some Christians are reluctant to use: ‘I don’t know’. We can feel that we should be able to answer every question that is presented to us by other Christians, or those outside of the faith. But the reality that we need to face is that we currently live in the place of partial knowledge. Paul celebrates the day when all shall be revealed, but in the meantime, we live in the twilight zone, and we should not be afraid of mystery - rather, we should embrace it as part of the walk of faith. And it’s not only when God seems distant that we embrace misery - when a prayer is answered, we might be grateful, but then quickly ask, ‘how comes that prayer was answered and another was not?’. We don’t know.
Tom Wright comments on 1 Corinthians 13: 11-12
Mirrors were made in Corinth, but the point Paul is making is familiar to many writers in the ancient world. When you look in the mirror everything is back to front, inside out. You can’t always make out what it is you’re looking at. That’s what the present time is like, Paul is saying. You can see something of God’s plan, something of what’s going on, something of what God wants for his human creatures. But in the world to come all will be plain. ‘Face to face’ could be simply a way of saying ‘so we won’t be looking in mirrors any longer’, but it is probably also a way of reminding his readers, as John puts it in his first letter, that when Jesus appears we shall be like him, ‘because we shall see him as he is’ (1 John 3:2).
‘Now I know in part’; there is such a thing as genuine Christian knowledge in the present, even though ‘knowledge’ can ‘puff you up’ (1 Corinthians 8:1). But then—in God’s new world, the world waiting to be born, the world already glimpsed in Jesus’ resurrection—‘then I shall know in the same way that I too have been known.’ What matters at the moment, as in 1 Corinthians 8:2–3, is not your knowledge of God, but God’s knowledge of you; but your knowledge, too, will be complete in the age to come.1
Gordon Fee comments, “Our present ‘vision’ of God, as great as it is, is as nothing when compared to the real thing that is yet to be; it is like the difference between seeing a reflected image in a mirror and seeing a person face to face.” In our own culture the comparable metaphor would be the difference between seeing a photograph and seeing someone in person. As good as a picture is, it is simply not the real thing”2
1 Wright, T. (2004). Paul for Everyone: 1 Corinthians (pp. 178–179). Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
2 Fee, G. D. (1987). The First Epistle to the Corinthians (p. 648). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.