Charles Ellicott Commentary 2 Corinthians 5:8

"we are of good courage, I say, and are willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord." — 2 Corinthians 5:8 (ASV)

We are confident, I say.—The sentence begun in 2 Corinthians 5:6 and partially broken off is resumed. The apparent meaning is that he prefers death to life because it brings him into the presence of his Lord. At first, this seems to conflict with what he had said in 2 Corinthians 5:4, regarding his not wishing to put off the garment of the present body.

Here, however, the expression is not so strong. “We are content,” he says, “if death comes before the Coming of the Lord, to accept death; for even though it does not bring with it the glory of the resurrection body, it does make us at home with Christ among the souls who wait for the resurrection.” If there still seems to us some shadow of inconsistency, we may view it as the almost inevitable outcome of the state which he describes in Philippians 1:21-25, as in a strait between two, and of the form of life in which he now finds himself.

The whole passage presents a striking parallelism and should be compared with this. This is, it is believed, an adequate explanation.

However, another explanation may be suggested. We find the Apostle speaking of certain visions and revelations of the Lord, of which he says he does not know whether they are in the body or out of the body (2 Corinthians 12:1). May we not think of him as referring here also to a similar experience?

“We take pleasure,” he says, if we adopt this interpretation, wholly or in part, “even here, in that state which takes us, as it were, out of the body, or seems to do so, because it is in that state that our eyes are open to gaze more clearly on the unseen glories of the eternal world.” The fact that both verbs are in the tense which indicates a single act, and not a continuous state, is, as far as it goes, in favour of this explanation.