September Season. New Old Things. 2 Corinthians 5: (26th Sunday in Ordinary Time)

Transcription

1 Season September 25 (26th Sunday in Ordinary Time) 2 Corinthians 5:11-21 New Old Things God s call to salvation is as old as the world itself but we will never be the same. But the passage is provocative. To be sure, old things serves as a metaphor for our sinful life before Christ, but how do we reconcile that with the sinful lives we lead now? And is it reasonable to interpret old and new as referring to traditions? Methods? Doctrines? The Bible itself? And all of this resolves to the somewhat timeless (if not settled) debate about whether or not Jesus was doing something new in his ministry or fulfilling the grand arc of God s history with us (or both). When looking at your own faith, is God doing something new in you or is God fulfilling a plan for you that began with your arrival on earth?

2 2 CORINTHIANS 5: So we try to persuade people, since we know what it means to fear the Lord. We are well known by God, and I hope that in your heart we are well known by you as well. 12 We aren t trying to commend ourselves to you again. Instead, we are giving you an opportunity to be proud of us so that you could answer those who take pride in superficial appearance, and not in what is in the heart. 13 If we are crazy, it s for God s sake. If we are rational, it s for your sake. 14 The love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: one died for the sake of all; therefore, all died. 15 He died for the sake of all so that those who are alive should live not for themselves but for the one who died for them and was raised. 16 So then, from this point on we won t recognize people by human standards. Even though we used to know Christ by human standards, that isn t how we know him now. 17 So then, if anyone is in Christ, that person is part of the new creation. The old things have gone away, and look, new things have arrived! 18 All of these new things are from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and who gave us the ministry of reconciliation. 19 In other words, God was reconciling the world to himself through Christ, by not counting people s sins against them. He has trusted us with this message of reconciliation. 20 So we are ambassadors who represent Christ. God is negotiating with you through us. We beg you as Christ s representatives, Be reconciled to God! 21 God caused the one who didn t know sin to be sin for our sake so that through him we could become the righteousness of God. What do you the author means by fearing the Lord? What does it mean to not live for yourself but for the one who died for you and was raised (v.15)? In verse 17, what old things have gone away (hint: pay attention to the beginning of verse 16)? Truthfully, verse 19 is a pretty ubiquitous theme in the Old Testament, especially during the exile (e.g. Jeremiah 31:33-34). So why do you suppose the author keeps referring to new things? 2 of 6

3 COMMENTARY BY DAVID E. FREDRICKSON preaching.aspx? commentary_id=2760 In 2 Corinthians 5:13 Paul admits to madness: exestemen. This verse has perplexed scholars for generations. What follows is one attempt to make sense of it. I do so by placing it into the troubled relationship Paul had with the church in Corinth. So here, in a nutshell, might have been the situation. The major data point, though not the first event, was the letter of tears mentioned in 2 Corinthians 2:4. Letters like these in which the writer bitterly rebukes the recipients by dwelling on the injuries received from the latter were not uncommon in antiquity and are attested in the surviving epistolary handbooks. So how had the Corinthians hurt Paul? After writing 1 Corinthians and sending it in the care of Timothy to Corinth, Paul decided to visit the church again. During this visit Paul was insulted or injured by an unknown person and the church took no action against him. Paul fled Corinth but sent the letter of tears in the care of Titus criticizing the community for ignoring the injury. At their rendezvous in Macedonia Titus reports (2 Corinthians 7:5-16) to Paul that the church had disciplined the offending individual (2 Corinthians 2:5-11). Paul also was informed of the pain his tearful letter had caused the church (2 Corinthians 7:8-13). What a mess! And remember this is only from Paul s point of view. Each person would have their own tale to tell. Everybody has wronged everybody. And it gets worse. The super-apostles show up pleased with Paul s severity in the letter of tears but ridicule his gentleness in the presence of the church. To Paul s way of thinking their ministry is indistinguishable from Satan s (2 Corinthians 2:11; 4:4; 6:14-16; 11:12-21). Yet it looks like the church has started to admire their moral absolutism (2 Corinthians 11:3-4; 11:19; 13:1-10). If ever a community and its leaders needed a new start, this was it. Paul s conviction is that the new start does not begin with a renewed application of law (see chapter 3), no matter how good that law might be. Out of this disaster emerges a profound meditation on grace 3 of 6

4 and forgiveness in 2 Corinthians 5: Our entry point into Paul s theological response to a very human and chaotic situation, one in which Paul finds himself as lost as anyone else, is to distinguish forgiveness from reconciliation. Here I follow John D. Caputo s fascinating exploration of forgiveness (The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2006, ). Reconciliation depends on reasons, excuses, or confession; these in a sense buy back the debt incurred As a thing made new by God, for though a man is not newly created when God gives him the spirit of regeneration, but only his qualities are changed, yet nonetheless it pleased the Holy Spirit to speak so, to teach us that we must attribute all things to the glory of God. Not that we are as rocks or stones, but because God creates in us both the will to will well, and the power to do well. John Calvin through the injury. Forgiveness, however, seeks to exist apart from any economic consideration. It seeks to be pure and absolute. Its logic, against the logic of common sense, demands that only the unforgivable can be forgiven, only that which is not forgotten, blotted out, cleansed, or purified, can be given back to the wrong doer as a gift with no strings attached. If one is moved to forgive based on the repentance of the offender or some proclivity of the sinner which excuses the wrong then it ceases to be forgiveness. Likewise, forgiveness offered because it heals the one who forgives (which may indeed happen) is no longer forgiveness in the strict sense. Forgiveness requires there be no reason for it. It must be a pure gift, the arrival of the impossible ( new creation in Paul s terminology); it must escape calculation in what Caputo calls the event. He writes, 4 of 6

5 Reconciliation is not a bad economy and certainly not a bad thing, and it is much to be preferred to vindictiveness and endless cycles of retribution. But it is not the gift of the event or the event of the gift, which is not an economy but an excess Reconciliation, which is the form forgiveness takes in its ordinary mundane existence, belongs to the economy of the world, taking place on the plane of being. Forgiveness, on the other hand, belongs not to the entitative order of checks and balances but to the order of the event, which is here the order of the gift, of the grace and gratuitousness of the event beyond being s transactions (p. 211). There is [a] kind of presumptuous sin [that] assume[s] a kind of perpetual stuckness about another person. Let s say you know something about this person s past - something they did or said, or how they typically acted a day ago or a week ago or a year ago or twenty years ago - and you assume that this person cannot change and will not change, in part because you could not countenance it. You wouldn t allow them to change if they wanted to. You freeze them. We have enormous power to condemn and imprison others by keeping them in the prison of their own past. Guarding that prison door. Keeping them locked up. Or forbidding someone to change is like locking them in a prison. The real tragedy is that both your prisoner and you, the prison guard, are in prison. Both of you are locked up. Brother Curtis Almquist 5 of 6

6 I want to emphasize the contrast Caputo draws between economy and excess. Paul, I think, sides wholeheartedly with the excess of forgiveness and not the calculation of reconciliation in 5: Why? Forgiveness is the only way to go on living with and in spite of the mess. It is the only way simultaneously to take responsibility for wrongs committed and to live as if a new start had been given. But Paul does use the term reconciliation, it might be objected. In fact, English translations of the term katallasso (2 Corinthians 5:18, 19, 20) and its cognate katallage (2 Corinthians 5:18-19) are testimony to our unfortunate habit of turning excess into economy, of turning gift into barter. Lexical evidence suggests that katallasso does not so much refer to a restoration of a relationship through settling accounts but the initiation of a friendship in which all things are held in common, in other words, where the very idea of an economic exchange has evaporated. New creation! Think of it (if you can): God has entered into a friendship with the cosmos (a Greek way of saying everybody ) in which God and cosmos have all things in common, where between the two there is no mine and thine as the ancients said about friends. Forgiveness, understood in 2 Corinthians 5:19 as God s not counting sin against the sinner is the heart of this new creation. And Paul is unafraid to draw an impossible theological conclusion from this mad idea of God s friendship with the world. Read 2 Corinthians 5:19 (very slowly) and wonder whether forgiveness might be bearing the sin of the other in one s own life and in so doing never forgetting it but living on in any case in the delight of the other s righteousness that your forgiving/not forgetting gives the other. Now apply this to God and everybody. Whoa. Other Thoughts & Questions What should be the consequence of reconciliation? Is it a determination of winners and losers? What in you is God making new? Don t forget the questions listed at the end of the Scripture passage! 6 of 6