2 Corinthians 5:16-21 Commentary

Christians might argue that a source of the world’s hatred and violence is our failure to view people the way God views us. Countries wage wars and people launch verbal broadsides against each other in part because we believe that our enemies are something other than beloved image-bearers of the living God.

Parts of North American culture claims to desire a more civil society in which all persons are respected. They often ground that desire in the pursuit of what we sometimes call “the common good.” However, Paul and Timothy ground their call to such a perspective in a different place. They ground it in God’s character and work. That’s the force of this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson’s beginning with Hoste (“So”) that links it to what the apostles have just written. At those preceding verses’ heart is verses 14-15’s “We are convinced that one died for all … And he died for all.”

These verses have, of course, provoked Christian debate across the centuries. Preachers want to proclaim the immensity of Christ’s saving work through the filter of our own theological tradition. But most Christians can agree that 2 Corinthians 5 reflects God’s longing for all people to receive God’s grace with their faith in Jesus Christ.

Because of God’s deep longing for all people’s well-being that’s so visible in Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection, “from now on [tou nyn*] we regard [oidamen] no one [oudena] from a worldly point of view [kata sarka]” (16). In this Lenten season, Jesus’ friends remember that we don’t, in The Message’s paraphrase of this verse, “evaluate anyone by what they have or how they look.”

Preachers might spend some time unpacking the shape of “a worldly point of view.” We might note how we, for example, naturally regard people from a racial, linguistic or gender perspective. We view people through the filter of their socio-economic condition, political philosophy or marital status. We even view people according to how we feel about them and what they’ve done (or failed to do) to us.

Paul wouldn’t deny that those things affect our view of people. But he summons Jesus’ friends to let the Spirit help us deliberately choose to treat people based on an entirely different reality. The apostles call us to view people as those God didn’t just create in God’s image but also longs for their flourishing.

The apostles remind their readers that there is, in fact, real danger in viewing anyone from a worldly perspective. After all, at one time we “regarded [egnokamen] Christ in this way” (16b). People judged Jesus by things like his background and what they thought of as his false claims to be God’s own dearly beloved Son. In doing so, they failed to see Jesus was the Messiah with whom God was deeply pleased. By regarding Jesus from a worldly point of view, they also risked eternal separation from the living God.

In verse 17 the apostles link a godlier perspective on Jesus to the new creation God has made of Jesus’ friends. “If anyone is in Christ [en Christi],” they write there, “the new creation [kaine ktisis] has come. The old [archaia] is gone [parelthen], the new [kaina] is here [gegonen].”

This seminal verse may offer two perspectives on the way God summons God’s adopted children to view people. On the one hand, it insists that our fellow Christians aren’t, first of all, black, brown or white. Our fellow Christians aren’t primarily politically liberal or conservative, English, Spanish or Mandarin speakers. They are new creations. Our brothers and sisters in Christ are those whom God has not just recreated but also continues to recreate in the likeness of our Savior Jesus Christ.

What’s more, however, part of Jesus’ friends’ recreation includes a transformation of the way we treat everyone. The Spirit has put to death our old perspective on people and is raising to new life our treatment of people as those whom God deeply treasures and longs to rescue.

This is part of what Paul and Timothy refer to when they speak of Jesus’ followers as ministers of “reconciliation” [katallages] (18) and “Christ’s ambassadors” [presbeuomen] (20). The Spirit equips God’s adopted children to advocate not for alienation, but for reconciliation. God saves God’s dearly beloved people in part to announce not hostility, but the good news of God’s rescuing work in Jesus Christ.

Of course, Paul’s primary reference is to Timothy and his work of announcing God’s reconciling work of people to himself. God graced them with what verse 18 calls “the ministry [diakonian] of reconciliation [katallages].” God made Paul and Timothy what they call Christ’s ambassadors “as though God were making his appeal [parakalountes] through” them (20).

But from that God’s adopted children can infer that each of us are also those whom God uses to appeal to people to be reconciled. Both preachers and our hearers are what The Message paraphrases as “Christ’s representatives God uses to persuade men and women to drop their differences and enter into God’s work of making things right between them.” The Spirit graces all Christians with the ability to plead with all people to be reconciled.

Of course, the reconciliation about which Paul writes is primarily between God and people. “Be reconciled [katallagete] to God.” he begs his readers in verse 20. God, after all, has already graciously done all the “heavy lifting” needed for such reconciliation. God has already graciously reached out to us.

As the apostle goes on to write in verse 21, God did that by making “him who had no sin [me gnonta hamartian] to be sin [hamartian] for us, so that in him [hin autou] we might become [genometha] the righteousness [dikaiosyne] of God.” The Message helpfully paraphrases this assertion as, “In Christ, God put the wrong on him who never did anything wrong, so that we could be put right with God.”

Yet verse 21 is mysterious. Obviously the One whom the apostle speak of as knowing “no sin” was the incarnate Son of God. Through Jesus’ saving life, death and resurrection God reconciled us, who’d made ourselves God’s enemies, to God.

But it’s hard to fully understand this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson’s explanation of how exactly God did that. The apostles seem to suggest God reconciled God’s people to himself by essentially treating God’s Son as God’s enemy whom God punished instead of Jesus’ friends. Paul and Timothy appear to be suggesting that God dumped all of God’s righteous fury over the world’s sinfulness squarely on the scarred shoulders of Jesus Christ.

As a result, Paul and Timothy marvel in verse 19, God doesn’t “count” [logizomenos] our “sins [paraptomata] against” us. For Jesus’ sake, God doesn’t view and treat us the way we deserve. God, instead, graciously both views and treats those who receive God’s grace with our faith as God’s dearly beloved children who’d never sinned against God or our neighbor.

Now God, in turn, invites Christians to view other people not from a worldly perspective, but from God’s point of view. In fact, the Spirit fully empowers us to treat people, including those who have made themselves our enemies, not as those who have sinned against God, our neighbor and even us, but as those whom God longs to rescue from the messes the world, we and they have made.

*I have here and elsewhere added in brackets the Greek words for the English words the NIV translation uses.

[Note: In addition to these weekly sermon commentaries on the CEP website, we also have a resource page for Lent and Easter with more preaching and worship ideas as well as sample sermons on the Year C Lectionary texts.]

Illustration

The movie Places in the Heart’s Edna Spaulding is the widowed mother of two young children during the depths of the Great Depression in rural Texas. The bank that holds a big mortgage on her place wants her to sell both her house and land to it, as well as send her kids to live with relatives.

Edna, though, will have none of it. Almost out of nowhere, a homeless and out-of-work African American begs a meal from her and then randomly suggests that she plant cotton on her sizeable chunk of uncultivated land and thereby make a tidy profit. Later she decides to do it, and immediately hires the fellow, Moses, to lead the way. Moze promptly gets to work, moves into Edna’s barn, and befriends her children.

But then comes someone who’s far more problematic, who’s dumped on Ms. Spaulding by the slimy banker who proposed she sell the place to the bank and send her kids away. The banker’s brother-in-law Will, blinded in the First World War, has come to live with him.

But because Will is so ornery, the banker is eager to get rid of him. So he tells a reluctant Edna that the bank would look favorably on her efforts to support herself if she took Will in. Will doesn’t like the idea and wants nothing but to be left alone caning chairs (his trade) and listening to music on his prized phonograph.

However, what’s really happening in the movie comes clear amid the approach of a violent thunderstorm when everyone must take refuge in the backyard storm cellar. Amid this emergency everybody reaches out, quite literally, for each other.

Blind Will finds his way to the attic where Edna’s little girl, Possum, is playing. After he grabs her, she leads him to the backyard where Edna leads both through the blinding dust and to the shelter. Moze does the same with Edna’s son Frank, who has dashed home from school to help his family. Just as Moze is about close the shelter door, he sees a shadowy figure, who he promptly goes out to fetch. Edna in turn also leads that pair to the shelter.

The five sit together in the cellar as the storm rages above and around them, not knowing if there will be anything left when the storm subsides. This merciless storm mirrors the immense pain and heartache each sheltered person has experienced.

These random, hard-pressed people have come together out of practical necessity. “Still,” as one reviewer notes, “for those who wear their biblical goggles to the movie theater, the group, strangely, looks vaguely familiar, as a full-on representation of the kind of kingdom Jesus talked about over and over: widows, orphans, blind, and exiled, clinging together for what Frederick Buechner calls ‘a dearer life’.”