II Corinthians 5:16-21
“Reconciliation”
March 27, 2022 – Fourth Sunday of Lent
He stands and watches as a great procession draws near him in heaven. At the center of it is a female figure with a shining a face. She is surrounded by glowing angels and by the figures of boys and girls all trailing along singing joyfully. In The Great Divorce C. S. Lewis’s narrator says, “I remember the unbearable beauty of her face.”[1] He turns to his guide and asks, “Is it? … is it?” clearly imagining that he is watching a parade in honor of the Virgin Mary. His guide tells him, “Not at all. It’s someone ye’ll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith…”
The narrator wonders, “She seems to be… well, a person of particular importance?” His guide answers, “Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on earth are two quite different things.” The story goes on to explain that on earth no one thought this woman remarkable at all. Yet she welcomed every young person she met as if it were her own child, “even the boy who brought the meat to her back door.”
She, the heavenly lady, was also followed by a huge contingent of animals: cats, dogs, birds, and horses. The guide explains, “Every beast and bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them.”
Lewis’s point is that “the great ones” in God’s kingdom are not who we would expect them to be. We may barely notice them in this life, people like a sweet old lady who is kind to children and takes in stray animals.
So that grand dame of heaven in Lewis’s story is something like what Paul wants us to understand when he says in verse 16 of our text, “From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view…” Literally, “a human point of view” is “according to the flesh,” where Paul is using “flesh,” as he often does, to mean a sinful, fallen human way of looking at things, rather than actual skin, muscles and bones. In any case, he is saying that Christians have another way of seeing the world, and especially other human beings.
The end of verse 16 mentions that “we once knew Christ from a human point of view.” Paul is particularly speaking about his own willful human ignorance about Christ, when he regarded Jesus as a pretend messiah and persecuted His followers. But he says “we,” including all of us who may have looked at Jesus as merely human before coming to faith in Him as the Son of God. And, as he says, “we know him no longer in that way.”
Verse 17 returns to the main point from verse 16, that from an earthly perspective we and the people around us are merely human, nothing remarkable, not worth much in the grand scheme of things. Christ came to change all that. “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” My wife Beth just taught the closing chapters of the Bible in children’s Sunday School. There in Revelation 21 verse 5 God says, “See, I am making all things new.” There is also a list of all the old things, like death and grief and pain, which will pass away. Before John ever wrote those words, Paul said the same thing is true of every Christian. God’s new creation begins in each one of us when we believe in Jesus, when we enter into Christ.
I’ll keep saying it. The point of Christian faith is not just forgiveness, not just God waving His hand saying it’s all O.K. and pretending that we are not really sinners when in fact we are. What Jesus did for us was done in order to change us, to make us into something new, something grand and beautiful enough to be called a “new creation.” The whole world is being made over again in Jesus Christ, starting in us.
At the beginning of January, we spent a few nights in an AirBnB a couple blocks away from Old Town in Florence on the coast. We stayed in an old house, built maybe a century ago. But the current owners have transformed it. It is now a lovely new home built on the bones of the original. The walls had been stripped and replaced with modern siding outside and gorgeous shiplap inside. All the light fixtures, cabinets and plumbing were brand new, as well as the heating system. The old, weathered hardwood floors on which we walked were the only visible part of what had been before, and they were sanded and polished into beauty. It was the same old house in an old neighborhood, but it was also a new creation. That’s what God wants to do with you and me, with anyone who comes to Jesus in faith.
That aim of transformation is why we will take a close look at what the next verse, 18, actually says, “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ…” Note that it says God reconciled us. That’s important because there has been a strong theological undercurrent in Christian history to suggest that God is the one being reconciled, that God is the one who was changed by what Jesus did.
One of the founding figures of our Covenant denomination is Paul Pet(t)er Waldenström. We have constantly retold the story of a conversation Waldenström had with two other Swedish Lutheran pastors in 1870. They were discussing “God’s reconciliation in Christ,” that is, how God was reconciled to human beings through the work of Christ, appeasing His wrath, and turning Him toward human beings with love and grace. Paul Peter almost off-handedly asked a question that has become a slogan in our denomination, “Where is that written?”[2]
Now, I could go off on how “Where is it written?” became a foundational question in Covenant life and thought and our attitude toward the Scriptures. But I’m concerned here with the main point of that seminal conversation and Waldenström’s follow up. His question was greeted with a laugh. Lutheran and other Protestants of that time generally assumed what Waldenström and his friends did, that God’s reconciliation to human beings was “written all over the Bible.” Yet he decided to go and look. After great searching, not only did he not find the phrase “God reconciled in Christ” anywhere in Scripture, he found the whole idea of the “reconciling of God” missing from both Old and New Testament.
In 1872, then, Waldenström wrote a sermon which challenged the reigning assumption that the work of Christ on the Cross was a satisfaction of God’s wrath which changed God’s attitude toward us from wrath to love. Instead, he maintained, the change was all on the human side. Jesus reconciled human beings to God, by taking away their sins and making them righteous. As Paul says here, “All this is from God.” The work, the activity, was all on God’s side, but the change, the transformation, was all on our side.
The Gospel lesson for today, Jesus’ beloved parable of the Prodigal Son became a key illustration of that Waldenströmian flavor in our Covenant theology. Look at the father in the story. He isn’t full of wrath needing to be appeased. He is always full of love toward his wayward child, just waiting and watching for the boy to come home so that he can jump up, run out, embrace him and bring him into the house once again. The father didn’t need to be reconciled. He went out to reconcile the Prodigal Son to himself.
Likewise, we heard that strange little Old Testament reading today, about the stopping of the manna after the people of Israel entered Canaan and ate produce from the Promised Land. The key, though, was verse 9 of Joshua 5, when God says, “Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt.” That’s God’s reconciliation at work, rolling away, taking away human disgrace and shame, taking away our sin. He reconciles us.
The upshot for Paul is there at the end of verse 18, God, “reconciled us to himself through Christ, giving us a ministry of reconciliation.” God’s loving forgiveness and reconciliation for each of us does not terminate in any one person. That’s why Jesus’ story did not stop with that sweet moment when the father welcomed home the prodigal. Instead, the parable goes on to show us how the father also went out to that bitter, jealous, angry older brother, offering him reconciliation as well, not just with the father, but with his sibling as well.
Lewis shows us something similar in several conversations which happen in The Great Divorce on the outskirts of Heaven. Visitors from hell are greeted by people from their past who are now in heaven. Those blessed citizens of glory do their best to persuade old friends and relatives to give up their sins and receive the grace and transformation of God’s reconciliation.
The longest of those imaginary celestial conversations is between that blessed Lady with whom I began this sermon and the man who was her husband on earth. It’s a complicated exchange in which Lewis explores how a person like her husband was can use a pretense of suffering and misery to manipulate someone else, in this case his wife, by making her pity him. She keeps trying to get him to give up the act, to quit his show of being hurt, and to simply accept a Love that loves him in spite of all that deceitful manipulation. She herself was reconciled by Christ and continued, like Paul says, “the ministry of reconciliation.”
Ultimately, as the end of the book of Revelation shows us in detail, God’s aim, working in and through us, is what it says in verse 19, “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.” In Christ, God wants to bring the whole drunken, wasted, hungry and lost world staggering back up the road to His house where He the Father is waiting to run out with open arms and draw it in. You might say the arms of Jesus were stretched out on the Cross for just that reason, to show us the open arms of His Father who does not count our sins against us but loves us unconditionally.
Paul repeats our part in that whole-world work of reconciliation again there at the end of verse 19, “and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.” Like that bright woman’s husband in Lewis’s book, there are so many, many people unwilling to let go of their sins, of their deceptions, of the lies by which they live. To reconcile them to Himself, God sends those of us who have been reconciled as “ambassadors for Christ” Paul wrote in verse 20.
We typically do not think much of the people we call “ambassadors” in world politics. They wear fancy clothes and go to extravagant banquets to exchange meaningless pleasantries with other ambassadors and heads of state. An old Saturday Night Live skit suggested that the only qualifications needed to be an ambassador were a large political donation and the ability to say “Please pass the sweet-and-sour shrimp,” in several languages. Yet now, watching a horrific war which cries out for peace, truth, and reconciliation, we might wish for truly good men and women in that role, ambassadors with a more significant message.
Paul says “we,” you and I, and all followers of Jesus, are those needed ambassadors. God sends us to family, to friends, to co-workers, even some of us to people on the other side of the world, with the message at the end of that verse, “be reconciled to God.” There are a lot of things we might wish to say to Vladimir Putin or to Russian soldiers, but that is the message which they most, like anyone else on earth, need to hear and accept.
You and I will, of course, need to make sure that we ourselves have truly heard and accepted that message of reconciliation. Remember that it’s not about some change on God’s side, something like, “God used to hate me, but, because of Jesus, now He loves me.” If that were how it worked, we would remain pitiful, hopeless, miserable creatures like the bright lady’s husband ended up being. No, the message of Jesus is of a reconciliation which changes and transforms us, by love, into people worth loving, people who ourselves offer love to those around us.
Some of you came last Saturday and watched the story of Sabina Wurmbrand, a Jewish convert to Christianity. With her husband she suffered for Jesus during the Nazi occupation of Romania. The high point of the film was when Sabina confronted a Nazi soldier who had been one of those who killed her Jewish family back home. She came into the room where he was and embraced him and then kissed him on each cheek. With all her heart she invited him to be reconciled, to accept her forgiveness and, more importantly, the forgiveness of Jesus Christ.
Honestly, I cannot imagine myself able yet to do what Sabina Wurmbrand was portrayed to do in that film. I can only imagine that it happened because she herself was already more reconciled in Christ to God than I feel myself yet. That’s why I still need to hear for myself that entreaty Paul makes to the Corinthians: “on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.” I know, as Paul says elsewhere about himself, that I have not arrived. I am still in process, still being reconciled, still being changed by the love of God given to me in Jesus. My only hope is back there in verse 18, “All this is from God.” I’m the one who needs to change, but God in Christ is the one who makes it possible.
I don’t want to spoil the film for anyone, but Sabina’s Nazi soldier was transformed by the loving reconciliation she offered him. He became someone worth loving, someone who helped others to know Jesus as he was helped to know Him. That’s the sort of transformation which God’s reconciliation of us in Christ is meant to produce.
Paul offers us one more way to see all this in the last verse of our text, one of the stranger sounding verses in Scripture. “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” What could it possibly mean that he, God, made Him, Christ, “to be sin?” We say that Jesus died for our sins or that He was a sacrifice for our sins, but we almost never say that Christ was sin. What in the world is Paul saying here?
The best answer I know points back to that work of reconciliation, that transformation God wants to make in us. He wants to get rid of, to take away our sin. He doesn’t want to ignore it or pretend it doesn’t exist or even just forgive us for our sin. He wants it gone. So the church father Ambrose says God made Jesus be sin, so that when Jesus died on the Cross, sin was being crucified.[3] Sin was dying there. God was making it possible for sin to die in us, so that, just as the verse says, “we might become the righteousness of God.”
And there is that transformation in us once again. God reconciles us to Himself in Jesus Christ and sin starts to die in us. Righteousness, His righteousness, starts living in us. That’s the only way someone could give a kiss to a person who murdered her family. That’s the only way you and I can get free of all our ugly little manipulative games and big hatreds and secret lies. We must keep coming back to Jesus, taking Him into ourselves via His Word and His sacraments, and letting him kill the sin and grow the righteousness in us. That’s what reconciliation means. That’s the message for which we are ambassadors to a world in desperate need of reconciliation.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2022 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1946), p. 106ff.
[2] For the whole story, see Karl A. Olsson, By One Spirit (Chicago: Covenant Press, 1962), pp. 109, 110.
[3] See Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament VII (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press), p. 252.