Malcolm Rogers on 2 Corinthians 5:11–6:2, 6 March 2005
2 Corinthians 5:18
"All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself
through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation".
The ministry of reconciliation is the service of reconciliation
1. The ministry of reconciliation is God's ministry: God's service – v18ff: "All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them.")
It is God's initiative.
2. The ministry of reconciliation is Christ's ministry, 'through Christ' (v18). The motivation for this ministry is Christ's motivation: v14. That is very important. Often we assume that it is meant to be our love for others that is the motivating force. So we wait until we feel love for another person before we choose to serve them. This can be simply an excuse for doing nothing.
I love you - even if I don't like you - because Jesus loves you, and he is my Lord. (cf 4:5 "For we do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake"). And if he loves you, who am I not to love, and not to seek your best: in this world and the next?
The power for this ministry is Christ's power – v14 "Because we are convinced that one died for all and that all died".
Right at the centre of Christian ministry is the death of Jesus, the cross. The cross is the centre of our faith. A condemned man hanging naked, and in agony. It looks awful. The modern PR person would tell us to have any symbol, any message, but the cross. The church needs a rebranding. For people, who see the hand of God (however they understand God) in victories and success and miracles, a man on a cross is the opposite of victory and miracle and success.
Think about it. Most people's heroes are successful. If you ask someone, "Who would you like to be like? Who would you like to follow?" And most people will probably point to people who have been successes (Ellen McCarthy, Clint Eastwood, Thierry Henry, Delia Smith, Bill Gates). Not many people will - if they think about it - choose to follow a man who ends up getting himself crucified.
And yet, we are told that the cross is the power of God and the wisdom of God. Through the cross
- God removed the barrier of sin that separated us from himself:
V19: 'Not counting men's sins'
V21: "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us."
The technical term for this is "substitutionary atonement". We sinned. We rebelled against God. God, the bible tells us is angry with us (of course we are using human words to describe divine emotions, but if you think of the best sort of righteous anger – and multiply it by infinity – then that is how God feels about our sin). He says, "I gave you the gift of life. I gave you the gift of each other. I gave you the gift of this world. I meant you together to become like gods". But you turned your back on me, you turned your back on each other. You trample on the life that I give you. You crush the life that I give to others. You spit on the world that I give you. When I look and see what you have done to yourself, and to others and to your world, it makes me sad (because I love you) and it makes me angry (because I love you). I want you to know my anger, and I want you to know my love.
If you love something or someone, you are going to get angry if you believe that they are destroying themselves. A parent who watches their child go into self destruct mode is going to weep and to be angry: "How could they waste what I have given them?" The day they stop weeping and the day they stop being angry is the day that they stop loving.
God does not stop loving. And so the Father, in his love, sent his unique Son, Jesus, to die for us, to pay the price for our sin. And Jesus, in his love, took onto himself the anger of God and he died for us, in our place.
That is why the cross is the power of God. Through Jesus' death, death has been defeated. Through Jesus' death, there is forgiveness. Through Jesus' death, men and women are drawn back to the God who loves us. That is why the cross is the wisdom of God: it shows us God's righteousness. It shows us God's anger, and it shows us God's love.
It is not our job to stand in front of the cross and to debate whether this term or that term is appropriate to describe what is going on. It is our job to stand in front of the cross and to tremble: not simply at the blood and the ghastliness of it all, but at the awesome divine dimension. Jesus death was nothing less than a human being experiencing the anger of God directed against us and our sin. It is the penalty that we should be paying. But Jesus death is also nothing less than the expression of awesome divine love: the Son of God choosing to die in our place.
- God enabled us to become righteous:
V21: "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God."
The cross is not just about forgiveness. The cross is much more than that. Through faith, and through baptism, we are united to Christ. That means that Jesus' death becomes our death. Jesus is on the cross. We are there with him. Jesus, risen and alive. We are there with him. What happens on the cross is an exchange, a swap: through his Spirit, he takes our sin and we receive his righteousness.
And righteousness is not simply about my relationship with God. It is also about my relationship with others. The gift of righteousness can transform our relationships. It is the key to reconciliation.
Four consequences of the cross:
1. The cross gives us a new way of living (v15)
"He died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again."
Because of the cross we can begin to die to self and to live for him. It is about one of my favourite theological phrases, 'Living our baptism'. The bible tells us very little of the practice of baptism, but quite a bit about the meaning of baptism. In our baptism the bible tells us that, by the Spirit, we are united to Jesus. And by receiving baptism we are saying, or others are saying on our behalf, "I am now, as far as the world is concerned, a dead person. I died with Christ on the cross. I died to my hopes, my ambitions, my failures, my gifts, my sin, my achievements. And I am now, as far as God is concerned, alive with the risen Jesus. I now live not for self, but for him, for his hopes, his ambitions, his gifts, his plans for me and for others."
But baptism is only a moment. Some of us will remember our baptism. Others, like me, will not. The critical question is not when, how or with how much water we were baptised, but whether we are living as baptised people now. Because that is the gift of the cross. We are set free not to live for ourselves but for him who died for us. We are set free to live a cross -centred life, a Jesus-centred life in a self-centred world.
2. The cross gives us a new way of looking (v16)
"So from now on we regard no-one from a worldly point of view..."
The worldly way of looking is about looking at people with the 'lust of the eyes'. We look for power and success and status. I look to see how I can use another person to further me. But the cross makes us look at the world and at other people in a new way.
We see Christ in a new way (v16):
Maybe we saw him as a good man wh came to an unfortunate end; Maybe we saw him as a religious teacher who, like most religious teachers, seems stunningly irrelevant to 21st century life; Maybe we saw him as a wonderful miracle worker who can help us to get on and become successful in life. We see Christ in relation to the 'I': we ask, what relevance does Jesus have to me.
The cross makes us see Jesus in a completely new way. His death is now no longer the tragic end to a promising life, but the fullest revelation of the power and wisdom and love of God. The cross is not the sad bit in between his miracles and his resurrection: the cross is life itself. Whenever I choose to die to self, to what I want, and to live in the way that God wants, I am living.
In other words we begin to see him not from the 'I' perspective, but from God's perspective. The question becomes not how will Jesus further my interests, but how can I serve His interests.
And in the light of the cross we see circumstances in a new way.
It is not a question of measuring success in terms of power or status or wealth, but in terms of love and self-sacrifice and humility. I am merely repeating what I said a few days ago: Who is the greatest? The one up there? No. The one down there, who pushes people not up to here, but right up to there.
We see God's people in a new way (v16).
The cross is a great equaliser. Many of us are driven by a desire to prove that we are better, or more worthy, than other people. Or, equally, we can become paralysed by the fear that other people are better or more worthy than us. But when we see the cross, we discover that we are all in the same boat.
I've been rereading the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. One of his stories, Douglas Adam's tells is about a phrase that was broadcast through a particular galaxy was misunderstood by everyone and ended up causing a major interplanetary war. After many years of war and the obliteration of several planets, the warring parties meet together, and discover that the initial phrase did not originate from their galaxy but came through a time warp from a distant galaxy. So they patch up their differences, build a massive war fleet and set out in their space ships to declare war on the offending galaxy. Unfortunately, Adam's writes, due to a severe confusion of perspectives, on arrival at the offending galaxy their entire war fleet was swallowed by a dog.
I guess that you could say that in our world we like trying to prove that we are someone, that we are somehow more valuable or of more significance than the next person. The problem is that we are so wrapped up in our own little world that we cannot see the vastness of the world to which God invites us to come.
But when we see ourselves in the light of the standard of the cross then we do see both how far we have fallen and how much we need God. At that point it becomes rather foolish for me to then say of another person, "But of course they need God's forgiveness more than me"
This is what Paul means when he says that in Christ there are no barriers: no racial or social or sexual barriers. The barriers that we put up are the barriers that are built and maintained by sin and prejudice and fear and pride and envy. But in the light of the cross, those barriers crumble.
3. The cross gives us a new way of being (v17)
"Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! "
This must be one of the most quoted verses of the bible. There is the song that we often sing: "I am a new creation, no more in condemnation". It goes to the very heart of who it is that we are. Because of the cross we are new people. We are now 'in Christ', brought into a completely new set of relationships.
In the world, who 'I am' is determined by my family, my cultural background, my sex, my tribe, my nationality. There are people who are like me and there are people who are not like me, and often we define ourselves not in positives but in negatives: "I'm not like them". A child may start of wanting to be like their parents; they may go through a phase when they would rather be dead than be like their parents; and as they grow up they discover that they can still be their own person even though they are like their parents (three phases of belief in Santa Claus: first a person believes in Santa Claus; then he doesn't believe in Santa Claus; then he is Santa Claus)
In Christ, who 'I am' is determined by a completely new set of relationships: not biological or national or cultural. Instead who 'I am' is determined by my relationship with Christ. When I am baptised I become part of a family that is so much larger than any natural family: it crosses space and time. I become a brother to the people of the Old Testament. Their story becomes my story. And I become a brother to believers who worshipped 1900 years ago or 500 years ago. Their story is part of my story. And today, I am brother to Christians in China or the Middle East, in Afghanistan, Israel and Palestine. We have a common identity. We are forgiven sinners. We have one Saviour, one Lord and one God. We have one purpose and one destiny.
It is said that "Blood is thicker than water". Sadly that is true in this world, but it is not true in the world that really matters. Would that it were not true in this world: we only need to think of the massacre of Tutsis by the Houtus in Rwanda, the massacre of people by people who went to the same church and prayed the same prayers and who had received the same baptism.
That is why baptism is so radical. It undermines our old identity. It dethrones the biological family, because it says to the person being baptised: "You now belong to a family that is much bigger than your biological family, and that - in the end - is more real than your biological family. You will be a member of your biological family for 70 or 80 years, but you will be a member of your new family, in Christ, for eternity"
That is why we try to have baptism services here in one of our main services. We are saying to parents: "This is not simply a biological family affair. This is about the child or adult becoming part of a much bigger family"
So because of Christ's ministry of reconciliation we become a new creation, with a new identity and a new nature.
4. A new task (v18). We are Christ's ambassadors (v20).
Here it comes full circle. The ministry of reconciliation is God's ministry: He took the initiative. When we were lost, he came to find us. The ministry of reconciliation is Christ's ministry: He died for us, so that we can be put right with God.
Now it becomes our ministry. It is not that we can die for people again. No. What Christ did on the cross was once and for all. His death has done everything that needs to be done.
But there is something lacking, something that we need to do - or, more accurately, that Christ needs to do in us and through us. And that is the message of proclamation. Notice the language that Paul uses: we persuade (v11), we implore (v20), we urge (6:1). Our job is to be God's spokespeople, speaking on his behalf with his authority. Our message is very simple: 'Be reconciled to God' (v20). Get yourself right with God
Of course it is difficult. It is OK standing up in church and urging people to be reconciled to God. I assume that if someone has come to church, they will expect to get this message. We have a couple of very pagan friends who were telling us how they went along to their local carol service. "It was really good. A great sing", they said, "And then the vicar got up and said his bit about God. But it was OK, because I guess it was part of the deal. We went for the carols, and he could do his bit". It is actually so much harder talking with friends or colleagues or members of our families. And of course we have to wait for the right time or the right opportunity: but it is OK to pray for those times and opportunities, and to pray that we will have the wits and the courage to take them when they occur.
The thing is, all of this – coming to church, singing, listening to the preacher – it's not a hobby. And we're not playing games. This is a matter of desperate seriousness. It is about God calling, through us, to people who are cut off from him; it is about urging people to seek the only one who can break us out of the icy-cold self-centred life. It is about inviting people to have life. CS Lewis describes it as inviting children who have spent all their lives making mud pies in back street gutters, to come to the seaside for a holiday. It is about pointing people to a relationship with Jesus, to friendship with God.
That is this ministry of reconciliation.