Monday • 5/31/2021
Monday of the Second Week After Pentecost (Proper 4)

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 41; Psalm 52; Deuteronomy 11:13–19; 2 Corinthians 5:11–6:2; Luke 17:1–10

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 9 (“The First Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 12:2–6, BCP, p. 86); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 19 (“The Song of the Redeemed,” Revelation 15:3–4, BCP, p. 94)

Knowing what time it is! I hope I never outlive the thrill at the arrival of a long-anticipated special moment. Several from my life have stuck with me through the years. My first at-bat in high school baseball, my wedding day, the acceptance of my dissertation, my ordination to the ministry. I hope there are more days like those still to come!

Paul’s special sense of time is that Christ’s coming inaugurated a whole era of special days. Every day is an amazing, awesome, astounding “now”: “Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2b). Paul deeply inhabited the Bible’s world; it defined his reality in a way that is difficult for secularized (post)moderns to comprehend. But it did. And one of his chief realizations on the road to Damascus was that every moment of history since the descent of darkness in Genesis 3 had been a preparation for the breaking in of the “new creation” ushered in by Jesus of Nazareth, who though recently crucified, now stood before him, risen and ascended.

My years in Little League and youth baseball leagues had made me ready for my first plate appearance in high school … and all the fun that followed. Similarly, Paul realized that all the biblical sagas about the patriarchs, the judges, the kings, and the prophets had been leading up to this: “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

An ambassadorial voice. A calamitous and unthinkable thing had happened. All the evil in the world — whether experienced by victim or perpetrator, whether as despair or arrogance, as forlornness or domination —all of it had been absorbed by God’s own delegate, his own Son, on the Cross. On Calvary’s Cross, one who “knew no sin became sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21). The result: “one died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them” (2 Corinthians 5:14).

Christ died for all, and all have died in him. That is a staggering claim. It’s a claim of universal import, and brings with it a claim to universal dominion: “even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus... (Ephesians 2:6), . But more fundamentally, it is a claim of universal love. Which is why Paul says Christ’s love compels him to tell its story: “For the love of Christ urges us on….” (2 Corinthians 5:14).

So important is the good news of Christ’s love that God commissions Paul (and all of us as well) as ambassadors: “So we are ambassadors for Christ…” (2 Corinthians 5:20a). When ambassadors speak, it is as representatives of the one who sent them, responsible for speaking directly. That is the thrust of the rest of the verse I just cited (and is better perceived in the more literal NASB translation): “…as though (Gk hōs) God were making an appeal through us; we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Corinthians 5:20b).

The thing we ambassadors have to keep in mind is that we don’t speak for ourselves. We don’t get to tinker with the message (something to ponder for another time). Nor do we have the option of keeping the message to ourselves, as though it were our own privileged and private mystical knowledge.

A vicarious representation. When I was in seminary, I remember asking one of my professors about the meaning of a verse in the previous chapter of this epistle. “Sir, Paul says that he preaches ‘Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’s sake.’ Could that possibly mean that our transformed lives are part of the message, part of what testifies to the truth of Jesus?” The professor’s reply was: “Absolutely not. The message is the message. Period.” I wasn’t completely convinced my professor caught Paul’s nuance, but I let it go, and tucked the question away.

The more I’ve thought about it, the more deeply I’ve read Scripture, and the longer I’ve served in the church, the more firmly I’ve concluded the professor was wrong. One big reason for thinking that Paul does mean to make our lives part of the message is what he says at the end of chapter 5. Paul concludes that the purpose of Christ’s becoming sin for us on the Cross was “so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Here’s what New Testament theologian Richard Hays says about this verse:

[Paul] does not say “that we might know about the righteousness of God,” nor “that we might believe in the righteousness of God,” nor even “that we might receive the righteousness of God.” Instead, the church is to become the righteousness of God: where the church embodies in its life together the world-reconciling love of Jesus Christ, the new creation is manifest. The church incarnates the righteousness of God.*

It’s not that we don’t need first to “know about,” “believe in,” or “receive” God’s righteousness. It is that Paul is looking beyond that wonderful reality here. He’s looking to the extraordinary power of that righteousness—the very character of God—becoming incarnate in us. For, if the world is going to see the meaning of Christ’s taking the world’s sins upon his shoulders, the world is going to see it in the way we—his followers—embody and champion the cause of justice and righteousness in this unjust and unrighteous world.

The God who cannot otherwise be seen is seen in the bearers of his image of justice — as well as of mercy and holiness and goodness and compassion and wisdom. It’s what New Testament theologian Michael Gorman fittingly calls “becoming the gospel.”**

Be blessed this day as you, by the grace of God, do just that!

Reggie Kidd+

*Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics (HarperCollins, 1996), p. 24 (emphasis in the original).

**For more on this theme, see Michael Gorman, Becoming the Gospel: Paul, Participation, and Mission (Eerdmans, 2015)