By Such Stripes Are We Healed
by Jack Shaver
©The United Church of Canada, 1985
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 0-88622-196-X
7M/12/85/APL
Used with Permission
Saturday
What can put the world right?
II Corinthians 5: 17-21
The Corinthian letters are wonderfully revealing of the man Paul and the congregation at Corinth. Read these epistles sometime as though you had come upon some letters written, centuries ago, by a preacher to his congregation. Play amateur historian. Look for evidence with which to reconstruct what was going on at the time. How many letters have passed between them? What is the relationship between this congregation and its leaders? What upsets them about Paul and what upsets Paul about them? The better you know the writer and his context the more living help he will be to you as a theologian. It is real people that are witnesses to God's grace. Idealized saints are a poor substitute.
Today's verses come in the correspondence after several letters have passed between Paul and the church. At least one was a very angry letter from Paul to them. As he thinks about it, he is sorry he wrote it. But he is also not sorry, because it resulted in some godly sorrow which is good for everybody as it works repentance. Today's verses are part of a tender letter. Paul and the congregation are making up after an enormous spat.
It is verses like these that indicate there is no essential divergence between Paul and the Gospel writers. The reason they paid so much attention to Passion Week, the reason they spend so many words having Jesus explain that it was necessary for him to suffer, is that, like Paul, they see the life and death of Christ as God's righteousness at work. When what we see in the life and death of Christ is God putting the world right, everything becomes new. If all we see in Jesus is an example to be followed, we have the same old world.
This crucified one is God's work putting the world right. God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself. God's righteousness, as distinct from a righteousness of our own, is fulfilled in overcoming the brokenness of the world. God does not count our sins against us. It is forgiveness that reconciles us to God. It is God's forgiveness that accomplishes our new creation. Nothing greater can happen than that we are forgiven. Behold all things are new.
Anyone who has experienced genuine forgiveness will know that such new creation does not come cheaply. When one person has offended another, that offence has not been forgiven when it has been forgotten by both parties. The offence has not been forgiven until they remember it together. They are reconciled when they see the offence between them with each other's eyes. What sight, other than the cross of Christ, can reconcile us to God?
Wonders of wonders, we have this ministry of reconciliation with one another. We are ambassadors for Christ. The way one gets to know that one is forgiven by God is through someone who has been forgiven by God.
Praise
Thank God.
Now and again there is a kind of thanksgiving in us that can get expressed only by thanking you.
The gift of life in the body is a wondrous mystery. Light and sound, thought and feeling, agony and ecstasy. None of it the work of our hands. Indeed it is when we think we create ourselves that we subject the creation to futility.
How transformed life is when we freely receive it as your gift. Thanks be to God.
The gift that other people are to us in their unique reality is of unsurpassing treasure.
There is no accounting for it, there is no measuring it, there is no earning it, there is only the grateful receiving of it.
Thanks be to God.
Your gift of forgiveness is the greatest thing that can happen to us. Thereby we are restored to you, and to the others, and to ourselves. Thereby we receive the gift of life again and can embrace it with thanksgiving.
Thanks be to God.
Your gift of your Spirit empowers our life in you without destroying us, leaving our integrity intact. Your Spirit is the fount of all our blessings. Praise God from whom all blessings flow.
Amen