A New Creation – 2 Corinthians 5

A text – 2 Corinthians 5:16-21

¹⁶ From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we no longer know him in that way. ¹⁷ So if anyone is in Christ, thereis a new creation: everything old has passed away; look, new things have come into being! ¹⁸ All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; ¹⁹ that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. ²⁰ So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ: be reconciled to God. ²¹ For our sake God made the one who knew no sin to be sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

A reflection:

Can you imagine yourself having a friend who just betrayed the daylights out of you? Or who did something or said something that you simply cannot believe? So much so that you feel you might have to sever ties? In these polarized days and weeks and months, this very thing is happening over and over again. And to save our sanity, sometimes we just have to walk away, at least temporarily. This, too, shall pass, and, as Disney’s Robin Hood says to a sweet child, “Keep your chin up. Someday there will be happiness again.”

Paul and the church at Corinth have gone through a two or three-layered conflict, and everyone has been keeping score. Paul may, in this passage about forgiveness and reconciliation, be saying, “Look, if we follow God in Christ Jesus, we have to be as crazy as God is, to build a friendship of trust with human beings who will always fail but whom God always forgives, not by magically making sins disappear, but by bearing them in God’s actual body” (verse 21 – For our sake God made the one who knew no sin (Jesus) to BE sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God).

If we want to live in God, we, too, must forgive (not counting one another’s trespasses against one another) and live on, knowing we are all sinners and living together anyway. If we want to know God the Father, we must accept God’s forgiveness like the prodigal son did and not resent it like the older son did. In this way we all become new. We remember the old, but we are living in a new way, the way God created us to live. This new way we won’t understand at first, and it may be hard to give up resentment and judgmentalism. We have had those habits for a long time. Think how hard it must have been for a Pharisee to accept Jesus’s ways. But if he could, if we could… what a new creation we would be!

A prayer:

Lord God, Thank you for loving us. Thank you for the gifts you gave to us in your Son, Jesus, and your forgiveness of all our failings. Help us to remember how we have been forgiven when it comes to looking at our neighbors, friends, and family members. Amen.