Abstract
If Lent provides Christian communities once more with the opportunity to engage in practices of introspection and sacrifice, the scriptures this fourth Sunday of Lent provide an example of what must be sacrificed. In order for the promises of God to take hold and become tangibly realized in our midst, the idol of our own rectitude, merit, or spotlessness before God must surely be sacrificed. These texts speak together to affirm that God is indeed gracious in wonderful and unpredictable ways, but not because we first relinquish the idol of rectitude and merit. Rather, relinquishing this very idol is the condition for the possibility of perceiving afresh what God has always been doing and continues to do, but which we, in impotent self-reliance, too often fail to see and, therefore, fail to participate in.
Joshua 5:9 notes that ‘The Lord said to Joshua: Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt’, but this divine act arrives delayed, after forty years of wilderness wandering in neither Egypt nor Israel, but between and betwixt. The divine word of promise becomes tangible and memorialized around Passover meal and the transition from relying upon manna alone in the desert to life-sustaining agricultural life in the land of Canaan. But the disgrace of Egypt: this must not be passed over too quickly in preaching and theological reflection. The disgrace of slavery and all manner of dehumanizing social and economic arrangements must sound a familiar if painful ring in the congregation’s ears on this day, with our own inheritance of racial injustice and its metastatic effects. Here, the idol of our own rectitude will appear as the failure to perceive these disgraces as our own metaphorical Egypts of the day. As a disgrace, the metaphor of Egypt invites the congregant to inquire critically about one’s own participation and privileges in society, whether these be more akin to Pharaoh or to the Hebrews, more like an oppressor or oppressed, or some mixture of both, or silently and even ignorantly complicit in an Egypt by any other name. We like to rest in the presumption that others are the oppressive Egyptians. But are we? Are we oppressing and disgracing others?
To be sure, Psalm 32 councils against the domestication of the biblical text—the silencing of the prophetic word—by celebrating not only confession but the fruit it bears. As one’s own impotent strength dries up and fades, a new, life-giving strength can be found in practices of confession: ‘Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord!” and you forgave the guilt of my sin’ (Ps 32:5). Indeed, this confession clears out space for the spiritual realization of what God has been doing: ‘You are a hiding place for me; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with glad cries of deliverance’ (Ps 32:7). The Psalmist’s own confession expresses the understanding that something is wrong with the human condition and that we ourselves are capable of entering into a critical dialogue about the contours of that brokenness. Doing so with honesty can give rise to those glad cries of deliverance and other tangible expressions and behaviors that flow from an awareness of what God stands ready to do and does do, despite the various disgraces—akin to Egypt—to which we succumb.
The fruit of the Psalmist’s confession—‘glad cries of deliverance’ (Ps 32:7)—becomes in Second Corinthians an imperative for active, boundary-crossing ministry.
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 regard him in this way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old is passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled himself to us through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; 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 (2 Cor 5:16–19).
The text is prophetic to the point of being difficult, even seemingly impossible, to comprehend. What is ‘the human point of view’, through which we are no longer to regard one another, much less Christ? What clues might drilling down into the metaphor of Egypt, or other sites of deep suffering, yield? The manner in which the Christ event changes all relationships in a fundamental way cannot be appreciated from that same conventional perception generated within a broken condition. This novum changes everything. Participation in Christ changes everything. What can the text mean by ‘if anyone is in Christ’? Indeed, what are meant by ‘anyone’ and ‘in’? By ‘a new creation’?
Second Corinthians here challenges us to remain ever open to the Spirit in order to see our channels of perception and spiritual insight broadened to the point of regarding all persons as redeemed in Christ such that their newly perceived belonging and true home become the first and last things to be said about them. Their status in church, in society, in the briefest of passing interactions, is now seen to be irrevocably changed: they belong to Christ, they are in Christ, Christ is for them, because of which they are for all. Neither ‘they’ nor ‘we’ earn such adoption; it is freely bestowed and irrevocably constitutive of human personhood. It is not the case that being the patient and recipient of this adoption implies passivity. Rather, the dynamic of reception—of openly receiving what God wills to do and does do—exercises a regenerative effect over the same persons now set to the vocation of an active ministry of reconciliation. As recipient of reconciliation, the church’s vocation as the body of Christ the reconciler is to become agents of that same unpredictable, wonderful reconciliation. It means to establish, here and now, new spaces of encounter which unify brothers and sisters one to another because through such ministry the active love of Christ pours out onto a broken humanity, fractured by its many metaphorical Egypts which tell the lie that some deserve their power and its effects while others deserve their powerlessness and its effects, that some are beyond redemption while others deserving, that some through their own waste, lack of judgment, or location on this or that side of a border no longer belong to us while others demonstrate their belonging through merit or even unearned privilege. No, to be in Christ, is to be one. Any other perception or behavior represents the ‘human point of view’ and announces its own need for Christ the redeemer.
Such was also the lie Jesus exposes and rehabilitates us from in the parable of the prodigal or lost son (Lk 15:11b–32), which instructs us—perhaps painfully—that we can never be in Christ while at the same time expropriating others from that same, wonderful, unmerited home, equally theirs as ours. The son can never cease being the son of this Father, nor the brother of this brother. See? Everything has become new.