06-Mar-16
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
Bring up the name of Jesus any place but in a church and you’re apt to hear a variety of opinions about the man. You might hear, “Oh, he never existed. He is merely the figment of some well-meaning but over-active imaginations”. Or you might hear something a little more charitable like, “Oh, he was a very good man who did some very good things and said some very good things, but who, over time, in the telling and re-telling of his story garnered legendary and God-like status”. But very rarely will you hear, “Oh Jesus, he is the coexistent and co-eternal Second Person of the Holy trinity who came to this earth from the heavenly realms in the fullness of humanity, died, rose again on the third day, ascended into heaven and now sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, and who will one day return to judge the living and the dead”. That one’s not apt to come up in normal conversation. In fact, it might not even come up in church!
And yet, if we were to take the time this morning to unpack all of that stuff we would discover some of the awesome mystery of just who Jesus Christ really is. But when we come to our passage this morning, the Apostle Paul, at least on the surface, seems to be asking us to set aside the very real and very important human nature of Jesus. He says, “…Even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way.”
Well, what in the world does that mean? Does it mean that we no longer think about Jesus as being a human being, that we ignore the fact that Jesus is fully human, that he shares all of our own humanity in every way with the exception of sin? Fortunately, that’s not at all what Paul is saying here. In fact, it is not even close to what he is saying. What Paul is saying is that once upon a time, before we met Jesus Christ, and received him as our savior, we had some very rational and very human, but also very defective opinions about Jesus. We regarded Jesus in much the same way as the folks that I described at the beginning of this sermon…Probably lived for a time on this planet, most likely a good man and a good teacher, may very well have died the death of a common criminal, but winked out of existence just like everyone else who has preceded us on this planet. Good man gone. That is a very human, very rational, but also very defective view of who Jesus Christ is.
But Paul says, we don’t think about Jesus in that way anymore. We have a different view of Jesus that goes beyond mere human assessment. In fact, Paul says, we don’t even think about each other that way anymore. We don’t judge or assess each other from a human point of view. And that’s stunning and utterly amazing. But Paul says these things because it is very likely that some of the folks in the church in Corinth have been reluctant to set aside their very human ideas about Jesus and one another. Old patterns of behavior are sometimes difficult to set aside. Some Christians in Corinth might still be holding to the idea that Jesus was just a good man. And, just as important, some Christians in Corinth had some pretty defective ideas about each other, too. We know that the Christians in Corinth liked a good fight. We know that they liked to judge one another’s spiritual maturity. We know that they enjoyed pretending that they were better and more lovely Christians than some of the other folks in the church. We know that they liked to demean their fellow Christians and put them down. We know that their church was pretty much a mess, because we know that they were busy judging one another from a human point of view.
But this cannot continue. It is not just wrong, it fails to take into account an awesome miracle that God has accomplished in Jesus Christ. Paul says, if anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation. Everything old has passed away, look, everything has become new! Now this is certainly not a human perspective. I know from my own life that there’s still plenty of the old that is left inside of me. There is still plenty left to judge, particularly from a human perspective. This can only be a divine perspective, and that’s just what it is. If we have received Jesus Christ as our savior, we have been reconciled to God, and as far as God is concerned, we are a new creation, the old us has passed away. This is God’s doing. As hard as this is for us to imagine, when God looks down on us from heaven, he regards us not as broken, sinful, defiant, lazy, judgmental or reluctant servants, but rather as a new creation with amazing potential. It is almost impossible for us to comprehend this. As miserable a Christian as we may be, our status has been completely changed in God’s eyes. Because we are reconciled to God, God now no longer counts our trespasses against us. Paul said this in a slightly different way in first Corinthians chapter thirteen. He said love keeps no record of wrongs. This is the divine point of view. God keeps no record of wrongs. God is love. Love keeps no record of wrongs. There is no book, anywhere, that lists our failings, shortcomings or sins. Such a record does not exist.
And so if we have been reconciled to God, we ought also to be reconciled to one another. We ought not to regard one another from a human point of view, but rather from the divine point of view. We ought to regard one another in the same way that God regards us all. If God keeps no record of wrongs, we ought to do our best to do the same, with one another, and maybe, especially, with ourselves. Some of us keep a very large book of the record of our own wrongs, and we read it and re-read it. It is time to get rid of that book.
Paul says that God has entrusted the message of reconciliation to all of us. We are the very Ambassadors of Jesus Christ. This was especially important to Paul for a couple of reasons. The folks at Corinth were especially good at keeping records of the wrongs of one another and particularly good at keeping records of their perceived failings of the Apostle Paul. They needed to be reconciled to one another and to Paul, but especially to God. They needed to realize that they were far more than mere human beings stumbling around on the planet. They needed to comprehend that they were indeed a new creation, masterfully re-created to better reflect the image of God, and they needed to see that in each other.
Paul closes this passage with an awesome, profound, deep, and practically unfathomable statement. Paul, speaking of Jesus, says this: For our sake, for us, for you and me, God made Jesus to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. That is so beyond me. I cannot fully comprehend it. I cannot imagine that Jesus Christ could love me so much that he would willingly become the very nature of my brokenness and sin, in order to create me anew so that I could actually become the very righteousness of God. I don’t deserve that. How could one who knew no sin become sin? That is a paradox beyond comprehension. The fully righteous Jesus became the fully sinful in order that the fully sinful me could become fully righteous. And yet this is how we have become reconciled to God. The prophet Isaiah, as he peered into the future and saw this awesome miracle, came pretty close to explaining it. This is what he wrote down:
He was wounded for our transgressions,
crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the punishment that made us whole,
and by his bruises we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have all turned to our own way,
and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.*
On the one hand, I am completely undone by those words, but on the other hand, I am made whole by them. What a glorious paradox! This is the work of God. Let us rejoice in it.
*Isaiah 53: 4-6
Thomaston Baptist Church 