MOVING FROM “YOU” TO “WE”

In Lent, we think of the suffering of Jesus and how he gave himself in life and death for us.  As a member of the Body of Christ, it is also a good season to think about whether or not I am giving of my life in the name of Jesus.
            Here is a text that is easy for Christians to misread.  (Note the movement in the pronouns in the following text.  I will comment on them below.)

But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.  We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair;  persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.  We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.  For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body. ¹² So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you. (2 Cor 4:7-12 NIV)

The earliest Christians of Corinth were struggling with many issues.  That should not surprise us.  The Body of Christ was emerging from a cultural context of polytheism, paganism, fertility religions, a hierarchy of social-status structures, rampant sexual immorality in a city frequented by sailors and soldiers, as well as a diversity of cultural symbols of a major port-trade city.  Paul was calling these new Christians to live radically different lives than what they had lived before and from the what the culture around them practiced.  They had issues over pride, status, lawsuits, immorality, what to eat, how to dress, how to conduct an orderly worship service. etc.  It is significant to look at how Paul addressed each of those issues.  However, I just want to note the big picture.  Following the example of Jesus, Paul and his team were spending their lives on the Corinthians – a theme of our text – so that the Corinthians would become holy, so that the holiness of Christ would be found in the Body of Christ as it emerged out of its fallen and conflicted culture.

Today, I do not see much of a Church that has remained distinct from its culture as a light in darkness.  We have a Church that re-coalesced into its lost culture.  To be sure, there are prominent, “hot-button” politicized issues, but I am thinking of a Church that obeys Jesus’ charge to practice righteousness and not of efforts to protect “Christian identity.” [Note: As of 2024, about 63% of Americans claim to be “Christians.”  It appears that the decline of Christianity has stopped and there has been a slight increase, but it may be due to political ethno-traditionalism and populism.*]

Clearly there is a need for self-reflection.  That brings me back to the text above and how it is easily misread.  I try to teach my Bible students is that Christians, me included, when reading the NT letters wrongly tend to identify ourselves with the “we” references.  Most of the time we should be identifying with the “you” references.  (An example is Eph 1:3-14 from which people draw all sorts of bad theology from references to “we” having been chosen and predestined without noticing that the “we” applies to Jews and the “you” to the Gentile audience.)  So, too, when I read our text, it is easy to identify with these “we” statements, as if they rightly described me.  They do not.  Paul, however, is describing how he and his ministry team were pouring out their lives like Jesus for the emerging Church in Corinth, the “you” of verse 12.

Application:
The point is that I need to be a Christian who has moved on from being the object of such ministry, the “you” of verse 12.  I need to become like the “we” references in our text, the people who were being poured out so that the life of Jesus might be at work in the people around us.  That is a good Lenten reflection for me.  It brings me back to Jesus, who gave Himself totally for me and asked me to serve others in the same way.

When my wife and I reach our 1^st and 2^nd grade SS class, we tell a Bible story, and then we raise some “wonder” questions with the kids.  Here are the wonder questions that I am asking myself:

      ·       I wonder where I see myself in the Bible text today?  Am I the “you” or the “we”?
·       I wonder whom I know who has poured out her or his life so that others might have life in Jesus?
·       I wonder if I died today what legacy might have been left through me?
·       I wonder how Jesus’ life can emerge more from me in service to others?

Lord, guide me through your Spirit to answer these questions honestly.  Help me to move from the “you” to the “we.”  Thank you that you gave everything for me.  Amen.
----
*See, for example, “Is Christianity in America Back?” (Newsweek, 2/28/25).

JESUS’ CALL TO VULNERABILITY (IT SCARES ME)

This Lenten season I am thinking about Jesus’ making himself vulnerable.  I think it fair to say that Jesus died because he made himself vulnerable.  I do not like the implications.

Vulnerability has an interesting relationship with power.  Generally, we (I certainly) avoid vulnerability with one of two expressions of power, shields or spears.  We might empower ourselves with various psychological defensive barriers of protection (shields), or we might become the aggressive bullies (spears).  (I even alternate between the two.)  Strangely, the powerlessness of vulnerability emanates its own “power.”  It is like light coming into darkness; sometimes those in darkness do not want to be exposed without their shields or spears.  Jesus’ vulnerability displays his absolute God-dependence.  Jesus’ vulnerability exposes the need of all people to be completely God-submitted in order to be embraced by Life.  Some receive that revelation with joy and embrace Jesus; some shy away to rely upon themselves; and some try to eliminate the vulnerable Jesus.

Vulnerability starts, of course, with the Incarnation.  Paul lays it on the line for all Christians in Phil 2:1-11.  If Christians are to have any proper response to being united with Christ, it must be this: lowering ourselves beneath others (1-4), which means creating a state of mind (a command to obey) that is found in Christ Jesus (5), who made himself nothing to take the nature of a servant, and who humbled himself becoming obedient to death (6-8).  The proper response to Jesus is nothing less than that.  Another way to say this is that Jesus made himself vulnerable to save vulnerable people who must recognize their vulnerability.  Christians have that same calling.

Lord, I do not really like the implications of being called to become vulnerable like Jesus.  I balk at dropping my defenses.  I resist becoming vulnerable.  But, once again, I know I belong to Jesus, and I do know that deep down I want you to change me.  Help me to become a vulnerable servant obedient unto death.  Please accept my hesitant prayer.  Amen.

FORGIVENESS AND THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD

(As ever, this Lenten devotional applies to me.)
Forgiveness
At the Ash Wednesday service I attended this week, a key verse was 2Cor 5:21, but in what I consider to be a bad translation, one that miscommunicates the nature of forgiveness.  Many translations render the Greek as,

“The one [Jesus] who did not know sin (hamartia), he [God] made sin (hamartia) on behalf of us, in order that we might become the righteousness of God in him.”

Good modern translations will at least provide a footnote stating that the second time hamartia occurs, it could be rendered “sin offering.”  That makes a world of difference!  The lexical situation is that hamartia is the NT Greek equivalent for the Hebrew ḥatat, both of which not only can mean “sin” in the general sense, but also are the technical sacrificial terms for the “sin-cleansing offering” in the Temple system of atonement.

So, which did Paul mean?  If Paul knew the Temple symbolism, which I assume he did, he would never say that Jesus “became sin.”  Nothing and no one became sin in the Israelite atonement system.[1]  However, it makes perfect sense for Paul to see Jesus as fulfilling the function of the sin-cleansing offering.  (Some translations do get this translation correct in another debated text, Rom 8:3, “… God his own son sent in the likeness of sinful flesh and for a sin offering (hamartia)….”[2])

What does that mean about forgiveness?  The sin-cleansing offering is the main symbol of God’s forgiveness in the Temple sacrificial system.  First, the forgiveness of God throughout the OT is never about someone first paying a judgment price of punishment.[3]  It is about God’s gracious mercy.  Second, in the Temple sacrificial system, this mercy is ritualized by the blood of the sacrifice symbolically cleansing away the polluting effect of sin in God’s dwelling in order to restore unimpeded communion with God.  In Paul’s thinking, Jesus’ sacrificial life/blood fulfilled that role.

First Application
In the same way as Jesus, then, Christians are to express the righteousness of God, by thinking of themselves as a life’s-blood-giving, cleansing offering.  The season of Lent reminds us that forgiveness is not easy but is self-costing.  It involves self-lowering, self-giving, enduring unjustly, etc. for the sake of others.  At least for me, such merciful forgiveness never comes easily.  I tend to want the other person to suffer.  I tend to give validity to the adage, “Hurt people hurt people.”  However, merciful people, not only do not hurt people, rather, they give of themselves to “cleanse” the effect of sin.

Become the Righteousness of God
2 Corinthians 5:21 also tells us that we “become the righteousness of God in him.”  What does that mean?  Verse 21 needs to be understood in the context of 5:14-6:2.  A couple of themes come together.  First, Christians are intimately and mysteriously “in Christ” (5:17,19,21).  Second, as ones in Christ, Christians are now ambassadors of God’s salvific ministry of reconciliation (5:18-20;6:1).  God’s righteousness is revealed in how God does not count people’s sins against them but works to reconcile them to God (19).  As Paul states elsewhere, “This righteousness of God is made known …  through the faith of Jesus Christ in all who are believing [entrusting]” (Rom 3:21-22).

Second Application
Christians are to be the righteousness of God!  When we do not count people’s sins against them but offer ourselves in expressions of forgiveness, we, too, reveal the righteousness of God of the salvific work of Christ.  That is – my words can only understate it – a monumental calling.

Lord, I hardly see myself as your expression of righteousness.  Still, I do know that I am in Christ.  I am to live in Christ.  I am to be merciful.  I am to forgive.  I am to live the ministry of reconciliation.  So, help me, Jesus, to be your expression of righteousness.  May it be so.  Amen and amen.

---

[1] Sins are not literally transferred from people to animals even in the Day of Atonement scapegoat ritual which was transformed from the ancient Near Eastern realm of magic to function symbolically in Israel.  Although it is popular to allegorize the OT scapegoat as a figure of Jesus, Jesus is never called that in the NT.  Also, a well-known text that might cause some confusion is 1Pet 2:24, in which it is said that Jesus bears sin.  Behind this text is an OT idiom.  “Forgiveness” in the OT is often expressed by the action of God lifting/bearing the sins of people.  It does not mean sins were objectively transferred to God/Jesus; it is a figurative expression of God removing the “weight” of sin, an expression of mercy.

[2] The Greek phrase peri hamartia, which could be translated as “concerning sin” (see NET), is used throughout Leviticus and Numbers in the Greek translation, the Septuagint, to refer to the sin-cleansing offering (ḥatat), an idiom one would presume that Paul knew.

[3] That way of thinking comes into Christian thought via Anselm, Luther, and particularly Calvin, who thought in judicial terms as the lawyer he was.