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Scripture for Sunday, October 29: 2 Corinthians 5:11-21
Last week in our Words on the Wall series, Rev. Hoogeboom preached about the scandal of the cross and the great love of our Savior.
This week, Rev. Jonker will turn our attention to the problem of human guilt. How does Christ's entrance into this world to "become sin for us" allow us to become "the righteousness of God"? (2 Cor. 5:21).
Guilty
Many of us have never stood before courtrooms as defendants awaiting a jury's pronouncement.
But we do live with the voices of judges and juries in our minds every day.
I wish I would have spoken up when that conversation at work made me uncomfortable.
Boy, I really overreacted to my daughter's misbehavior. I owe her an apology.
I should have spent my time more wisely today.
Amid the swirl of our thoughts, it can be difficult to discern between shame, false guilt and true guilt.
When we feel ashamed, we feel badly about who we are. Shame makes us feel worthless, to doubt that we are intrinsically valuable image bearers of the one true God. Shame can keep us in the shadows and away from the love of God in Christ.
False guilt comes when we feel badly because we will disappoint someone, because we are listening to our own expectations, or even because Satan's distortions of the truth are influencing us. We find ourselves coming up short on a measuring stick that is hard to quantify. The uncertainty and hesitation we experience can be powerful.
No one else seems to be making their children pack their own school lunches. Maybe I'm not doing my job as a parent.
Did I do enough to keep Dad company in his last days? I was there as much as I possibly could have been...but I still have this sense that I should have done more. What if I didn't do right by my dad?
True guilt is an accomplishment for many of us--so said one of my seminary professors. True guilt is godly sorrow. It comes from an awareness that we have done something truly wrong, or failed to do something truly right that was within our power to do.
I lied to my teacher when she asked if I turned in that assignment she can't find. I need to make that right.
I took credit for an idea at work that was really the effort of our whole team. That was wrong.
When we experience true guilt, it is a motivator toward repentance and reconciliation. True guilt can be a means by which we come to recognize our need for a Savior, admit that need, and move forward in forgiveness and hope.
In this week's passage, Paul speaks of the great hope we have, no longer relying on our own "worldly" or unredeemed perceptions of ourselves or others:
"So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view.... [I]f anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them.... God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, that in him we might become the righteousness of God." (2 Cor. 5:16-21)
Christ, Paul says, is working on a very big project--a project that alters not just individual human destiny (though it does that) but also the destiny of the entire created order. In Christ, the whole creation is made new--including our perceptions of reality, including the ways that we see one another anew through the eyes of Jesus Christ, including the truth that here and now and forever after we are reconciled to God through Christ.
This is the power of the cross.
Questions for Reflection or Discussion:
1) From the Sermon: Rev. Jonker describes the pervasiveness of guilt in human experience, but also the relative inability of many people to identify it as guilt. How much does a sense of guilt affect your life? When or if you feel guilty, what is your usual response to that feeling?
2) How does our awareness that Christ becomes our sin, our guilt, our shame free us to live as his people, knowing that God has received his sacrifice on our behalf?
3) On being Christ's ambassadors: In our world, where is an ambassador's citizenship; and what is an ambassador's role? How does Paul's ambassador metaphor in this passage shape your understanding of our role as Christ's people in the world?
4) You can read and reflect on Walter Wangerin's short story "The Ragman" here. This is a picture of substitutionary atonement--the great exchange that Christ makes on our behalf.
