From now on…regard no one according to the flesh…Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Cor. 5:16-17) After college, I worked in Manhattan in the financial district and commuted to work via PATH trains and subways. Without fail, whenever I got off the train at any stop, I would see various homeless people sleeping, wandering around, and mumbling to themselves. Typically, I just kept my eyes to the ground and hurried past; it was better to ignore the situation and turn up the volume on my discman than look any one of these people in the eye. I never gave any one of these individuals much thought or regard, in fact, if I’m honest, I wished someone would do something about them – they were an inconvenience to me. But then, in December of 2000, something happened: I got knocked off my horse. What I mean is, to allude to Caravaggio’s The Conversion of Saint Paul, I became a Christian. I was not blind for three days like Paul, but something did happen to my eyes. I saw differently, in the old “I once was blind but now I see” sense. I saw things differently; specifically, I saw people differently. I remember clearly walking through the PATH and Subway stations, past the many homeless there, and for the first time, I looked and I saw men and women; I saw people who used to be babies, who were possibly loved and cherished (and missed) by another, who were brothers or sisters, who belonged to a family. Essentially, for the first time, I saw people like me: I saw my neighbor. In a previous post I spoke about the reconciliation between God and the believer through faith. In Christ, our reproach has been removed, our enmity with God transformed to love. Our sin is no longer counted to us because it has been counted to Christ, and we receive his righteousness. Christ bore and became our sin so that we might be accounted/constituted as righteous (2 Cor. 5:21). Martin Luther called this the “Happy Exchange,” and this gift of righteousness means a restored relationship (reconciliation, 2 Cor. 5:18-19) and a new reality (new creation; 2 Cor. 5:17). That’s enough… but there’s more! This reconciliation has tremendous consequences not only with us in our new relationship with God, but also with our neighbor. As we are reconciled to God through faith in Jesus Christ, we are reconciled to our neighbor. Seeing God as savior and ourselves as sinners we are given eyes to see our neighbor: broken, sinful, “bleeding but bled for” (Buechner), the object of God’s great and gracious love, and a neighbor in need of our love. The ministry of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:16-21) is not merely an event that stays within the believer but an event that propels the believer outside of him or herself toward another. As Luther put it, the Christian who “lives in Christ by faith” also “lives in his neighbor through love.” Being a new creation does not mean that our sinfulness is banished. The present is the co-presence of the old age and the new creation: simul iustus et peccator. New creation in the “now” isn’t about a suffering- and sin-free existence; it looks like loving your neighbor as yourself. We are no longer judged according to the flesh (i.e. according to the resume of our achievements and attributes), and we are therefore free to call a ceasefire on judging others according to the flesh. The two are intimately connected: “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). To see ourselves as sinners and to see God as savior opens our eyes to our neighbor: forgiveness is for us, and thus free to flow from me to you and you to me. We are deeply and radically loved by God, the creator of heaven and earth. We are given new and true life in Christ through faith—we have been seen in our sin and declared worthy by his love. And this is a love-evoking love; a justification that suspends our own judgment of others. Because we are no longer judged by our works, we are free not to judge our neighbor by theirs. We are loved, in other words, and therefore free to love.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:56:52 +0000
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