Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!
2 Corinthians 5:17 (NIV)
New Creation, New Eyes
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! Paul says that while he is talking about how people look at each other. From now on, he writes, he regards no one from a worldly point of view, and he had once looked at Christ himself that way and quit.
Printed by itself on a card, the line loses what Paul was talking about when he said it. His subject is eyes. Who gets written off in the first few seconds of knowing him. Who stops being a person and turns into the story you heard about her.
At the break in choir rehearsal a man said he liked his job. He said it the way you would say the coffee was fine, and the row went quiet for a second, because that is not a sentence people hand over. Somebody had him re-sorted before he finished it. He shrugged. He does like it.
If anyone is in Christ. The condition stays, and Paul says how anyone gets inside it. God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. The work is God’s and he did it in Christ, and then he committed the message about it to the people he had reconciled.
He says new creation about people he is still imploring on Christ’s behalf, as though God were making the appeal through him. The sentence stands over them while the asking goes on.
The man in the row turns back into someone with a week and a mother and a reason, and that is what the new eyes are for.
Paul says it to them plainly, Be reconciled to God.
A Prayer to Remember
People have told me the truth about themselves when it cost them something to say it, and I know what that did for me. Give me a long look at the next person I have already decided about. Thank you for looking at me the way you did, late in the day and without hurry.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
