We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
2 Corinthians 5:20-21 (NIV)
The Wronged Party Pleads
We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. The appeal moves from God toward the people who left.
Ambassadors don’t write the message they deliver. Paul says God is making his appeal through them, so the imploring keeps God’s voice in it the whole way down the line.
God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. The purpose named is that people would come out of it righteous, and righteous in him, on his account.
She can forgive her son and she has. What she cannot do is make him other than what he is, and that is the second half of Paul’s sentence and the half only God does. Not the debt dropped and the man left standing where he was. The man himself counted righteous, on somebody else’s account.
Her son took what was in the account her husband had left her, and she has not seen him in two years. She writes about once a month. The letters are short and they never mention the money, and she has to get the address off her sister-in-law most times, because he moves.
Look at which way that is running. The one who was robbed is the one writing. Nothing obliges her to, nobody would think worse of her if she stopped, and she has never once asked him to say he is sorry.
Today he died. The one who had no sin was made sin, in a body that felt every part of it, and by the end of it he was dead. The wrong in that transaction ran entirely one direction, and God is asking anyway. Nobody made God ask. He wasn’t under any pressure to reopen it, and he reopened it, and the price of reopening it was his Son.
Be reconciled to God is a short sentence and it stays open all day. I mean to keep this day quiet and I’ve never once managed it past the middle of the afternoon. Nothing about today gets easier as it goes, and there’s nothing on this evening’s calendar but the cost of it.
She wrote one on Tuesday. It is the twenty-sixth she has sent. So the imploring goes on tonight, and it comes from the one it cost, aimed at the people it was spent on.
A Prayer to Remember
Most years I’ve thanked you for this in about four seconds and gone on with the morning, God. You made the one who had no sin to be sin for us. Keep us in this day and don’t let us leave it early. Slow us down until the asking lands where you aimed it.
In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.
