NOTES for Co2 5:15

What mean Paul's words about the necessity for the Christians to live "unto him which died for them and rose again" Christ? Sometimes they are understood as the necessity of remembering what the Savior did for us and what it cost Him, sometimes as the call to a certain mystic "participation" in His sufferings, explaining clearly moreover not always, what could be this mystic participation today and why it is necessary for Him. Of course, the memory is important, and the sufferings are inevitable. But indeed, the Savior came into the world not to be remembered as we often remember famous, long ago dead people, and of course not for us to suffer for Him. He knew perfectly of course that His followers will be persecuted and that they are going to suffer, but as we see, He gave no mystic meanings to these sufferings, considering them just as an inevitable consequence of the opposition of the Christians to this evil, in which is the fallen world. Another thing is important: to remember that the earthly way of the Savior does not end accidentally with death on the cross and the resurrection.

Also that if in His resurrection there isn’t of course our merit, then in His death on the cross each of us is guilty to a certain extent. And not because we participated in a mystic way in the events of two thousand years ago, but because we were all born and live in the world, where the righteous must die automatically. And if we do nothing to change these automatisms, we can consider ourselves accomplices in the death of all the righteous of all times and all peoples, including also the Messiah, Who also died the death of a Righteous innocent. And any attempt to change this automatism somehow or other brings to two things.

In the first place, it brings us inevitably to confrontation with this evil, in which lies the fallen world. And, suffering in this confrontation, we participate not mystically, but completely real in the sufferings of the Savior, and in the sufferings of all the righteous persecuted or killed for their righteousness, which is not only identical in all the times, but also one for all.

And, secondly, the attempt to change the automatism, if only we are coherent, sooner or later will bring us inevitably to the beginning of the Kingdom, the same that the Savior brought to the world at the price of His death. It would be because any righteousness has its foundation in the Kingdom, which is also one for all, and ends in particular there. And any life, joined to the Kingdom, any way, ending inside, will be the life for the Dead man and the Resuscitated, and the way leading to Him. In order to share His life that turned out (unexpected even for His closest followers) more than His death.

If life ends inevitably and definitively with death, why, properly, shouldn’t I be selfish? Not lot of time is given to me, and it is necessary to live this time in a way that it won’t be cruelly painful... From here ensues the famous trickster principle "you die today, and I shall die tomorrow". But if Christ died for all, if our death is overcome by His death, then everything changes.

I don’t have to grasp, snatch pieces of life from others, I can unite my life to the life of the One, Who died for me and resurrected, by trying to live as He lives, in order to cross together with Him through physical death to the Resurrection. And that will not be a life for itself, because He does not live for Himself, but for others sake, for those He loves, and thus - for Him. And it will be my real gratitude to the One, Who opened to me the way to everlasting life.

In practically every one of his letters, Paul in one way or another touches on the question of what the essence and meaning of Christianity are. And Second Corinthians is no exception. Here Paul reminds us again that Christianity is not some new religion or new moral teaching, but a new life, whose newness consists in the fact that it belongs not to us, but to Christ, who came into the world in order to share it with each of us who is willing to receive it. Only in this way can we both share in the Kingdom and be freed from sin.

This new life that enters us through Him is like a blood transfusion in certain serious illnesses: there are cases when the patient's blood has been irreversibly poisoned, so that the only thing left is to replace it with other, fresh blood. And our life, given to us by God, has been poisoned by sin so deeply that the only way to keep us from dying is to replace that former life with another, new one, free from sin.

Is that not why Christian life is so joyful and so difficult at the same time? Living in the Kingdom is certainly joyful, but then one has to consent to a "transfusion of life," and therefore to renounce once and for all something so familiar, habitual, and in many ways comfortable, despite all its problems. But this is renunciation for the sake of the Kingdom. And each person makes his own choice.

The apostle Paul makes it all sound so simple: “the old has passed away; everything is now new”... Yet we keep thinking about how gradually, little by little, ever so quietly—smoothly and painlessly—we might, so to speak, pass into the state of a “new creation.” Did everything really happen to Paul instantaneously and without difficulty? I do not think so: if we read his epistles carefully, it becomes clear that things were not simple for him either. Then why does he speak so categorically? Probably because of what matters most to him. What matters most is the new reality within me through Christ's victory, whereas the “old self” is, alas, still present—but it is not the old self we must look at; it is Christ.

Continuing the discussion of the Kingdom, Paul draws attention to what is in fact the foundation of Christianity: Christians are those who live one life with the risen Christ, the life of the Kingdom that He brought into the world. They become a "new creation," being renewed by the breath of God that permeates this Kingdom (v. 17). Therefore it is pointless to approach witnesses of the Kingdom by the usual human measure, because what they say expresses not their own assessments of what is happening or their attitude toward it, but God's view of the situation, which the witnesses simply convey to those to whom they preach. And if the assessments at times prove severe, this is only an objective given, not the ill will of a witness who, on his own initiative, would never resort to such severity (v. 13).

The proof of a witness's sincerity can only be his openness both to God and to people (vv. 11-12), an openness without which no witness to the Kingdom is possible. When it comes to witness, the witness, more than anyone else, is guided by the spiritually understood principle of "nothing personal." All human sympathies and antipathies move into the background, since they are conditioned mainly by the limitation of fallen human nature and have nothing to do with the Kingdom. A Christian no longer lives his own natural life; he lives the life of the Risen One, for which these sympathies and antipathies mean nothing (vv. 14-15). Even the attitude toward the Savior Himself ceases in such a case to be purely human, as it necessarily was, for example, for the apostles who associated with Jesus during His earthly ministry (v. 16). The only goal of witness is the salvation of each person, his reconciliation with God through Christ, and his receiving in Christ the Kingdom that the Savior opens to everyone who seeks and is ready to trust Him (vv. 18-21).

At the end of today's reading there are words saying that the love of Christ embraces us. The apostle explains why this happens, and what is required of us in order to be embraced by Christ's love. His thought is expressed in our Russian Synodal translation with less than full clarity. It says here: "the love of Christ embraces us, reasoning thus: if One died for all..." In the original, however, the apostle Paul writes: the love of Christ holds us, κρίναντας τούτο, having understood that One died for all. The Slavonic text at this point says: "we who have judged this," and it uses a simple past form, not the present tense used in the Synodal translation. Blessed Jerome of Stridon, translating this text into Latin, emphasizes this aspect even more: in the Vulgate these words read, "nos aestimantes hoc..." This verb means "to evaluate," like the English word "to estimate" derived from it.

So this is what is being said: the love of Christ embraces us and fills our whole life when we estimate the greatness of His sacrifice, when we understand and realize that in Him all of us truly died. More than that, it is important to realize this as an accomplished fact. Not to speculate, searching for meaning in a religious phenomenon, but to judge, to understand that this has already happened and, as a historical fact, has direct relevance to us. Only in this way can one receive this love, without which life loses its support.