NOTES for Co2 5:15
What do Paul's words mean about the need for Christians to live "for the One who died for them and rose"? Sometimes they are understood as the need to remember what the Savior did for us and what it cost Him, sometimes as a call to some mystical "participation" in His sufferings, though it is not always explained exactly what such mystical participation could be today and why He would need it.
Of course, memory is important and sufferings are unavoidable. But the Savior did not come into the world so that He would be remembered as people sometimes remember great people long dead, and certainly not so that we would suffer for His sake. He, of course, knew perfectly well that His followers would be persecuted and would have to suffer, but He appears not to have given these sufferings any mystical meaning, considering them only the inevitable consequence of Christians' opposition to the evil in which the fallen world lies.
Something else is important: to remember that the Savior's earthly path does not end by chance in death on the cross and resurrection. And also that if in His resurrection, naturally, there is no merit of ours, then in His death on the cross each of us is guilty to one degree or another. Not because we somehow mystically participated in events of two thousand years ago, but because all of us were born and live in a world where, by default, the righteous person must die.
And if we do nothing to change these defaults, we can consider ourselves participants in the death of all righteous people of all times and peoples, including the Messiah Himself, who also died the death of an innocent Righteous One. And every attempt to change the defaults leads in one way or another to two things. First, it inevitably leads us into confrontation with the evil in which the fallen world lies. And, suffering in this confrontation, we participate not mystically but quite really in the sufferings of the Savior and in the sufferings of all righteous people persecuted or killed for their righteousness, which is not only the same in every age, but one for all. Second, the attempt to change the defaults, if only we are consistent, will sooner or later inevitably bring us to the threshold of the Kingdom, the very Kingdom the Savior brought into the world at the cost of His death. If only because every righteousness has its foundation in the Kingdom, which is also one for all, and ends precisely there. And every life that has shared in the Kingdom, every path completed in it, will be a life for the One who died and rose, and a path leading to Him. So as to share His life, which turned out, unexpectedly even for His closest disciples, to be greater than His death.