NOTES for Co2 5:20-21

It is clear to Paul that the Kingdom and remaining in it are inseparable from the relationships that bind each of His followers to Christ, but those relationships themselves are possible only when a person remains in Christ to the end and completely as a poor one - in the spiritual sense of the word in which the prophet Isaiah of Jerusalem had already spoken of poverty. And in this sense of the word, poverty carried through to the end is nothing other than becoming nothing, even to the point of physical death, if such death is required for witness. And for the Messiah, it means going as far as complete, unreserved, and unconditional immersion in the sinful life of the fallen world, into whose depth He had to bring the fullness of the Kingdom that was contained in Him.

And the evil of the sinful world really does take the Messiah Himself captive: it cannot penetrate the depth of His heart or His human nature, free from the power of sin, but it was able to bring Him to the cross. The One who knew no sin came under the power of sin, became sin for our sake - this is how Paul describes it. Such is the Messiah's poverty carried through to the end, a poverty without which the Kingdom would not have entered the world, because the Messiah Himself could not have entered the world in any other way than as a poor one.

And this is understandable: any other kind of entry would have meant submission to the laws of the world that lies in evil. Not to submit to them meant to leave the world; but to leave the world and at the same time remain in it means to die. Such a path for the Messiah, bearing within Himself all God's fullness, all the fullness of the Kingdom, could end on earth only with the cross. And with the resurrection, of course, too - but that is already the reality of the Kingdom, not of the fallen world. The Kingdom to which the fallen world can belong only to the extent that, being transformed, it ceases to be fallen.

And we Christians become participants in this process, as the apostle reminds us. If we are alive and remain in this world, it is only insofar as the world itself has already ceased to be fallen, insofar as it has already managed to be transformed and become part of the Kingdom. If the Kingdom were not in the world, nothing would remain for us but to die. Or to live as the righteous lived while awaiting the Kingdom in pre-Christian times. If, of course, we are Christians not only in name.

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 changes the world has undergone in the past decade, which we most often call globalization, lend particular urgency to the Apostle Paul’s words in today’s apostolic reading about the ministry of reconciliation. Indeed, globalization as a cultural or economic phenomenon can be viewed in different ways. Some people reject it categorically and express this in various ways, most often through hooliganism. Yet in some respects our time resembles the first century AD, when almost the entire more or less civilized world was united by the Roman state. This proved most opportune for the apostles’ preaching, because they could travel without particular restrictions and speak anywhere in the empire in Koine, the English of antiquity.

Today, the close interconnection of formerly divided parts of the world at last answers the call to reconciliation that was voiced two thousand years ago. The world in which we live is such that any enmity destroys it at every level. A person simply ceases to be human if he is not prepared to participate in the ministry of reconciliation entrusted to us by God. This is true on the personal level, the family level, and the global level. That is why any separatism mixed with xenophobia looks so unnatural today, and why the unique value of every person can be seen so clearly. Reconciliation, the ending of enmity and confrontation, is part of the great commission given by the risen Christ to His disciples. Well or poorly, we are trying to carry it out, and this could not fail to affect the world in which He has placed us.

We will probably still see an upsurge of the aggressiveness that served as the foundation of a world maintained by a balance of opposing forces; we will still experience an unaccountable longing for an order imposed by violence. But God’s work cannot be turned back. Reconciliation will appear to us ever more clearly as the only path to the salvation of the world. It is the only one because it alone is worthy of the Creator of this world.

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).