NOTES for Co2 5:11-21
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.