Week 14—Thursday 2 Corinthians 5:17-19
2 Corinthians 5:17-19
“GOD WAS IN CHRIST RECONCILING”
We ended yesterday with the girl saying to Miss Carmichael: “I didn’t know you loved me like that.” And from that moment she was changed. She looked up through the blood and saw past the blood the unseen cross upon the heart of the one who loved her and was saved, as it were, through that blood. Did something like that happen in human history? I look up through the blood of Christ, past his wounds back into the soul of God, and see there the unseen cross. But I could never have seen it had it not been for the outer cross lifted up in human history. The cross lights up the nature of God as redemptive love.
An Italian painter has painted the nails through the hands of Jesus, through the wood into the hands of God back in the shadows. “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself” (NEB). “God was in Christ”—in his suffering, in his “bearing our sins in his own body on a tree.” God isn’t laying our sins on Jesus to appease God’s own anger—Jesus took it on himself.
If there isn’t a God like that in the universe, there ought to be one. Would the highest in us rise higher than the highest in God? “Would I suffer for one I love? So wouldst Thou, so wilt Thou,” says Browning. The psalmist asks: “He who planted the ear, does he not hear? He who formed the eye, does he not see?” (94:9). And we may ask, he that made love, will he not love? And he who put the impulse to sacrifice themselves into the souls of the highest of us, will he not sacrifice? Will we rise higher than our Maker? An old Chinese scholar who heard for the first time the story of the Redeeming God ran his fingers through his hair, turned to his neighbors, and said: “Didn’t I tell you there ought to be a God like that?”
O God, our Heavenly Father, we are now at the heart of things. For if we are right here we are right everywhere. Take us by the hand and take us into this Divine mystery—this Open Secret of the Universe. Open our minds, hearts, wills to it. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: God has shown me The Way—that Way a cross. I follow blindly, if necessary.