Co-missioners,
This is the third and final installment of the gift we received from Marcus Kunz just before Ash Wednesday. Here he discusses the day’s Second Reading, 2 Corinthians 5:20b—6:10. Here too, as with last week’s treatment of the day’s Gospel, Marcus pushes us to think more deeply than we tend to about this astonishing passage. All of us, though preachers in particular, will find much to enrich our conversation this Lent as we keep talking to others about Christ for us.
Peace and Joy,
The Crossings Community
___________________________________________________________________
When the Cross Made with Ashes Frames 2 Corinthians 5:20b—6:10,
the Second Reading for Ash Wednesday
by Marcus Kunz
Christ Crucified – Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) From Wikimedia Commons
It’s not possible to make even passing comment about the full set of interpretative issues in this reading, much less the diverse perspectives among readers in various social locations. The framing provided by a cross made of ashes, however, leads my thinking to the following.
“God made him to be sin (hamartia)” (5:21). I have long been mystified by this statement, as have many scholars. My own obstacle (as is often the case) has been to think of sin abstractly. What sense does it make to say that a person made of flesh and bone (Jesus) has been made into an abstraction (sin)?
Of course, that’s what human beings often do with their gift of reasoning. They (or shall I say “I,” being especially fond of this habit) dehumanize people all the time by reducing them to a single demographic or personality trait (e.g., “one more speak-first-listen-later extrovert” as I think to myself while silently rolling my eyes). Obviously there are differences in practice. It’s one thing to think myself “suffering” certain others who strike me as loud mouths. It’s another to see a person with different physical characteristics as a potential piece of property to be owned. Still, it’s the same dehumanizing act and the same dehumanizing actor, that is, the self-serving all-in-one idol and idolator: Me, Myself and I. “I am the potter, thou art the clay” (cf. Isaiah 64:8). Does this seem far-fetched? With a frequency that surprises me I hear people claim the mantle of being an inspired “creative” (spirit-filled), while dismissing the value of others, referring to them as “slime,” “pieces of [dirt]” or even “mud people.”
This word hamartia is often explained as “missing the mark” as people do in archery trapshooting. Their marksmanship is less than perfect. This portrays sin as the real (but mostly harmless?) gap between best intentions and perfection, where one misses the target by a hair’s breadth, falling just short of 100% performance. But this obscures sin’s true nature. I
In reality, hamartia is about hitting a target, wrongly hitting a target dead center with deadly intent and deadly effect. It’s not missing some perfectionist target by a hair’s breadth; it’s shooting with deadly purpose—to eliminate any impediments to my own idolatrous enterprise, whether they are the ones I hold at a distance, the ones I hold close, or even the true God by whose faithful holding I feel constrained. Hamartia isn’t “close, but no cigar.” It could be the coldly calculated violence of enslaving trafficked captives or the coolly designed exploitation of undocumented workers or the willful indifference that ignores the basic needs of the people in my plain sight. It’s the crucifiers turning 180 degrees from their true human callings and taking aim at their targeted outcomes and wrongly hitting their intended marks.
“For us God made him to be sin” (5:21). That is to say, for us crucifiers, hitting our marks. If human beings have perfected anything, it is the art of deflecting attention from hitting our marks on the way to becoming our own gods. It has only become more sophisticated since that day when, according to the Genesis narrative, the first human creatures attempted to deflect from the reality of their own idolatrous grasping to “become like god.” One scapegoated the closest human companion; the other scapegoated a member of another species. They both targeted one of God’s creatures in a vain attempt to hide their ambition to displace the Creator.
It is a merciless undertaking, this sacrificing of other creatures in service of human striving to be gods. Nothing is too sacred, not even God’s own word. Certainly all sorts of abstractions are employed—efficiency, protection, progress. People like me think we can mitigate the damage with careful nuancing. Humane effectiveness rather than brutal efficiency, informed equity rather than blind equality, etc. And, in truth the outcomes may be marginally more humane, more equitable. But the problem remains: the self-deceiving idolator who will use even the abstraction of justice, God’s own dikaiosunē, to deflect attention from our targeted crucifying—the public condemnation and shaming of God’s creatures in social media and the self-righteousness of various “wars” on this or that evil, which as some have rightly observed are always violent campaigns on people who first must be discredited as humans worthy of love or even simple respect as God’s own creatures. We used to call these campaigns “crusades” and think of ourselves self-righteously as “crusaders” until some began to realize that we were giving ourselves away too obviously if we were to continue deflecting attention from ourselves as crucifiers.
So for us deflecting crucifiers, merciless in hitting our targets, God sent Jesus to preach, embody, enact the very creaturely faithfulness, including unfailingly merciful forgiveness, that we reject. God made him to be the target on which our self-righteous practice of hitting targeted “sinners” was executed. Jesus was a target to find, see, hit. God has drawn us out and shown us for what we are—
—“so that in Christ we would become God’s righteousness” (5:21). That is, for us to find ourselves for what we are most truly. The self-righteously crusading campaigns to be our own gods, relentlessly speaking (just like God!) condemnation on behalf of self-serving, deflective “justice” is false. In fleeting moments of honesty we sometimes see that. The deepest truth, the truth of how God chooses to set the world right (that’s God’s dikaiosunē, whether it’s rendered as “justice” or “righteousness”) is to make us, again, beloved creatures of God’s own mercy. Even more, God chooses to place us in a community of mercifully beloved creatures. That is to say, reconciled, a social location where keeping account of wrongs and rights (the task of jurists) is no longer the order of the day (2 Cor. 5:19). This is the new day, the new creation. Which is to say that every creature who took up the crusade of a deflecting crucifier has been exposed and thereby stopped. “We are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died” (2 Cor 5:14). Full stop. In turn, a new creature has been brought to life, the new creation in Christ (2 Cor 5:17, 21
From Canva
To put it differently, while human creatures conduct their multitude crusading campaigns against God and each other (I suppose if there were truth in our self-promotion it would include a flashing sign “over 8 billion now being self-served”), God is conducting a different kind of undertaking for us. It is an undertaking hidden under humankind’s crucifixion of Jesus. It is an undertaking of astonishing mercy on that cross, absorbing humankind’s violence and returning forgiveness in the resurrected Jesus. It is an undertaking “for us and our salvation”—an entirely new creation out of the ashes of the old, in the very places where we have burned it all down. It reunites us as beloved creatures with our loving Creator, with other human creatures as companions (rather than scapegoated targets), even with ourselves as creatures of dignity and grace.
“We entreat you,” Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “with hearts opened wide” (2 Cor 5:20, 6:11). “Now is the time.” Now. Not later, not “I’ll get back to you after we wrap up this last crusade and it has sunk in” (not usually said aloud: “after all the crucifixions have been completed and the blood has sunk into the very soil on which we conduct our various crusades”). Now. God is undertaking this reconciliation now, because to be honest, crucifiers will never find the right time. (A famous New Yorker cartoon comes to mind: an executive stands at a desk, speaking into a telephone receiver. “No, Thursday doesn’t work. How about never? Does never work for you?”)
When Paul writes, “Be reconciled,” it is the same as when Jesus reportedly said, “Follow me.” It’s not a proposal for a business contract: “you perform these tasks or meet these conditions, you’ll get this payment.” That kind of accounting is done. It’s a new day. God is doing a new thing. “Oh my, look!” Paul exclaims, “can you see it happening now? Everything old has passed away, everything is becoming new. You too. Now.”
“Come. Come with me,” Jesus says. “I am taking you into this reconciled life.” It’s the life where we wear the sign of the cross made with ashes, not as crusaders for our own rightness, but as beloved creatures of the Creator of new creations, the One we crucified.
MK
February 25, 2025
