Now is the Day of Salvation. How Do We Face It?

5 NOW IS THE DAY OF SALVATION. HOW DO WE FACE IT?

Text: 2 Cor. 6: 1-10

The Interest in Reading the Text

One of the most difficult problems in people’s organisation is the difficulty to imagine that a new man and new life, a new structure of society is really possible. If we look at the outrageous disparities between rich and poor in many of our countries we emotionally feel the strong wish that these disparities should be overcome. We can go on to analyze then why the disparity is there. What are the powers which maintain it? What are the perspectives to overthrow these powers? From then we may develop a political strategy.

Still, in the everyday situation, in the villages, in the city slums, people tend to relapse and to reproduce the values of the old society. The values of the oppressor are the dominant values for long. Besides, there is always the long term programme of total transformation, revolutionary liberation and the short term perspective of small steps which can be achieved here and now, the minimum programme.

It is the weakness of many political parties and peoples movements that they get completely caught up in the short term perspective and tend to betray the goal of liberation. If someone’s immediate problem is food or to get security for the site on which one’s house is built, how then can one be concerned with the total transformation of society. One may be satisfied by appealing to the government or some aid agency and get their own problem solved. To understand the problems of a whole class and the class contradictions in society already requires to think a lot further than the tip of one’s nose. It even requires a certain amount of unselfishness.

Likewise, among those who try to organise people, a tremendous farsightedness and soberness is required. The expectation often is the leader, or on a larger scale, the party, should deliver the goods. The temptation on their part therefore is to pretend that they can deliver the goods and that, if this happens, all will be sheer happiness.

Often the awakening is very bitter if the people discover that the leader or the party cannot deliver the goods. That they themselves have to build the new life, or, if the goods are delivered, the people may discover that still their situation has not changed. Still they have no say in decision-making. Still they are powerless.

If leadership moves into a place from outside, there is always the temptation to build up a very powerful image and to mislead people. But even if low class and low caste people organise in their own place and try to assume some leadership, the temptation remains. The people will keep nagging: You are only one of us. How can you achieve anything? Why should we be with you? And the organiser may try to boost his image with arguments like: But I have learnt to read and write; I have clearer insights in the situation; I have so many contacts; I have been to the big city; I have influential friends – so just trust in me. People need some glamour, some dreams; they cannot bear the crude reality. So runs the argument.

This argument is rooted in a lack of imagination on the part of the people as well as on the part of leadership. The imagination fails to project the newness of life. It only creates opiatic dreams which distract from reality. It does not create the critical dreams which discard the old and help to create the new society.

Background of the Text

From this point of view; How is newness of life possible? It may be helpful to have a fresh look at the letters to the Corinthians. And I propose 2 Corinthians 6:1-10 for this purpose. Before I read this text, some initial remarks may be useful.

Corinth at the time of St. Paul had a large harbour and was an important trade centre. The parish which Paul had founded consisted mainly of Greek converts part of whom were slaves, while others were recently freed slaves. On the whole, the harbour proletariate of Corinth made up a huge proportion of the church there. One of the key passages which give us not only a picture of the social composition of this church but also the theological significance which Paul sees in the proletarian character of that parish is found in I Cor. 1:26-30 which reads: “For consider your call, brethren; not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were

powerful, not many were of noble birth; but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption: therefore, as it is written, “Let him boasts, boast of the Lord.”

The apostle reminds the Corinthians of their proletarian background and uses it as an illustration for God’s partiality on the side of the poor. The worldly standards, that is power, nobility, a high birth and “wisdom”, i.e. the sophistication of philosophical and religious speculations. God, on the other hand, chooses what is weak and foolish and low and despised in the eyes of the world. Paul has to remind the Corinthians of God’s partiality, because they, themselves, tend to abandon their own background; they try to be wise and clever and sophisticated in the eyes of the world.

In the first letter to the Corinthians, it seems to be the religious speculation of gnosis with its contempt for the material reality of life which gains influence. Later in the second letter, specifically the question of leadership is raised. The position of Paul is contexted - the new leaders boast of their achievements in order to make Paul low in the eyes of the people.

From this background, we gain a new understanding of Paul’s terminology. He all the time distinguishes between the eyes of the world and the eyes of God, the ways of the flesh and of the spirit. “According to the world, according to the flesh” seen on the described socio-economic background means: according to the values of the powers that be. The dominant values, as Paulo Freire says, are the values of the oppressor and also the oppressed internalise these values. According to the flesh therefore means: according to the standards of power, wealth, high birth and sophisticated education. According to the spirit, on the other hand, means: according to the spirit of God’s justice which makes low the high and strengthens the weak. Therefore, “spirit” has nothing to do with idealism, abstraction from and evasion of the material reality. On the other hand, it is taking serious the material reality and reshaping it according to the spirits of God’s justice in Christ.

The Text

Our text in 2 Cor. 6:1-10 exegetically still belongs to chapter 5 which so powerfully speaks of the newness of life in Christ. Since Christ has died for all, says the apostle (v.14), I do not look at any one from a human point of view, that is, I do not look at any one anymore from the point of view of power and status. Once also I looked at ‘Christ that way - which means I looked at him as a powerless good for nothing who had died as a criminal. But I look at him so no .longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away, behold, the new has come (17).

While it cannot be denied that this text also speaks of an inner renewal, it cannot be seen apart from the social reality into which it is spoken. If Paul says: In Christ God has reconciled the world to himself, then this does not only mean individual sin and forgiveness; it has the full corporate dimension of society. God’s reconciliation Wants to restitute and enables people to restitute justice. How could Paul otherwise say: God makes us ambassadors of reconciliation, so that in Christ we ourselves may become, may embody, may build the justice of God.

Here our text sets in. Paul asks the people not to accept the grace of God in vain. Obviously he is very much aware that this is possible: to accept the grace of God just as a private religious consumer good, to keep it as an enrichment of one’s pious life, and not to draw any upsetting conclusions from this. In order to make this private use of God’s grace impossible, he quotes the prophet Isaiah, using a passage which is strikingly close to the Nazareth manifesto of Lk. 4:18-19.

Isaiah 49:8-13 reads: “Thus says the Lord: In the hour of my favour I answered you, and I helped you on the day of deliverance, putting the land to rights and sharing afresh its desolate fields; I said to the prisoners, ‘Go free’, and to those in darkness, ‘Come out and be seen’. They shall find pasture in the desert sands and grazing on all the dunes. They shall neither hunger nor thirst, no scorching heat of sun shall distress them; for one who loves them shall lead them and take them to water at bubbling springs. I will make every hill a path and build embarkments for my highways. See, they come; some from far away, these from the north and these from the west and these from the land of Syene. Shout for joy, you heavens, rejoice, O

earth, you mountains, break into songs of triumph, for the Lord has comforted this people and has had pity on his own in their distress."

Of this restitution of equality and the healing of all afflictions, Paul says: Now is the day, now you have to work together with God. God’s grace in Christ sets us at work and the basic insight which we have in our mind when we set out is that the old has passed away, everything has become new. In some of the most radical texts like the Magnificat or the Nazareth Manifesto or here in 2 Corinthians, the embarrassing fact is that the message of Liberation is put in categories of past and present, not just promised or something lying in a remote future. It has happened; it happens now.

How Does One Cope with This Here and Now?

One way to cope, of course, is to describe the implementation of God’s justice mainly as an internal event, something which happens between the individual believer and God and which has not much visible outward effects beside individual conduct. Much of the theology of the Reformation since Luther made this internal understanding possible. The justification through faith alone was isolated from what can be done about the condition of the world and each effort to “work together with God” became immediately suspect as self justification.

Of course, this theology must be understood in its protest against a powerful church which became rich by acting as an intermediary between the individual and God. A church which through ownership of land belonged to the powerful exploiters, enhanced its wealth by selling God’s grace for money. Compared with this, an individualisation and internalisation of grace was a step forward. Yet, in our days we have understood that as an individualistic preoccupation with justification, reconciliation with God may even keep people away from involvement. Since the Kingdom of God cannot be built by us, the reasoning is often that there is no meaning in striving towards anything which tries to make the-i promise of the Kingdom visible. We just wait and see.

Paul’s own life however is a clear indication that he does not think of the newness of life only in an inward way. He struggles with the church founded by him that they should live this newness. He tells the Christians in Corinth that they cannot celebrate the

Eucharist if some go hungry and others are over fed. But he also makes clear that the transition from the old society to the new life does not happen in one miraculous, sweeping step. While the new life is already present, the old values are still valid in the eyes of world.

What Paul describes as the strategy of his own apostolate has very much a subversive character. It is also extremely ambiguous. It sounds very opportunistic when he says: We put no obstacle in anyone’s way so that no fault may be found in our ministry. Apparently Paul tries to avoid provocation, outright confrontation. Yet, obviously, to live as a servant of God, according to the spirit of God’s justice, is in itself scandalising enough. It requires endurance and brings affliction, hardship and calamities. It involves beating, imprisonments and mobbing. It requires ceaseless hard work, sleepless nights, hunger. “We recommend ourselves the innocence of our patience and kindliness; by gifts of the Holy Spirit, by sincere love, by declaring the truth by the power of God.”

Obviously one of the most important criteria for the newness of life is not success, but dedication, the ability to be with the- people with a clear grasp of the situation and patience and love. Then, only then, it is possible to wield the weapons of righteousness, that is, to fight injustice with the power of the people. This description reminds one very much of one of the last editorials of the Signs of the Times before the office was raided in the beginning of December (‘76). An editorial in late October reflected on the meaning of the paper’s name and said: We have to remember with Martin Buber that success is not one of the names of God. We simply believe that by participating in the suffering and dying of Christ, we are participating in the implementation of his justice. The raiding of the office of course showed the cost of this stand.

People who fight like this survive severe sufferings; they live on even if they die. In all their sorrows, they have reason to rejoice. Being poor, they make many rich. Having nothing, they possess everything.

Poverty is part of the struggle. As poor to make people rich, having nothing to possess everything. This reminds us, that, while the struggle for liberation is a struggle for bread and for basic necessities, it is not a struggle for possessions. It is a struggle for the

sharing of goods. While the struggle for liberation is the struggle for power of the powerless, it does not aim at the power to oppress but at the power to share everything, the power to set free.