All this is from God, who reconciled himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:18).

Reconciled is a wonderful word about a bad situation.  

Reconciliation is needed when a relationship has broken down, gone bad, been destroyed by evil, injustice, anger, rejection, bitterness, unforgiveness. Reconciliation involves hard and difficult work.  It’s not pretending that the awful relationship-destroying things haven’t happened or don’t matter. It means facing fully all that has gone wrong and doing everything that needs doing in order for the relationship to be restored to health.

Sin is not first the breaking of rules, but the fracturing of a relationship.  The believers in Corinth, for example, to whom Paul wrote two letters, are famous for relational fractures of all kinds: the pride that separates into “in” groups” and “out” groups; indifference, even hostility, to the poor; sexual brokenness; willful ignorance, and hardness of heart; trying to live a godly life “on the cheap”; participating in injustice (“who, us?”), refusing to be generous – and on and on it goes.

All this human relational brokenness springs from our broken relationship with God.  The heart of my sin is not the bad things I do, or the good things I fail to do; the root of my sin is my rejection of God.  “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” Yup, I was there. I was there, shouting, “Away with him! Crucify him! I will not have this one be king over me!”

Yet “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself” (verses 18-19).  Note the “direction,” the “flow” of this reconciling work: from God to us. Not from us clawing our way up to God.  Humanity’s relationship to God has completely crashed and burned—whether we’re Jew or Gentile, wealthy or poor, educated or illiterate, “cultured” or hicks, this ethnicity or that one, “religious,” “spiritual” or “none of the above,” we are all in the relentless, irresistible, unbreakable power of Sin and Death.  

“God made him who had no sin to be sin for us …” (verse21).  This is what is “happening” on the cross. Jesus is not only bearing the weight of all our sin—he is also, somehow, “becoming sin” for us in order to break its power over us.  The cross reveals how God views my sin, your sin, our sin—and the depths to which God willingly descends to reconcile us to God and to one another.

Reconciled is a wonderful word about a hopeless (from our side) situation.  God was in Christ crucified, reconciling the world to himself, breaking the power and dominion of Sin and Death … so that in Christ we might become the righteousness of God (verse 21).  Righteousness is not primarily a word about the rules, it’s a word about relationship.  Having been reconciled to God by God, what sort of people can we now be?  

How, therefore, ought we to treat one another?  Our neighbors?

Our enemies?

Was there something in this devotional that struck you, arrested you … angered or offended you?  What are some ways you could have a (hopefully ongoing) conversation with God about that?

Are you currently facing a broken relationship of some kind?  How might you, following the crucified Christ, take a first step into the hard work of reconciliation?