From the Mind of Meegs

So here's my confession. For the better part of my life, I've hated 2 Corinthians 5:17, the infamous "if any man is in Christ, he is a new creation" verse. I think it was partly a reactionary thing. If everyone and their brother didn't have that as their "life verse" then I probably wouldn't have gotten so uptight about things.
 
I've hated that verse because it always seemed to mean, "if any man is in Christ, he is less of a big, fat sinner than he used to be." It always went along with stories whose plot could be summed up thusly: "Before, when I was an evil, evil person, I used to lie/cheat/steal/whore around/be prideful/whatever. But now that I am a Christian, I don't do those things anymore. I don't even want to do those things anymore, because I am a new person!" Cue the halo.
 
OK, that's a cheap shot. But what did that mean for those of us who still sinned a whole lot? What did it mean for those of us who didn't experience an instantaneous, miraculously decreased desire to lie, cheat, steal, and generally make obnoxious, narcissistic asses out of ourselves? I got tired of the put-togethers (a term a friend and I often use to indicate, with some derision, Christians who give the appearance of having all their shit together) using this verse to talk about how much less they sucked, and how much I, by logical extension, must still suck. If the point of your existence on earth is, effectively, to sin less--well, where does that leave us? What kind of hope does that bring?
 
So I've been reading NT Wright's latest book on the resurrection, partly in preparation for Easter, and partly because my dearest Tom is a damn genius, and if he weren't already married, British, and twice my age, I would totally look him up. The basic thesis of the book relates to something I blogged about a while back, about how God's ultimate plan for the world isn't destruction, and the ultimate plan for us isn't escaping to heaven when we die. The ultimate plan is to finally bring to completion what was begun in the garden, and to restore everything. The point, as he puts it, is new creation.
 
And that's the point of the cross, the resurrection, and the ascension: not to give us an escape from the world, but to renew and reconcile the world. Not to save disembodied souls, but to resurrect whole persons. Not to make us less human, but to make us fully human. All of this, obviously, he develops in a far more detailed, thorough, well reasoned and articulate manner than I can here. But you get the idea.
 
But wait!--as all the infomercials tell us--there's more! The idea that God is in the restoration business wasn't a new idea to the Jews. They were awaiting the Messiah, the one who would restore Israel. Right up until the end, that's what the disciples were asking for. The new idea for them wasn't that God would put things right at the end of time. It was the idea that the resurrection had already arrived, for one person, in the middle of time. The Kingdom has already begun. And that gave them hope for our own resurrection in the future, as well as a direction for right now. They were supposed to participate in this already coming Kingdom. And the same goes for us.
 
I'm no longer entirely persuaded that 2 Corinthians 5:17 is just about sinning less. I mean, yes, that is part of it. I'm not saying we're off the hook, free to sin all we want...though, I have to admit it might be nice to go all antinomian and answer the question, "Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?" with an enthusiastic, "Sounds like a plan to me!"

But if the point is new creation--both the ultimate new creation and the new creation that's happening now--I think this verse is saying something more profound. If you're "in Christ" ("saved" as we would call it, though the way we use that totally flattens out the concept), you're already, in a very real sense, new creation. You're in on the grand plan. You're part of what God is going to do. You're part of the here-and-now announcement of the hope we ultimately look toward. You don't just sin less. You're a living, breathing, walking, talking example of God putting the world to rights. The demands are off of you because they've been fulfilled in Christ.
 
Look at the context. Paul's talking about the ministry of reconciliation. He's talking about God, in Christ, reconciling the whole world to himself, and about how we're ambassadors of that message. He's talking about us as God's fellow workers. He tells us not to receive God's grace in vain, which echoes 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul talks at length about the resurrection and new creation, and then tells us to be steadfast and unmoveable, because our labor in the Lord is not in vain. The resurrection means that everything is more valuable and more meaningful, not less because it's all destined for the trash heap anyway. And Paul closes that section with, "Now is the time of God's favor, now is the day of salvation."
 
And there's yet another phrase that now takes on a whole new meaning. When Paul says "now is the day of salvation" he actually means that now is the day of salvation, not "here's your chance to get your ticket to heaven while you still can." (I.e., before you meet your untimely end on the front of a speeding truck and become a cautionary tale under which many impressionable children and teens will be saved: "He left that meeting thinking he had all his life to accept Christ. Too bad he died that night and went to hell. Better repent while you still have time!" And if you think I'm making all this up, you clearly haven't spent enough time with evangelicals.)
 
So I suppose this is something of an answer to the question of what to do with a Christianity predicated on how much you suck. Maybe how much you suck isn't the exact point. Again, I'm not trying to minimize the importance of seeking holiness. But what if, by making every single thing about sucking less, we're missing the big picture? What if we're making it all about us? As Wright himself says, "Christian holiness consists not of trying as hard as we can to be good, but of learning to live in the new world created by Easter." By making this verse almost entirely about sinning less, we've missed out on something much deeper and richer.
 
In Romans 8, Paul tells us there is no condemnation for those who are "in Christ" (that phrase again!) at the start, and at the end he tells us that no one can bring any charge against those who are God's own. And what does he talk about in between all of that? New creation. All the good stuff that's going to happen not just to individual souls but to the whole world, and how much life often sucks in the meantime. That is the point. We don't escape condemnation because of how little we suck, or how much less we lie or cheat or steal or covet since we've gone and gotten ourselves "saved." We escape condemnation because God put a restoration plan into effect, and he's bringing it about even now.