Confident Hope
Rev. Jay Rowland
2 Corinthians 5:6-10, 14-17
Sun June 13, 2021
6 (NRSV) So we are always confident; even though we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord— 7 GNB for our life is a matter of faith, not of sight. 8 So, yes, we do have confidence [that] we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. 9 So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please [The Lord]. 10(MSG) Cheerfully pleasing God is the main thing, and that’s what we aim to do, regardless of our conditions. Sooner or later we’ll all have to face God, regardless of our conditions. We will appear before Christ and take what’s coming to us as a result of our actions, [both] good & bad.
14 (GNB) We are ruled by the love of Christ, now that we recognize that one man died for everyone, which means that [we] all share in his death. 15-17 (MSG) Jesus included everyone in his death so that everyone could also be included in his life--a resurrection life, a far better life than people ever lived on their own. Because of this ... we don’t evaluate people by what they have or how they look. We looked at the Messiah that way once and got it all wrong, as you know. We certainly don’t look at him that way anymore. Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone; a new life emerges!
NRSV = New Revised Standard Version
GNB = Good News Bible
MSG = The Message Bible
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I come into this day and this moment with Hope in my heart and in my spirit. I chose to focus on this passage from 2 Corinthians today because of the clear message of hope it proclaims.
I don’t know about you, but I would be utterly lost without hope. On any given day, any given moment or circumstance I have to have some amount of HOPE in me. When it comes to hope, hey, I’m all ears. And so I pray that the hope declared by Paul in this passage will resonate deeply in your mind, in your spirit, and in your life through the Holy Spirit far beyond my interpretation of it now.
As all preachers always do, I rely on the Holy Spirit again today, trusting that God’s intent for this preaching moment prevails the words and the images I speak into the air in the coming moments or in spite of them. I love this passage from 2 Cor 5 for the way it breathes life into the idea of spiritual hope--that is, hope distinguished from general optimism, Hope that is ours through the Love of God revealed in the Life, Death and Resurrection of Jesus.
It seems to me that Paul invokes a particular kind of (spiritual) hope, which Paul actually refers to as a distinct form of CONFIDENCE--the Greek word is tharreo which appears elsewhere in the NT translated as either “bold” or “confident” .
Now I’m not a particularly confident person by nature. I’m actually insecure by nature which in my experience is the exact opposite of confidence, right? So Paul’s word choice here jumps off the page at me as I ponder this hope available to us in Jesus Christ.
Again, not just any ol’ hope, but what I see as supernatural confidence comes to us through Jesus rather than anything you or I are capable of producing for ourselves in any given moment. Other Bible translations offer the word “courage” for tharreo ... which is helpful in some ways, and unhelpful in others. Unhelpful in that, to me, courage is something I may or may not have when I need it the most. I am always inspired by the courage of others, and ultimately Jesus of course, but apart from seeing it in action in others, I wonder whether I will meet any moment with “courage” especially moments when it may be needed the most.
And for me that’s what faith comes down to, not courage necessarily, but instead having hope/confidence beyond my own capability when I need it the most. Right? I mean, hope and confidence are typically attainable when life is going well--when our kids are doing well, when our loved ones are healthy--spiritually, mentally/emotionally and physically. But when such is not the case for whatever reason, that’s when hope/confidence--moreover our hope/confidence and trust in God--can evaporate or be missing in action.
So, spoiler alert: dissonance is woven into the Good News of God’s powerful Love displayed in Jesus Christ, dissonance which can spoil our willingness or ability to grasp God’s astounding and otherworldly Love. Doubts creep in and feast upon our insecurities whenever life becomes difficult, uncertain, even cruel to us, our loved ones, friends & neighbors. And it’s all the more excruciating when/if we realize we have ZERO control over life and death, zero control over all the dangers and accidents and happenstance that happens in between birth and death, as COVID has painfully demonstrated for the past 15 months.
So what are we to do?
How do we have any confidence in the midst of all the uncertainties and hardships of life?
Even if we accept that we have only the illusion of control at any given time, what are we to DO? We can’t just sit around and wait on God all the time.
How shall we live, and move and have our being without crumpling under the weight of our anxieties, our fears and all the uncertainties of life?
That’s where verse 10 comes in. The Message Bible translation expresses it well:
Cheerfully pleasing God is the main thing, and that’s what we aim to do, regardless of our conditions.
In other words, Paul suggests we find out what seems pleasing to God in any given moment, regardless of our conditions, and let that be the operative question to lead and guide our focus, our energy, and our direction. Then sit back and watch, see if perhaps this focus might also distract us from our anxieties and fears.
But what exactly is pleasing to God, you ask?
Well, that’s really between you and God.
That' sounds like a dodge I know, but I can’t prescribe any stock answer; that wouldn’t be right. It truly is between you, God and the Holy Spirit working in you, through your personality, your interests, your passion, your LIFE in Christ.
But Paul does offer us spiritual guidance--starting at v14 where he encourages us to live our lives ...
ruled by the love of Christ, now that we recognize that [Jesus] died for everyone, which means that [we] all share in his death. (MSG) Jesus included everyone in his death so that everyone could also be included in his life--a resurrection life, a far better life than people ever lived on their own. Because of this ... we don’t evaluate people by what they have or how they look. We looked at the Messiah that way once and got it all wrong, as you know. We certainly don’t look at [Jesus] that way anymore. Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone; a new life emerges!
Paul offers us a way to be all about pleasing the Lord, which also--I think--opens to us new doorways of hope ... hope we need for all that ails us … new life unleashing joy within us. Paul points us toward a life of confident hope: hope arising from moments which may have previously left us cowering in fear--moments when we fear our own mortality; the mortality of those we love; or the seemingly intractable problems of global warming, gun violence, police brutality, anything and everything which otherwise chip away at confident hope in The Lord.
“by saying that Christ “died for all,” Paul simply means that … “in Christ God did something radically new for the whole world” (CEP/Bratt/LenVanderZee). But clearly the “whole world” as it were, is free to make up its own mind about that. What I mean by that is “God didn’t let people kill Jesus before raising him from the dead just to offer people some kind of religious deal .… God doesn’t offer Jesus as one choice among many in the so-called religious marketplace … God’s work in Christ actually changes the world. In Christ God initiates a new creation (CEP/Bratt/Vander Zee)
We don’t have to do the initiating. God is already at work, indeed it has already begun. For the seed that is God’s transforming “work” to blossom in our lives requires only God’s grace working with our growing faith and spiritual development. And so as Paul explains, it seems that God’s plan is for people to respond to Christ’s death and resurrection by faithfully reconciling ourselves to God and each other. (CEP/Bratt)
That reconciliation, in turn, shapes the way we view the people around us. Instead of viewing people from “worldly” perspectives, we begin to see people, flawed and fearful people as we all can be, as people whom God wants to set free from the chains of fear…. From “now on,” that is, ever since the death and resurrection of Christ completed his saving work, we have the potential--make that the responsibility--to see and care for all people as being those for whom Jesus may well have died. (CEP/Bratt)
(So) To be “in Christ” means that we actually become participants in the “New Age” God created through the Life, Death and Resurrection of Christ. Experiencing death and resurrection with Christ as we endure painful endings and new beginnings, we discover how to live into “newness of life” (Rom.6:4) before, during and after our own actual death. Over time we become participants with God in bringing about unprecedented reconciliation and peace.* This does not require us to actually be (or worse to fake) “self-confidence” nor even to act confident as the world views confidence, but rather supernatural confidence, supernatural hope, meaning, again hope/confidence that doesn’t depend upon self-confidence or any lack thereof, but which is already given to us through the Life, Death, and the Resurrection of Jesus and in the Love that sustains all Life from cradle to grave and beyond.
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Source indicated by parentheses:
• CEP/Bratt/Vander Zee = Len Vander Zee quoted in commentary by Doug Bratt, Center for Excellence in Preaching, http://cep.calvinseminary.edu/ 2021
*Carl R. Holladay, in Preaching Through the Christian Year (B), A Comprehensive Commentary on the Lectionary, p.309-10 (1993)
