2 Corinthians 5:20

The Text

Paul says he and his fellow workers stand in Christ's place, speaking for him, as if God himself were making the appeal through their mouths. And then the appeal itself, addressed to people who already belong to the church at Corinth: be reconciled to God. Not a command shouted from a height but a plea, spoken on Christ's behalf.

The Core

Notice the strangeness before you explain it away. An ambassador of an empire does not beg. He delivers terms. He represents power, and his words carry the weight of the throne behind him. Yet the word Paul uses for what these ambassadors do is the word of a supplicant, someone who asks because he has no leverage. God, having done everything (verse 19: "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself"), now stands at the door and asks. He does not compel the reconciliation he has already accomplished. He requests our consent to it. Sit with that a moment. What kind of God arranges peace at infinite cost and then pleads to have it received?

The Common Thread

The Old Testament is full of God's messengers, and most of them thunder. Amos, Jeremiah, Elijah on Carmel. But underneath the thunder there is always a lower sound, God asking: come now, let us reason together, the husband pleading with the wife who has left. Israel's whole history is God refusing to stop asking. And then the asking takes flesh and weeps over a city. What Paul describes here is that same voice, now come to rest in ordinary human throats, in his own cracked and much-criticized voice. Christ, who is the reconciliation, does not stop speaking when he ascends. He keeps entreating, through people who have nothing to offer but the word entrusted to them.

The Mirror

Here is the uncomfortable part: this plea is aimed at believers. The Corinthians were baptized, gifted, articulate, proud of it. And still Paul begs them to be reconciled to God. Which means the reconciliation accomplished once can be lived at a distance, held at a polite arm's length, believed and not entered. You can know the doctrine of grace and keep a small locked room where you are still managing God, still keeping accounts on yourself, still assuming that some part of you is outside the amnesty of verse 19, the "not reckoning to them their trespasses." Where is that room in you? The unpaid debt, the thing you have never said out loud in prayer, the marriage or the failure you have quietly filed under unforgivable.

Today, take five minutes alone, name that one thing out loud to God, and then say aloud, in your own words: this too is not reckoned against me.

Context

Paul writes to a congregation that has half-rejected him. Rival teachers have arrived in Corinth with credentials, presence, rhetorical polish, the things a Greek city respected. Paul is unimpressive in person, his letters are stronger than his body, and his sufferings look to the Corinthians like evidence of failure rather than apostleship. He has already alluded to those who "boast in appearance, and not in heart" (verse 12). So when he calls himself an ambassador, he is claiming enormous authority and simultaneously emptying it out. He does not use the office to win the argument. He uses it to kneel. In a culture where honor was everything and a patron never begged a client, this is deliberate and costly.

The Question

If reconciliation is finished, why must it be begged for? Paul does not resolve this. He says God has reconciled the world to himself, and in the next breath asks people to be reconciled. Both are true, and the space between them is where our freedom lives, and our resistance. You could call it the mystery of a love that will not force entry. But there is something harder here too: what happens to those who are begged and say no? Paul mentioned the judgment seat only ten verses earlier. He puts the plea and the judgment in the same chapter and leaves them side by side. I cannot make that comfortable, and I am no longer sure I should try.

The Intertext

Two echoes. The verse immediately following: "For him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf." The plea in verse 20 rests on that exchange; God can ask us to come because Christ has already gone where we were. Take that away and the entreaty is only sentiment. And then Luke's father who runs out to the road, who goes into the yard to plead with the older son who will not come in to the feast. That story ends without telling us whether he came in. Jesus left the door open, exactly as Paul does here. The plea hangs in the air, unanswered, waiting.

Reflection

Where in me is God still asking, patiently, for something he has already given?

If I had to speak Christ's appeal to one person this week, not argue it but beg it, whose face comes to mind, and what stops me?

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