One of the former pastors at Trinity was a lovely man by the name of Dick Lucco. He was known for telling a joke on Easter – an ancient Christian tradition called risus paschalis – Easter laughter –which suggested that Jesus’s resurrection represented the ultimate practical joke, played by God on the devil: the triumph of life over death, of good over evil. And because I know that you remember him fondly, and have incessantly asked me about it, here is my Easter joke for you.
Tommy
wasn’t good at math and his parents tried to help him with tutors, learning
programs, and incentives with prizes, but nothing seemed to work. Finally, in an
act of desperation, though they weren’t religious, they decided to send him to
the private Catholic school down the street. After his first day Tommy came
home and immediately went to his room to study. When his mom checked on him he
was pouring over his math homework. It went on for weeks like this until Tommy’s
first report card came home announcing that he had received an A in math. And
Tommy, like all other days, went up to study. His mom came to his room and
asked, “Tommy, what’s happened? Why are you doing so well at math? Is it the
instruction and teaching methods?” “No,” Tommy answered. “Is it the discipline
of the nuns and the orderliness of the classroom?” “No,” Tommy said. “Well
then,” Tommy, she asked, “What is it?” Tommy looked at her and said, “When I
arrived on my first day and went to the classroom I saw this man nailed to a
plus sign and I knew that these people take math real seriously.” The Apostle
Paul would agree with Tommy that God takes math seriously but not in the way
that Tommy understands it - work hard or else. The Apostle Paul will argue that God isn’t a moral
bean counter we are. God isn’t the one who is mad – we are. God isn’t counting
sins – we do. We are the ones who want punishment. We are the ones with algorithms
of worthiness not God. God offers nothing less than a “pressed in on every side,”
reconciling, zero-sin-counting kind of love.
The cross is God’s plus sign that proves that God isn’t mad.
Through Jesus and Paul we learn that God is not mad and doesn’t do division or subtraction. No, the God we encounter in Jesus Christ and from Paul, his ambassador, is a God who loves addition and multiplication “for us.”
Jesus told divine math stories about God all the time like multiplying forgiveness 70 times 7 (Matthew 18:22). He spoke of a God who would leave 99 safe sheep in order to find one lost one, “not willing that any of these littles ones should perish” (Matt. 18:12-14). He announced a God who lovingly counts every hair on your head (Matt. 10:30) and taught about God who pays workers hired at the last minute the exact same wage as those who worked all day (Matt. 20:1-15). For Christians, Jesus’ whole life plus death plus resurrection are the mathematical proof to show us that God isn’t mad, isn’t nickeling and diming us. It turns out then that Jesus is saving us from more than our sin. He’s saving us from our sin-soaked, mistaken image of God.
Nothing is more consequential in our lives that the notion of God we hold. Not God but our notion of God. This is what steers the ship. Our idea of God will always call the shots. I meet so many people, Christians and non-Christian alike, who imagine a scary, petulant, crazy god of subtraction and division. In the comedic movie Zorba the Greek, Zorba says, “I think of God as being exactly like me . . . only bigger, stronger, crazier.” And even if you don’t imagine that God is crazy I meet many who believe God is a red-faced accountant, counting sins, and shaking his head in embarrassment, if not outright violence. The Christian mystic and theologian Meister Ekhart, who died in 1328, once declared, “God! Deliver me from god.” And in our passage today, that’s exactly what Paul does arguing that the cross, the plus sign of God’s love, proves that God isn’t mad but that he’s reconciling.
Reconciliation is mentioned five times in only six verses. It is about God restoring balance, “in Christ God was reconciling the world” (2 Corinthians 5:19). Verse 18 says that God does the reconciling because we are the Ones who are distant and upset, angry and blood-thirsty. We are the ones who imagine a God who is very, very mad. Yet on the cross, where Jesus offers forgiveness to killers, he does not change God’s mind – he reveals it.
Nowhere
is there any language of wrath or punishment. From God’s perspective there is
no distance, no abyss that must be crossed or bridged, no requirement. It is a
done fact, not because a debt has been paid but because the debt has been totally
and utterly forgiven. When faced with the worst that human beings could do –
put God’s own son to death – God meets such hatred with forgiveness.Jesus doesn't die on the cross to make God love us. Jesus dies to show that he always and already has.
The cross is God’s plus sign that proves that God is not counting our sins.
Why is it so hard to believe in a God that doesn’t count sins? It’s because from birth, Paul says, we’ve been taught a different equation. And Paul wants to remind us that we’ve all been taught from a “worldy point of view” of greater than / less than. The “worldly point of view” is not so much secularism as the judging algorithm of worthiness - who’s worthy and who isn’t. This problem likes to sort people into winners and losers, good and bad, lawful and illegal, and Paul rightly points out that we should think this way about “no one.” At one time, he says, we even looked at the one we call the Christ and saw, well, nothing special: perhaps a prophet, at least a criminal or even a fool. Then something happened: something that allowed us to see in Christ the one in whom God reconciles the world to God’s self – and that something is resurrection. The resurrection reveals that the forgiveness is true.
How does God deal with sin? God forgives it. It is as though, from God’s perspective, sin never happened. On the cross sin is multiplied by the zero of God’s forgiveness and thus becomes a zero, forgotten. There is nothing more to count. This is what is done with Jesus’ prayer from the cross in Luke 23:32. When humanity did its worse, placing the God of love on a cross. God, through Jesus responded, “Father, forgive them, they do not know what they are doing.” Or again as Paul says, “Love keeps no record of wrongs” (1 Cor. 13). God isn’t counting. And once you recognize this, once you know the infinite God of love, you fire all the other gods.
God is always plus us or “for us,” Paul says – always. In fact, vs. 14 is good place for to have our Greek of the week. Vs. 14 in the NIV states: “For Christ’s love compels” and that word “compel” [συνέχω synechō] is quite interesting. It appears and gets translated in the New Testament as “control, held together, gripped, pressed on every side, and even besieged, and imprisoned.” That’s what motivates God – a love that surrounds us on all sides and simply won’t let us go, regardless of our stature or our worth. So ditch your false theorem of a worldly problem of worthiness and let the love of Jesus hold you together, hold you prisoner, control you. The plus sign of God’s love is the reality of who you are and what God thinks about you.
I’m a big fan of Father Greg Boyle, the founder of Homeboy Industries, that takes gang members, gives them a job, and then loves them into a new creation version of themselves by introducing them to a God who’s always about addition and multiplication. He tells the story of Gloria whose childhood of addiction, abuse, and subtraction led into a strung out life of pain and emptiness. At her lowest point, she found herself standing on an overpass bridge and contemplated ending her life when I car sped by and someone yelled, “Just jump already!” The “less than” insensitivity made her usefully angry which led her to find her way to Homeboy and begin the hard and slow work of recovery. When there she had a dream that she shared with Boyle. She said that in the dream she was dancing with God and “more important . . . more valuable people, keep trying to cut in . . . and God won’t let them.” She said this, and our eyes met like never before and we both cried. We sat in silence, Boyle writes, at an image of God so perfect.”
Friends, I invite you today to join the Apostle Paul and receive and demonstrate such love. I invite you to be an ambassador, a math tutor, for the plus sign of God’s love – the cross. And to be ambassador – you need to be a worshipper.
The Hebrew word for “praise” is tehilla, which primarily means “to radiate” or “to reflect.” God’s invitation to us – God’s project – is for us to be radiant in reflecting God’s own tenderness in the world – to tell others that God isn’t mad. To shout out that God isn’t counting sins. To surrender to a love that comes from all sides. Let’s sing that love together right now. And if you haven’t believed it yet – let these words about how God feels about you – surround you and press in on every side.
