"Be Reconciled" - March 1, 2017

II Corinthians 5:20b-6:2

               
            “Reconcile” is not a verb anybody uses often, unless you’re an accountant reconciling the books.  Other than that technical usage, it usually has to do with marital partners.  There is always hope that Angelina and Brad or Tom and Katie will reconcile.  (Not much hope, but some.)

            The thing about marriage is that since the time of the New Testament, the Church has seen in it a reflection of the love between Christ and the Church, which means that the strange and holy dynamics of a marriage, which often includes a lot of unholy stuff, describe what can happen between God and us.  That makes Paul’s appeal all the more poignant:

“We entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.” [II Corinthians 5:20b]

            Paul didn’t come up with the comparison of the divine/human relationship to marriage on his own.  The prophet Hosea saw that in his own miserable marriage long before Paul.  In Hosea’s time, many of the people of Israel were turning their backs on God and worshiping the Canaanite fertility gods who promised many children and bountiful crops and the security and wealth that go with all of that.  Their worship included the practice of cultic prostitution, where a woman would go to a temple with a veil over her face and wait there for a male devotee to come along.  In return for a fee that would be given in part to the pagan temple, they would act out the ritual marriage of a storm god – a baal – and the earth mother, and in the course of it all the woman might become impregnated.  Hosea’s wife became mixed up in this sort of thing and, as you might expect, he was not happy about it.  He wanted to put her away, and was perplexed about what to do with her children, whose uncertain paternity he was prepared neither to repudiate them nor to recognize.

            What Hosea did do was to call upon his son and his daughter to act as go-betweens for him and his wife, since they weren’t on speaking terms.

“Plead with your mother, plead –

for she is not my wife,

and I am not her husband –

that she put away her prostitution from her face,

and her adultery from between her breasts,

or I will strip her naked

and expose her as in the day she was born,

and make her like a wilderness,

and turn her into a parched land,

and kill her with thirst.

Upon her children also I will have no pity…” [Hosea 1:2-4a]

He had a lot more to say, and this is the PG-13 section of it. 

On top of that, he realized he wasn’t the only one affected.  There were many other marriages in Israel with similar troubles of their own, and other ways in which people were turning aside from God’s paths.  In fact, Hosea saw Israel’s behavior in general as doing to God what his wife had done to him, with God preparing to cut his people off the way he wanted to do to her.

“I will lay waste her vines and her fig trees,

            of which she said,

            ‘These are my pay,

                        which my lovers have given me.’

I will make them a forest,

            and the wild animals shall devour them.

I will punish her for the festival days of the Baals,

            when she offered incense to them

            and decked herself with her ring and jewelry,

                        and went after her lovers,

                        and forgot me, says the Lord.” [Hosea 2:12-13]

            And yet, there was always something that held God’s hand back from the complete destruction of that relationship.  God maintained an abiding loyalty, however severely strained it might become.  Even though it gave him deep, almost inexpressible pain, God always kept the door open for reconciliation, with a love akin even more to that of a parent for a wayward child:

“When Israel was a child, I loved him,

            and out of Egypt I called my son.

The more I called them,

            the more they went from me;

they kept sacrificing to the Baals,

            and offering incense to idols.

Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk,

            I took them up in my arms;

            But they did not know that I healed them.

I led them with cords of human kindness,

            with bands of love.

I was to them like those

            who lift infants to their cheeks.

            I bent down to them and fed them.” [Hosea 11:1-4]

Reconciliation, not destruction, was and is God’s will. 

            Reconciliation begins with God’s own suffering love.  Hosea knew that.  We do, too, and have seen its fullest revelation in the way that Jesus lived and died.  Reconciliation for the whole world, not just Israel, begins on the cross, when God’s love picks up our pain to go with his own.

“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” [II Corinthians 5:21]

Without that initial offer, nothing we could ever do would turn things around.  But the offer is there, and persists.

            The second half of that reconciliation then falls to us.  Paul puts it this way:

“As we work together with him, we urge you also not to accept the grace of God in vain. For he says,
‘At an acceptable time I have listened to you,
   and on a day of salvation I have helped you.’
See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!” [II Corinthians 5:22-6:2]

Honestly, though, I think Hosea put it even better:

“Come, let us return to the Lord;

For it is he who has torn,

            and he will heal us;

he has struck down, and he will bind us up.

After two days he will revive us;

            on the third day he will raise us up,

            that we may live before him.

Let us know, let us press on to know the Lord;

            his appearing is as sure as the dawn;

he will come to us like the showers,

            like the spring rains that water the earth.” [Hosea 6:1-3]

And there it is.  If you would be reconciled to God, God is even readier than you are, and is saying, “Welcome home.  I missed you.”