March 15, 2026
The Ministry of Reconciliation
2 Corinthians 5:16–21
16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once regarded Christ from a human point of view, we regard him thus no longer. 17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: the old has passed away; behold, the new has come. 18 All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; 19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. 20 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. 21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
We are now in the third week of war with Iran. What do we make of this? Beneath the tactical analysis, economic impact, geopolitical commentary, ordinary people like us are trying to figure out how to think about it.
It is not a simple question for followers of Jesus. We don’t get to leave our faith at the door when we read the news.
The Confession of 1967 was drafted by the Presbyterian Church as American bombers flew sorties over Vietnam, as cities burned in the long summers of the civil rights struggle, as the nuclear standoff between superpowers seemed permanent.
The people who wrote it looked at all of that and chose one word as the center of their confession: reconciliation. Not because the world was reconciled. Rather, because God was, and is, at work reconciling it — and that claim needed to be said clearly and loudly.
The confession begins: “God’s reconciling work in Jesus Christ and the mission of reconciliation to which he has called his church are the heart of the gospel in any age. Our generation stands in peculiar need of reconciliation in Christ.”
Every generation, it turns out, does. Including ours. Including this one.
God reconciled. God gave. God was reconciling. God was not counting. Every major verb in verses 18 and 19 has God as its subject. The movement runs in one direction: God moves toward a world that is estranged.
The word Paul uses for reconciliation — katallasso — comes from the diplomatic world of his day. It describes the restoration of a broken relationship, especially where the aggrieved party took the initiative.
God was “not counting their trespasses against them.” This is the language of accounting. There is a set of books, and God has made a decision: the debt will not define the relationship. The entry will not be made.
Notice the scope of it. It is not “God was reconciling believers to himself.” God was reconciling — the Greek word is kosmos — the universe to himself. Everything. The new creation language in verse 17 is cosmic. This is not a renovation. This is a new creation.
Now, most of the time that sounds more like a promise than a description. We see how much of the old world is very much present, around us and within us. We carry our wounds, our bad habits, our prejudices, the signs of the old age. Paul knows about this too.
He is not writing from a position of triumph. He is writing from prison, from a place of real suffering to a church that is in disarray and conflict. And he stakes this claim about new creation in the middle of that mess: there is new creation.
He writes, “From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view.”
The new creation means we must examine the lenses we use to see people. The phrase Paul uses — kata sarka, from a human point of view — means evaluating by the metrics of the old age: status, credentials, threat level, tribe, usefulness.
Paul says he once saw Christ this way. He evaluated Jesus by the criteria of his world: a failed Messiah, a crucified pretender, a threat to everything Paul had given his life to protect. But the resurrection broke that frame permanently. He could never go back and see things the same way.
Early in my ministry, a nominating committee I was part of was trying to fill the church treasurer role. We went through the obvious candidates: accountants, business owners, people with the right kind of institutional profile. We were close to giving up when someone mentioned a woman in the congregation who had not been on anyone’s list.
She had worked as a clerk at Walmart for twenty years. The committee hesitated. Her resume didn’t look like what we were looking for. But one person had seen her differently: her attention to detail, the conscientiousness, the way she handled complexity. She joyfully accepted the invitation and became the finest treasurer that church could remember.
Our old categories — seeing things kata sarka — almost cost us a gift we desperately needed.
Now scale that out. We are in a war with Iran. Before we are citizens of a nation conducting a war, we are ambassadors of a kingdom whose sovereign is not counting anyone’s trespasses against them. That doesn’t dissolve the complexity of military decisions or foreign policy. It doesn’t make every use of force equivalent to every other. But it does mean we cannot look at the Iranian people — the opposition activists who hoped for liberation, the families caught in the crossfire, the ordinary people trying to live their lives — kata sarka, as simply the inhabitants of an threatening state, or necessary collateral damage. They are people. They are people for whom Christ came.
The new creation doesn’t just change our relationship with God. It changes the way we see. All of it. From now on.
Paul calls himself an ambassador for Christ, making an appeal on God’s behalf. An ambassador carries a message that is not their own. They are sent to represent.
The 17th-century English diplomat Sir Henry Wotton — on his way to his first posting in Venice — scribbled a definition of his profession in a friend’s autograph book. He wrote that an ambassador is “an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.”
It was a pun — “lie abroad” meaning both to deceive and to live overseas. The joke has endured because it captures a diplomat’s real predicament: they carry a message that is not their own, they represent someone else.
Paul as God’s ambassador has a different predicament. His problem is not deception, but difficulty.
The message of reconciliation sounds unbelievably naive. The logic of empire is deterrence, leverage, and power — not reconciliation.
The logic of the human heart is self-protection, fairness, preserving the ego – not reconciliation. Forgiveness can feel like rolling over. Making the first move can feel like giving in.
The old age that is within us and around us runs on different math than the gospel, and we feel that tension. I feel it when I read the news and ask myself what do I think of this? And I feel it when I face my own challenges and try to take on the mind of Christ.
There was a UN diplomat named Sergio Vieira de Mello. He spent thirty-four years as one of the world’s most experienced humanitarian envoys — Bangladesh, Cyprus, Lebanon, Kosovo, East Timor, Cambodia. He had seen enough atrocity to be a complete cynic. Yet he was not hopeless. He still believed in the rule of law, the possibility that the world could be less violent, the value of staying in the conversation.
In 2003, Kofi Annan asked him to go to Baghdad as the UN’s Special Representative for Iraq. He turned the assignment down three times. He had just taken the post he’d wanted for thirty years — UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva. He did not want to go, but he finally went because the mission needed a representative, and he was the one asked.
On August 19, 2003, a suicide bomber drove a truck full of explosives beneath his office window and detonated it. The building collapsed. Sergio Vieira de Mello was trapped in the rubble for nearly three hours while rescue workers tried to reach him. He died before they could get him out.
His last words, spoken to the rescue worker who had managed to crawl down to him through the wreckage, were: “Don’t let them pull the mission out.”
He wasn’t saying that because he was confident the mission was realistic, or even possible. He said that because the mission was larger than the odds, because of his faith that it was true, and he was appointed as the messenger.
That is something close to what Paul is describing. He is writing from prison, his body wrecked, ready to die. He stakes everything on this: we are ambassadors for Christ, God is making his appeal through us. We are God’s representatives.
Here what Paul is commissioned to say. Verse 20: “Be reconciled to God.” He does not say reconcile yourself to God. He says be reconciled. Allow yourself to receive what is already done. The work is accomplished. Set our minds on it, take it as truth, let is shape you and the way you see.
Verse 21 tells us what has been done for us: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
The theologian and preacher Fleming Rutledge describes what happens here not as a legal transaction conducted at a distance, but as a participatory exchange. Christ enters fully into the human condition — not just our weakness, but our sin, our estrangement, the whole weight of what separates us from God.
And we enter into the life of God. Christ participates in our life so that we can participate in his. The old self doesn’t get pardoned and sent home in the same rags. Something new takes its place.
Think of it this way. An ambassador is credentialed not by their own qualifications but by the authority of the one who sent them. They don’t present their resume at the border. They present their papers — the sovereign’s seal. Whatever their private doubts and opinions, whatever their personal history, the papers speak for them and say who they are.
When we stand before God, we don’t present our ledger. We present our papers: the righteousness of God made available to us in Christ. When we stand before the others and the world, we don’t carry our resume; we carry the mark of God’s mercy. We bear the seal of the one who was sent for us, and who has now sent us.
This is very important. God has sent us, the church, just as Paul was sent, to embody this message of reconciliation. There are no generic messengers. God sees us fully — the generational baggage we carry, the mal-formation we didn’t choose, the ways we are still very much old creation. God sees all of it, all of us together and each of us personally.
And God says: this is who I am working with. These are my people. These are their unique gifts. This is who I am sending. That my strength may be revealed in their weakness.
We are not loved in spite of who we are. We are known and sent as who we are. Bearing the seal of Christ. Forgiven, humble, we belong to God. Christ’s messengers. That is the exchange. That is what makes the commission possible, the commission to live the ministry of reconciliation.
So Paul stakes his whole life on this: God was in Christ reconciling the universe to himself. Not a corner of it. Not the deserving part of it. Everything.
The Confession of 1967 begins, “God’s reconciling work in Jesus Christ and the mission of reconciliation to which he has called his church are the heart of the gospel in any age. Our generation stands in peculiar need of reconciliation in Christ.”
Those words are true and we are carriers of the message. Not because we have figured it out or evidence it will prevail. But because we have been sent, and because the truth of what has been made known to us is larger than our doubts and fears.
One more story. This past week, more than a hundred preschool children and their teachers fled Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, amid fire and smoke from an antisemitic attack. They took refuge across the street at the Shenandoah Country Club, a gathering place for the local Chaldean community, Iraqi American Christians. The staff served the children food and candy while they waited to reunite with their parents. The following evening, the club hosted the synagogue community for Shabbat.
“Shenandoah opened itself to Temple Israel to be the command center, to be our shelter, to be our home,” said the rabbi. “We treat our neighbors as we treat ourselves,” said the club’s general manager. “These are our brothers and sisters.”
Iraqi Christians sheltering Jewish children, in a community where all God’s children are trying to live as neighbors.
In Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself.
The ledger of your life — whatever is in it — is not the final word about who you are. The ledger of this world — whatever is in it — is not the final word about what is possible among people or among nations.
The old has passed, the new come. Set your mind on this: you are reconciled to Christ.
And let us bear witness to the ministry of reconciliation, to every thing in every way in every corner of a world that is groaning: there is a new creation. Thanks be God.
Amen.
Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D.
First Presbyterian Church
Asheville, North Carolina