Trinity 12
2
Cor 3:4-11
8/19/18
Letters – actual physical pieces of
paper sent through the U.S. Postal Service – are becoming less and less
common. One wonders if someday they will
be like a phone booth with a pay phone inside – something that dates a movie or
television show to the time when it was made.
Things haven’t arrived at that point
yet. Not everyone operates in a purely
digital way. And there seem to be settings where there is still almost a
preference for a physical letter. In my
experience, that seems to be the case with letters of recommendation.
As a pastor, I get asked to write
letters of recommendation on a fairly regular basis. A pastor is supposed to be an honest
individual who is concerned about a person’s character, and who knows something
about the members of his congregation.
Not surprisingly then, people ask the pastor to write letters of
recommendation for members as they apply to scholarships and pursue opportunities. A letter of recommendation from the pastor is
usually a pretty good bet. He is a
respected source who should be able to write an articulate letter that will be
helpful. And when asked to do this, I
have noticed that quite often, it is still a matter of printing a letter on
church letterhead.
Letters of recommendation were even
more important in the ancient world than they are today. If you want to learn about a person today you
have several different resources you can use.
You can simply “google” the person and that can provide a huge amount of
information. You can look on social
media to see the kinds of relationships they have. You can look at the kinds of things they post
and “like.” In a very short time you can
get a good idea about who the individual is and what they are about.
Of course, none of those things were
available in the first century. You
couldn’t send an email or make a phone call of inquiry. Instead, if someone came to you asking for
help or claiming to be involved in doing something, the only real assurance
they could provide was a letter of recommendation. These were very important in the functioning
of the ancient world.
Letters of recommendation were also
extremely important in the functioning of the early Church. There were small groups of Christians spread
throughout the Mediterranean world. They
relied on hospitality – the provision of food and lodging for strangers – in
order to support mission work and other activities of the Church. Letters of recommendation were a key
instrument in making this work.
Some men had come to the
congregation at Corinth. They bore
letters of recommendation that indicated they were people to be taken
seriously. Once there in Corinth, they
stared to cause problems. They made claims about themselves and their importance.
They also attacked Paul and his ministry. Paul had changed his travel plans and
had not come to Corinth as scheduled.
This was used to call into question whether he was trustworthy. Other specifics are not entirely clear, but
we do know that Paul viewed them as a serious threat to the church at Corinth
as he dealt with this congregation that already had enough problems of its own,
without anyone coming from the outside and bringing more.
The apostle Paul has just explained about
the change in his travel plans – changes that were caused by the Corinthians’
own actions. The apostle had gone on to
say, “For we are not, like so many, peddlers of God's
word, but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God, in the sight of God we
speak in Christ.”
Then immediately before our text, Paul had said, “Are we beginning to commend
ourselves again? Or do we need, as some do, letters of recommendation to you,
or from you? You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, written on our
hearts, to be known and read by all.” Paul’s opponents may have needed letters of recommendation,
but he didn’t. He was the one who had
first preached the Gospel to them. Their
very existence as a church was his letter of recommendation. And indeed, in his love for them, Paul can
say that they were written on his heart and that of his co-worker Timothy.
Next,
continuing the metaphor of writing, Paul shifts to a discussion of the Spirit’s
work. He says, “And you show that you
are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the
Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human
hearts.” Alluding to the stone tablets
on which the Ten Commandments were written, Paul says that the Spirit had
written on their heart as he made them believers.
This work
of the Spirit in Christ’s new covenant is what gives Paul confidence. And so he says in our text, “Such is the
confidence that we have through Christ toward God. Not that we are sufficient
in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from
God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the
letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”
Paul says
that he has confidence through Christ toward God. Though you and I aren’t apostles, the same
thing is true for us because we too have been included in the new covenant. God
had made the first covenant with Israel at Mt. Sinai as he took them to be his
people. But Israel was never meant to be
an end in herself. From God’s promise to
Abraham that in his offspring all nations would be blessed, it was always God’s
plan to work through Israel to bring salvation to all people – to bring
salvation to you.
The first
covenant with its Torah – its Law – was meant for the time until the coming of
Christ. But it was never meant to be the
final word. Instead, God said through
the prophet Jeremiah, "Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD,
when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of
Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I
took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that
they broke, though I was their husband, declares the LORD.” God said that in
this new covenant he would put his law within them and write it on their
hearts.
Around the
same time, through the prophet Ezekiel, God revealed more about this end time
action. He said, “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put
within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a
heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in
my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.”
God’s
Spirit began this end time salvation as through his work the Son of God was
conceived in the virgin Mary. True God
and true man, Jesus Christ established the new covenant by the shedding of his
blood. That is why he said in the institution of the Sacrament of the Altar that
the cup of wine is the new covenant in his blood.
Jesus
Christ established the new covenant by dying for you sins. In fact in this letter Paul says about God’s
action in Christ, “For our sake he made him to
be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of
God.” Yet Jesus Christ did not remain dead. The Holy Spirit raised Jesus on the
third day. As Paul said in the same
chapter, “For
the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has
died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live
might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was
raised.”
You have been included in this new
covenant. It was the Spirit’s work as he
created faith in Jesus. It was the
Spirit’s work as you received the washing of regeneration and renewal in Holy
Baptism. The letter of the law with its
demands kills. But the Spirit has given you new life. As those are in Christ your sins are forgiven
– even the sin you commit when you do what is right! On account of Christ God now considers your
good works to be good, and the Spirit of Christ leads and enables you to do
them.
Paul says in our text, “Such
is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God.” The challenge then for us is not to forget
that we have the confidence of belonging to the new covenant through the work
of the Spirit. On the one hand, there is
always the temptation to overlook Jesus Christ and all he means to us. The old Adam always wants to find the
sufficiency in himself, as if he has no problems when in fact he is the problem.
And on the other hand we are tempted
to forget that we have this confidence because of Christ. We can allow ourselves to become bogged down
in guilt and regret. Yet this is to
forget that we have received blessings from a ministry of the Spirit, not a
ministry of death.
At the end of our text Paul alludes
to how Moses’ face used to shine after he had been in the presence of Yahweh,
and that he would then cover his face with a veil in the presence of the people
until this appearance faded away. Paul
then says, “Now
if the ministry of death, carved in letters on stone, came with such glory that
the Israelites could not gaze at Moses’ face because of its glory, which was
being brought to an end, will not the ministry of the Spirit have even more
glory? For if there was glory in the ministry
of condemnation, the ministry of righteousness must far exceed it in glory.”
Through
this ministry of righteousness God has given you forgiveness and reconciliation. He has made you part of the new covenant
through a ministry that exceeds even the glory of what he did in the Old
Testament. How can we lose sight of
God’s forgiveness and love when we receive the blessings of such a glorious
ministry from him?
And note
what Paul says in the final verse of our text: “For if what was being brought
to an end came with glory, much more will what is permanent have glory.” The New Covenant is the covenant of the end
times. It is permanent. The blessings of forgiveness and life with
God will never wear out. They will never fade away. Such is the confidence that we have through
Christ toward God.
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