By Nanette Sawyer
Epistle Reading: 2 Corinthians 5:16-21
For Sunday, March 10, 2013: Year C—Lent 4
When I began writing my book about hospitality, I really struggled over which chapter should come first: Hospitality to God, or Hospitality to Self. My idea was (and is) that God and True Self meet at the core of our existence. When we are being deeply and spiritually hospitable, the True Self is open to and shaped by God’s love and acceptance. This leads to an expanding hospitality that reverberates through all other relationships.
Hospitality to Self means being open to the Image of God placed in us when we were created. So that’s an expression of hospitality to God, too, since the image of God is what we’re opening too. I see this concept in 2 Corinthians 3:18: “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.”
When God and True Self “see” each other, there is a mutual unveiling, a reflection and a radical transformation. Divinization and theosis are related theological ideals that come to mind.
The View from Flesh Doesn’t Go Far Enough
Paul critiques some of his opponents who “boast in outward appearance and not in the heart,” a reference to how God judges character, not by outward appearances, but by looking into the heart—as God did when choosing David to be the new king replacing Saul. (1 Sam 16:7b)
Knowing Christ involves something more than what appears to the eye. Boasting based on outer appearances, or seeing from the “human point of view” in the NRSV translation, is literally “regarding according to flesh” in Greek, [oidamen kata sarka]. But we don’t just regard Christ, we know Christ (2 Cor 5:16) [from ginosko]. When we know Christ, we are in Christ, and Christ is in us. This gets back to the deep hospitality to God that I mentioned above. To really know Christ, we have to know Christ heart to heart, and to let God love us, deeply. We need to develop spiritual practices that help us open ourselves to Christ’s love. This may be one of the hardest things we have to do.
Clothed in Christ
An old way of saying this would be that we have to let the worthiness of Christ enter us, or cover us like an article of clothing—to become clothed in Christ. It’s taking on a new identity, becoming a new creation.
Henri Nouwen says that our identity is that of “the beloved”—an identity that is independent of anything we do or don’t do. It’s simply who we are in relation to God. And Paul Tillich says that we are “accepted” by God in a pre-existent love relationship that we did not create and we cannot make go away.
Sometimes we punish ourselves more than God does. We feel more shame and unworthiness than we need to feel. This becomes an obstacle in our own faith development. And it reflects a failure of the church (us), in my opinion, to lead people toward an awareness of holiness and the love and hope of God in Christ.
The Hardest Question
Given that God has already reconciled God’s Self to us, the hardest question for us from this text might be: Can we see ourselves the way God sees us?
