“Only second-best?”

By Rev. Michael Stonhouse

Meditation – Thursday, March 21, 2024

2 Corinthians 3:7-18 (Forward, p. 52) CEV p. 1207

So, once again, in reading today’s text, I was faced with a couple of questions, namely, what is this passage getting at, and how are we to apply it to our lives today? I am faced with these questions rather frequently because certain texts from the Scriptures don’t lend themselves to easy interpretation or to easy application. Today’s passage was one of these.

For an answer, I needed to go back and ponder what the written Law of Moses meant to the Jewish people of Paul’s era. Though it was similar in many aspects to the suzerainty (vassal) treaties of Moses’ period, it had three significant different differences. For one thing, it had been not imposed on them by some foreign, overpowering, dictatorial nation as these other treaties usually were, nations that, by the way, did not have Israel’s well-being in mind, but only a perpetuation of its own power. It had come from none other than a loving God who wanted the best for Israel. Secondly, this treaty, the Law of Moses, was voluntary. Israel and its people had a choice in whether they accepted it or not. And, thirdly, unlike these other treaties, this one was to stand the test of time, to be applicable for all generations and for all its people regardless of when or where they lived. So, all this put the Law of Moses in an entirely different league.

But, in some ways, all of this was incidental to how the Jewish people saw this law. For them, it defined them as a nation and as a people. There was no other nation that had been singled out by God like this, and no other nation that had this kind of law. Moreover, it defined how they were to live, how they were to live in relation to each other, and how they were to live in relation to God—how, in New Testament terms, they were to love God and their neighbour. And, in contrast with their neighbours’ belief systems, it gave them a moral code that was remarkably enlightened and singular. There was no other moral code anything like it in the ancient world. So, for all these reasons, the Law was, as the apostle Paul describes it, ‘glorious’ in its day.

Moreover, because that Law also spelled out the consequences of failing to keep that Law—consequences that the Jewish people seen ‘played out’ all too frequently in the past--it meant that the Jewish people had a decidedly

strong reason for wanting to adhere to it as best they could. It meant that they were not going to give up on the Law very willingly.

But then, here in today’s passage, Paul suggests that the Law can safely be ‘done away with’, as being only the second-best option. In fact, he tells the folks at Corinth that the Law brought only ‘the promise of death’ while the Spirit brings life (verses 6b-7). So, what can he mean by this?

Here Paul relates to how the Law functioned in the lives of believers. Firstly, it revealed the prevalence of sin in their lives, awakened their senses to its presence. It defined what sin was. Secondly, it laid out, for all to see, the consequences of that sin, namely death. Further to that, it gave them a partial solution, that of an animal sacrifice, but only for accidental sins rather than intentional sins, sins done ‘with a high hand’. But even there, those sacrifices had to be repeated over and over again, for their power and impact were necessarily limited. There was, as yet, no atonement for those other sins.

But, there was yet one other way in which the Law functioned in people’s everyday lives, a way that Paul knew all too well. He, and many other Jews, had grown up with the idea that they could somehow ‘earn’ their salvation, be ‘good enough’ as far as God was concerned, if they scrupulously carried out the dictates of the Law. But then there was always a measure of doubt as to whether they had indeed ‘been good enough.’ There were always those questions, and always that pressure to do better, to do more. There was always that anxiety and uneasiness and that lack of inward peace.

And so, as long as the Jewish people contented themselves with this particular way of doing things, they were only settling for second best. And as long as they were ‘stuck’ with this, they were deluding themselves, prevented from seeing the light by a kind of ‘veil’ over their thinking.

And so, what Paul was saying is that in Jesus, and in the Spirit, there was a better way. Firstly, by the death of Jesus, by His once and for all sacrifice on the Cross, the old system of animal sacrifice had been done away with. They were set free from sin and its penalties and consequences fully and for all time. And secondly, by the free gift of salvation through God’s grace, they no longer had to fret or worry or frantically work to ‘be good enough.’ Jesus was ‘good enough’ and that is enough.

So, what does this say to us today? I’d suggest a couple of things. Firstly, many of us grew up with the idea of having to ‘measure up’, whether it was measuring up to our parents’ expectations or those of our peers or teachers or measuring up to God. And secondly, even when we have ‘come’ to salvation, accepted God’s free gift, don’t we at times still wonder whether we are ‘doing enough’, or living in quite the way that God would want? Don’t we still harbour those unspoken rules, whether from the church or from our upbringing, of what we should or should not be doing, and still try to abide by them—even if they are no longer what God would want for us? I suspect that we, like the ancient Jews, can sometimes settle for ‘second best’, when the best, which is Jesus is there for the taking. Thanks be to God for such an incredible gift.

Forward notes: “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” (verse 18).

Commemoration: Thomas Ken

“Thomas Ken, an English bishop in the late 1600s, saw the glory of God in everyone, even his adversaries. It couldn’t have been easy. In Ken’s day and our own, politics and religion do not mix well.

“A few years ago, I was invited to attend the Governor’s Prayer Breakfast in Arizona. These events are sponsored by Christian groups, many of which hold viewpoints contrary to mine. I decided to pray before the event to be shown Christ’s presence inside the people who attended. (I also prayed that nothing too contentious would be raised in the speeches that morning!). While my faith in Christ was expressed differently than my breakfast mates, I found a wholeness in Christ’s body that morning. New friendships began, with new levels of trust among people from different backgrounds. Christ showed us God’s glory and gave us glimpses of what unveiled faces look like.”

Moving Forward: “What role should religion play in politics?”