BILLTESKA

Paul's great passage about reconciliation gives me the opportunity to pick up my favorite current theme, and add something to what I said last time, when the subject was the nocturnal visit of St. Nicodemus to our Lord. You will remember that the learned and sympathetic Pharisee was puzzled by the notion of being "born from above". A clue to what that means is found elsewhere in the writings of the same author — or at least of his school of early Christian theology — where, in one of the epistles attributed to him, St. John says

Born of God, you see. Maybe that is the birth from above of which Jesus spoke to Nicodemus in John's Gospel. If so, it means that love — the fruit of the Spirit, Who blows wherever She will — is spiritual rebirth. I think that has something to do with ego-loss. Self-forgetfulness. Love is more than simple kindness or generous disposition towards others. It is more mystical, and in a sense more frightening than that. It has to do with the loss of our life, in fact our soul, with the loss of whatever it is that, if we tried to hold onto it we lose it, but when we lose it, we find real life and our real soul. Hanging-on to our little sense of self, to our little egos — is what Paul calls the flesh.  Today he tells us:

Well, the word of our version renders as human is none other than this flesh,  so in my interpretation this passage could read this way:

Could this mean that — from time to time at least — Paul has experienced a new consciousness of which he is no longer the center? It is extremely difficult to explain this to those who have never experienced it. In fact, the attempt to do so may well appear to be lunacy:

The original Greek is helpful and maybe even illuminating here: the word our translation renders as "beside ourselves”   [exesthmen] Is related to our word ecstasy. It can mean out of one's mind or beside oneself, but it can also mean something mystical: astonishment, amazement, “a displacement of the mind from its ordinary state and self-possession”.  Self-possession. There we go. Paul is referring to a transformation of his sense of self as a result of his relationship to God in Christ. I think this is also what he means by reconciliation [katallassw],  which we will get to in a minute.

Paul says that he is "beside himself", as regards God. That is, for a time Paul finds himself outside his old, limited, ego-centric consciousness — the sense of individual self into which we are born, which he calls flesh.  When dealing with fellow mortals, he has to revert to that consciousness in order to appear not to have lost his mind, because that is exactly how ecstatic people seem to others. For the sake of those with whom he is trying to communicate, he must keep up what he now sees as the pretense of the flesh— the illusion that we are separate beings — while at the same time trying to convince everyone that they are really a new creation.

That's where our lectionary leaves it today, but Paul goes on to talk, rather excitedly — even ecstatically — it seems to me, about reconciliation, which is really what all of this is been leading up to, even though our lectionary omits it entirely, and skips on to the next chapter next week! Here's how Paul concludes this passage:

Sin is alienation –  our self-definition as OTHER than everyone and everything else. This is the exact opposite of the Divine Consciousness of the Three Persons, which is Love. Sin is the opposite of Love. It is the state of individuality into which we are born. In Christ, God has come into that state with us, so that we might become the righteousness of God: so that we might join in the society of Perfect Love which I've called the Divine Consciousness. We cannot enter the kingdom of God until we have been born from above — until we exchange sin for love, flesh for spirit, ego-delusion for self-forgetfulness.

"See, If anyone is in Christ there is a new creation." The old translations render it — mistakenly in my estimation — as an individual transformation: "If anyone is in Christ HE IS a new creation."  What's wrong with this is that it is precisely the overcoming of individuality that Paul is talking about as the New Creation — the reconciliation provided by God in Christ — we are reconciled with God and with one another. I think this means more than simply being forgiven by God and forgiving one another. It is a metaphysical change, in which we are no longer in Paul's ironic phrase "in our right minds" — our worldly, or fleshly, or ego-diluted perspective, but we are "beside ourselves” or “out of our minds” — those fleshly minds, those ego-minds. We are out of those.

We usually think of reconciliation under the influence of our atonement doctrine: we need, individually, to be reconciled to God, because of our misdeeds, and the blood of Christ makes that possible by paying the penalty due for our sin. Indeed, the Latin word from which our word reconciliation comes can be used in this way, although the Greek is not. In a more humanistic sense, we also think of reconciliation as laying down old enmities and grudges, and forgetting about other people's offenses against us. It means all these things, but looking into the roots of the words uncovers at least the possibility of an ecstatic and mystical meaning. The Greek word we translate as "reconciliation" is related to the word meaning other as in alien. It means to change into something else, to exchange one thing for another, to interchange ­and by extension, it means to restore to favor, that which had fallen out of favor. Reconciliation in the sense of “restoration to favor” is one of the ancient meanings, but at the deepest root there is always the notion of change. Transformation. Exchange. Restoration. Interchange. I want to propose that reconciliation can mean becoming interchangeable with one another — that reconciliation means really loving your neighbor as yourself. 

Reconciliation in Latin adds another interesting connotation: coming together again, implying that some kind of previous togetherness had been lost, which is now restored. That, in fact, is the usual meaning of reconciliation, isn't it? Usually, reconciliation goes hand-in-hand with forgiveness. But I want to suggest that it may mean much more, all-important though forgiveness may be. I suggest that reconciliation is an actual change in being, which is why Paul calls it "the New Creation”. The New Creation in Christ:

Let me read the passage, substituting my own interpretation of the words:

The cancellation of trespasses is part of the reconciliation – the interchange of Being –  but it is far from the whole thing. The reconciliation of which Paul writes seems to be liberation from the prison of ego – the flesh, as he called it — as we are incorporated into Christ which means into the Mystical Body in which we are all one. The flesh is transformed – exchanged for the Body: the New Creation that is the Body of Christ. In the old, worldly, fleshly, consciousness of self — from the perspective of ego — this kind of talk is crazy: the lunatic raving of one “beside himself”, but in this new, ecstatic understanding, in which everything old has passed away — in which Paul has experienced the new level of consciousness in Christ — it is the Message of Reconciliation: the incredibly Good News that we have been changed — brought into the Eternal Communal Self: The Most Holy and Life-giving Trinity: we are "reconciled" in the sense of being brought into that Divine Being — together.