20th after Trinity, 5 October 2008
Text: 2 Cor 3.3-9
Hans S. A. Engdahl
You are a letter from Christ – on identity
What is identity? Do I know who I am? What makes me who I am? Is it the others that I live with or is it somehow my own making?
A lot of questions could be asked in this connection and rightly so. The truth is that many people today ask this question, who am I, as they are not sure of their identity any longer. If I grew up in one place, especially if it was in a rural village or town, went to school, had my friends, started working and even established my family there, and perhaps also all along grew up in my church and remained there as a faithful believer, surely my identity would be fairly clear cut and definable.
More and more people today would have moved a number of times and would have had to get used to new kinds of environments.
And yet, in both cases it takes a conscious decision in order to know one’s identity. You may not be aware of whom you are or you may not care and it does not matter whether you are rural or urban.
To ask about identity is to say that it matters who you are and that it matters how you relate to others. You do not only react on what others say or suggest. You also want to create your own life and through your own ideas you also want to influence others. In short, what you would need is to develop dynamic relationships with others where you allow yourself to be influenced by others provided that there also is room for you to have a say.
We can easily destroy our ability to build a strong identity and a strong self-confidence. As a parent I could do a lot of harm perhaps without wanting to. Do we understand that a child is a human being in her or his own right? Or do we early on impose our will on that child, in all possible ways to the detail? One should just conclude that parents’ perception of the child will to a large extent decide the child’s self-confidence.
As a parent you have to do two things, believe in your child and have high expectations on the one hand and create room for that child to develop freely. Such a life would of course be built on basic principles but these principles can only be instilled by living them – not shouting them out and not doing them ourselves.
We need to be people who know a direction, who have an identity. Only then will we be able to take part meaningfully in the ministry of reconciliation.
The text today is about identity. Paul says that through Christ we will get our identity as we are letters from Christ. The word itself is not used, but other words like confidence and competence bring you close to thinking about identity.
In order to understand what Paul is talking about one could take the example of transfer of membership within our church. If I am right the supposed procedure is to bring a letter from the previous congregation to the new one. The local pastor is asked to endorse this person as a good standing member and as somebody that could be recommended in a new congregation. It may even be that this member has had a particular role or capacity and that could then be mentioned in the letter.
But Paul himself, while he still was Saul, had carried such a letter with him on the way to
Now, all that he can say about the Corinthians is that they themselves are letters of Christ. The image of being a letter is not difficult to understand and it has been used by others (Plato). What has to be transferred is not just written letters but rather a life. So this is what Jesus had done. “He had written his message on the Corinthians, through his servant Paul, not with fading ink but with the Spirit, not on tablets of stone as the law was first written, but on the hearts of men.” (W. Barclay, Corinthians, p. 187).
This image of being letters could be seen both as an inspiration and as a warning. Whether we like it or not, we as Christians are the great advertisers of Christ. We are his face, his arms and his attitude. And when we abdicate this role of being reflections of Christ, we will still be judged as if we were. The greatest obstacle to human beings accepting Christ certainly is Christians who do not reflect Christ but self interest, fear, prejudice, power hunger, greed etc. We all understand this and still it is very revealing.
Paul goes on talking about the written letter as destructive, as something that is of death. Only the Spirit makes alive, and we are called to be such living letters, written on “hearts of flesh” (literal translation). This in fact calls for some explanation. It is not as if the written word was bad, negative or deadly as such. In that case the Word of God, which undoubtedly consists of written letters, would not be of such value.
No, what Paul is talking about is how we as humans are able to move out of our predicament just as humans. He has our salvation in mind. The written letter could here be seen as the law of God. Paul has clearly demonstrated in the Romans and in other places that even if we read and learn and try to practise the law of God we will fail. We will just be reminded of our shortcomings.
There is an image that I fairly recently have come across that I think is just a great truth on the same line. We have the ten commandments (and they are much the same all over the world, you could here talk about a global ethics) and it is not that you and I could change them at our whim, for example saying, if I prefer to commit adultery or theft, I could create my own law and it could work just as well. Well, such home made laws do not stand the test of the times, and soon enough a state of chaos will enter. Why is it like that? It is because there are certain ground rules and principles of life that are there as certain as life is there. The commandments then could be seen as pillars. It is not that you could change these pillars, because you cannot. What happens when you sin is that you hurt yourself against those pillars, yes you may even kill yourself against them.
That is what Paul meant when he said that the written document is a deadly thing. If you do not have the Spirit of God and Christ you are doomed. You will not make it by the written code or letter alone. It is rather that the inviolable pillars of the commandment will throw you up on to the mercy of Christ. That is to allow you to be a letter of Christ, the letter being of the Spirit.
Paul says: you are a letter written by Christ (v 3). How are we to understand this in terms of identity? Are we Christ’s or are we our own? The answer must be if one reads carefully something of a paradox: I am somebody, which I become in Christ.
This paradoxical statement says two things: I am already somebody, in my own right. I have my profile, my looks, my gifts, my strengths and weaknesses. I am somebody and I must affirm that at all costs. I cannot be somebody else, not even Christ, who by the way was a Jew.
Secondly, I am not complete and I have great problems of various kinds, sometimes of a magnitude that I even despair of continuing my life as before. Therefore we have to say, I am somebody, which I become in Christ. That means, only through Christ could I become what I was meant to be, with all my gifts and even shortcomings. Identification with Christ then does not take away anything of my identity but enhances it, cleanses it and completes it.
We sometimes hear theological talk about us being nothing in ourselves, empty and useless and that what we get from Christ is borrowed from him temporarily. This is not a good theology; it in fact could undermine our own self esteem and make it impossible in the end to be those Christ letters which we are called to be.
One could also summarize what just have been said in this way: I am created by God and the person I am is not replaced through meeting Christ but transformed.
There are many ways by which our persons could be undermined and the foundation of a low self esteem could be laid already as a child thanks to parents and other adults. There are also societies that on a large scale have managed to undermine the self confidence of people. If you are told that you are not a full human being, if you are consistently taught that you belong to a group that is inferior, such information will affect you and undermine you. We know all too well that
At the UWC there is a renewed discussion about Black Consciousness and many students and scholars feel that we still have a lot to learn from the founder of this movement, Steve Biko. He said for example that the black person (man) was an empty shell. He was nothingness because of the system. The first thing that had to happen would be for him or her to realise that this is false that he or she in fact was a creation by God, of infinite value.
His talk about the empty shell reminds us of Paul’s words about being Christ letters. Fine, we could say, I am so and so and I also have a culture that will help me to achieve my dignity and fill my empty shell. This is in part what is happening in
Christ knows that you are not an empty shell and he will suddenly awaken all those sides that are truly yours.
Do not here misunderstand what I am saying. Culture could be absolutely essential and I think that the movement to retrieve some of the Khoi-San culture (and one of my very best friends is deeply involved in this movement) for example is praiseworthy, as this was a culture looked down upon for centuries; it was nothing, it was not more worth than animal’s behaviour. Today we know better and praise God for people who are being filled from having been (regarded as) empty shells.
Still the last word for a Christian could never be culture or any kind of human tradition. The last word rests with Christ. And it is so wonderful to be able to end on this note. In accepting Christ in your life you are also opening the whole world for yourself, perhaps first unknowingly.
To accept Christ is to accept the stranger in your life. Let us start with Christ. He is allowed into your life, but he is still somebody else who now makes you come into your own. If you allow that to happen, you would be open for any other child of God to come into your life, as a principle, otherwise you could not become one with Christ or his letter.
Such acceptance will strengthen your identity immensely and you will gain the best part of two worlds: you will remain the one you always were and yet a renewal is taking place, even a transformation; you are now a letter from Christ to the world.
Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning is now and will be for ever. Amen
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