Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday

February 14, 2024

Text: 2 Cor. 5:20b-6:10

            Now is the favorable time.  Now is the day of salvation.  The opportunity is now, not later.  This is the time of grace.  The Apostle implores you.  He begs you.  And as an ambassador for Christ, he is speaking on the Lord’s behalf.  It is, in fact, Christ who implores you.  It is Christ who begs.  Repent now.  Believe now.  Be reconciled to God in Christ now.  For, if you are waiting for a more opportune time, be warned.  That time may never come.  The Lord Jesus stands before you now with His full and free forgiveness, life, and salvation.  This is it.  Receive it, repent of your sins, and rejoice.

            In the Greek New Testament, there are two words for time, chronos and kairos.  Chronos is sequential time.  We get the word chronology from chronos.  “It is now 7 pm.”  That is chronos.  “The trip will take two hours.”  That is chronos.  Chronos is the ticking of the clock.  It is full of all the busy-ness of life, the joys and the sorrows, the pain and the pleasure, the labors and the distractions.  And as we know all-too-well, chronos is relentless.  The clock never stops.  And before we know it, time has passed us by. 

            But that is not the word Paul uses in our text when, preaching on a passage from the Prophet Isaiah, he says now is the favorable time (2 Cor. 6:2; Cf. Is. 49:8).  This is the other word for time: kairos.  And kairos refers, not to the sequential passing of each moment, but to the appointed time, the right and proper time, the time of determination, God’s time. 

            This is the time we’ve heard about so often from Jesus over the past few weeks: “The time [καιρὸς] is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15; ESV).  This is the time appointed for our Lord’s self-giving: “The Teacher says, My time [καιρός] is at hand. I will keep the Passover at your house with my disciples” (Matt. 26:18).  That time is the time of the cross.  And it is the eschatological (the End Times) time: “the time [καιρὸς] is near” says the angel to John in the Book of Revelation… the proper time (καιρὸς), St. Paul says to Timothy, at which our Lord Jesus Christ will appear (1 Tim. 6:14-15) to judge the living and the dead.

            The Isaiah passage St. Paul recites in speaking of this favorable time in our text, is actually a reference to the Year of Jubilee.  What happened during the Year of Jubilee in the Old Testament?  It was a year of forgiveness.  It was a year of release.  Every fiftieth year, appropriately beginning on the Day of Atonement, at the blowing of a trumpet, everyone forgave everyone else their debts, slaves were freed, property was restored.  It was a great national reconciliation.  Flowing from the sacrifice of atonement by which God released His people from their sins, thus reconciling them to Himself; the people now released one another, thus reconciling themselves, one to another. 

            Well, if that is what happens in Israel as a result of sacrificing a goat, beloved, what must happen now that the Lamb of God has taken away our sin, and the sin of the whole world?  Full reconciliation.  Comprehensive release.  Jubilee!  Now is the time for that… here and now, among us.

            This time is a gift from God.  He injects it, this kairos, into our chronos, by the preaching of His Gospel.  When you hear it (the Gospel), grasp it, believe it, live in it joyfully.  For you are released.  And you are reconciled.  To God in Christ.  And so, now, to one another.  Releasing each other.  Being “kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you” (Eph. 4:32).

            Now, in order to inject His kairos into our chronos… that the Gospel thus be proclaimed to us… God has given us Apostles and pastors.  He has given the Office of the Holy Ministry.  I don’t know why the Epistle appointed for Ash Wednesday begins with part b of 2 Cor. 5:20.  Part a goes like this: “Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us,” and then part b where we pick up, “We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.”  The “we” of whom Paul is speaking, the “ambassadors,” are St. Paul himself, and his fellow ministers… in this case, particularly Timothy, who is writing the letter with him.  The Apostle and the Pastor.  As ambassadors for Christ, they speak for Christ.  What does an ambassador do?  He speaks for the government he represents.  When an ambassador speaks in his ambassadorial office, his word is the word his sovereign.  And oftentimes that word means the difference between war and peace. 

            What word from Christ do His ambassadors speak to you?  You have sinned.  You have initiated hostilities with God and His Kingdom.  You have separated yourself from Him.  You have rejected His rule.  You have sought to take possession of God’s Kingdom for yourself.  And so He should rightly obliterate you.

            But He doesn’t.  Instead, He sues for peace.  And what are the terms?  Your transgressions, your rebellion against your Lord, cannot simply be swept under the rug or ignored.  No.  Someone must die.  You are the sinner, so it should be you.  God is righteous.  He is righteousness itself.  So, it should not be Him.  But it will be Him.  It will be Jesus, the eternal and beloved Son of the Father.  Jesus, God’s Son, born into our flesh.  Jesus, who has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.  Jesus, who was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities, who suffered our chastisement that we may have peace with God, that by His wounds, we be healed (Is. 53:4-5).  It is an incomprehensible mystery.  God “made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cord. 5:21).  That is our justification.  And in being thus justified, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ (Rom. 5:1). 

            In preaching that, the Apostle Paul, and Pastor Timothy, and all Christian pastors, work together with God, appealing to you not to receive the grace of God in vain (6:1).  That is, hear it, receive it, believe it, and it is yours.  This is the kairos, this preaching.  Let it invade your chronos.  Let it invade your whole life and being, your body, your soul.  Let it captivate your every relationship, with God and with one another, and with the world.  It will even transfigure your sufferings.  Just ask St. Paul.  You heard his list of all the things he endured on account of the Gospel.  He did it as a faithful servant of God, one who follows Jesus on the way of the cross, joining his suffering to that of his Savior, in sacrifice, not just for the Corinthians, but also for our sake, that the Gospel be preached to us (as it is tonight), that we receive it, believe it, and so be reconciled to God.  This is the Jubilee.  Now is the favorable time.                            

            And so, the ashen cross.  Hope rising from the char.  Redemption.  Peace.  New life emerging from the rubble.  Dust you are, and to dust you shall return, but the cross…  Resurrection springs from cross and tomb.  The Crucified One is risen from the dead.  God takes the destruction wrought by your sin, and wields it for your life and salvation.  This is the moment.  The cross is the sign of Christ’s victory and of our reconciliation.  And tonight… now, in this favorable time… it marks you as His own.  In the Name of the Father, and of the Son X, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.