I’m not sure if this is from a recent Mass Reading that I forgot to write about on the relevant day (it’s been sitting in draft mode for a while) or just something I picked up in a blog or Bible perusal, but ponder this from St. Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians:
2 Corinthians 5:16-18
…from now on we regard no one according to the flesh; even if we once knew Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know him so no longer.
So whoever is in Christ is a new creation: the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come.
And all this is from God, who has reconciled us to himself through Christ and given us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting their trespasses against them and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.
So we are ambassadors for Christ, as if God were appealing through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.
We are “in Christ” when we live out our Christian vocation. Being Christian isn’t something you do for an hour on Sundays or when its convenient or inoffensive. It isn’t something you turn on or off. No one is perfect in the ideal, but you try anyway.
When you are “in Christ”, you’ve cast off your old self, the self that belonged to the World and its shifting and changing “anything goes” corruptible moral and social values. By being Christian and living according to Jesus’s teachings, you are a new creation, a new person, one who has been reconciled to God through Jesus by His sacrifice on the Cross.
We have been reconciled for our sins, no matter how scarlet, no matter how often committed. No matter what the transgression was, reconcile yourself to God, and be “in Christ.” Confess your sins to a priest and be made new.
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