Word Had Not Reached Them

The Armistice that ended the First World War was signed a little after five in the morning on 11 November 1918, in a railway carriage parked on a siding in the Forest of Compiègne. It did not take effect until eleven o'clock. In the hours between the signature and the silence, men went on attacking and men went on dying — some 2,738 of them killed in action that day — on ground where the war was, as a matter of legal fact, already over.¹ Nothing they did that morning made the peace, and nothing they did unmade it. What was missing along that front was not the peace. It was word of the peace.

Paul's letter puts the same two things in the same order. First the fact: "All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation" (2 Corinthians 5:18). The quarrel was not settled at a table where we had a seat. "In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them" (2 Corinthians 5:19). In the ordinary run of things the guilty party sues for terms; here the one who was wronged crosses the room. The Greek word underneath it all, katallagē, is a commercial word for an exchange that ends a quarrel — enmity traded away, favour handed over.

The peace cost something to reach. "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Corinthians 5:21). That is why Paul can speak of peace with God as a thing standing rather than a thing under negotiation, and why, writing to the Romans, he can say that the white flag is not ours; God raised it, at his own cost, while we were still enemies (Romans 5:10).

Only then does our own sentence arrive, and it arrives on a hinge: "Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us" (2 Corinthians 5:20). An ambassador is an envoy — someone who carries terms he did not draft and has no authority to revise. That is the dignity and the limit in one breath. We are not asked to arrange this peace, or improve it, or soften it into something easier to hear, or hold a clause back as leverage. The work was finished before the errand was handed out.

Notice, too, what God is said to be doing through the people he sends. Not issuing a summons. Making an appeal — "we implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God" (2 Corinthians 5:20). Having paid for the peace himself, he then stoops to ask. Which means the carrying of this word is not a way of keeping our own standing secure; our standing was settled at the cross. It is the gladness of people who were enemies last week and are messengers this morning.

Somewhere this morning there are people still fighting a war that ended at a cross — defending their ground, keeping the score, braced for a wrath that has already fallen elsewhere. The peace is not ours to make; we could not have made it. It is only ours to carry, and we carry it as what it is: not advice about how the fighting might be stopped, but news that it has been. Word has reached us. Let us go and be the reason it reaches someone else.