All Things

Christ redeems all creation. He makes all things new. He reconciles all things to God. That language seems like it includes the very inanimate matter of creation.

Let's unpack that. Christ died at a particular place and time, and rose at another place and time. Relative to those events, at what point does, say, the Andromeda Galaxy become reconciled to God? That galaxy is so far away that it takes 2.5 million years for any information at all to travel there. How does God's reconciliation propagate throughout creation?

Does reconciliation propagate through organized information? I tend to think not, because that would mean we are the limiting factor on the work of God. God invites us to participate in his work, but he does not need us. The Andromeda Galaxy isn't unreconciled to God until some human gets there to fix it. Similarly, we would have to assume that the redemption doesn't propagate through matter at all, because I seriously doubt any matter from here ever makes it to Andromeda.

Does the redemption then propagate outward from first-century Judea at the speed of light? Well, no, because as the expansion of the universe accelerates, a (possibly infinite) portion of creation will have no contact with it. That's not really acceptable, unless we understand "all things" to mean "all observable things." Could the redemption propagate faster than light? God can do what God wants, but the problem then is that FTL travel is also time travel depending on your frame of reference. That would mean that from some frames of reference, the redemption arrived before the crucifixion!

Or perhaps God's reconciliation does not propagate at all, but instead affects all creation simultaneously, at the time of the death and resurrection of Christ? But we have a problem here, since the universe has no master clock; due to relativity, the way the universe actually is built and behaves, it's not even meaningful for an event to be simultaneous in all frames of reference.

When the reasoning process is this absurd, I am clearly asking the wrong question.

Reconciliation of creation to God isn't the causal result of any single event; instead, the crucifixion is a necessary aspect of the redemption of creation. If creation was not redeemed, the crucifixion could not and would not have been part of it; all possible reconciled creations include the crucifixion.

We have been reconciled. We are being reconciled. We hope to be reconciled. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. Amen.