SIN-BEARING GOD

THE SIN-BEARING GOD

2 Corinthians 5:21

God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (NIVUK)

Read the verses around this Bible passage from the Internet Bible: in English, and many other languages

This little verse is a gem, shining with all the brightness of heaven and brimming over with love. It is a verse to meditate upon and commit to memory because of the stark truths it presents about the Father and the Son in relation to our evil natures and God's righteousness. It starts and ends with God, describing an awesome sequence of events which were planned by God. They result in God sharing His nature with people, who were once rebellious enemies, but who have been reconciled by the blood of Christ (Colossians 1:22). It starts by affirming that God the Son, who became the incarnate Lord Jesus Christ, had no sin. He was always in intimate relationship with God the Father and God the Spirit from eternity past. And yet the divine plan was for Jesus to 'become sin' because of God's love for us (John 3:16). That does not mean that Jesus became personally sinful or that in any way He rebelled against His Father's will. It means that He became the sin-bearer. God placed upon Him the sin - all the sin of all the people of all the world for all time (John 1:29) - like the scapegoat (Leviticus 16:10). The cross was no accident: it was God's intended way of atoning for our sin (Acts 2:23). The ultimate purpose is that we should wear the righteousness of Christ (Romans 3:21-22). Just as our sin was imputed (attributed) to Christ, so His righteousness is now imputed to us. His death, bearing our sin, was because He loves us (1 John 4:10). Likewise, His righteousness replaces our unrighteousness. The two are linked, "He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness" (2 Peter 2:24). As unrighteousness is the uniform of the world's rebellion against God, so His righteousness is the uniform of heaven. We must take off unrighteousness and delight in wearing His righteous nature (Ephesians 4:22-24). That is why Christ died for us – not just to relieve us of a guilty verdict in the court of heaven, but for us to be like Him and work with Him. Like the easily-distracted Corinthian church, we can also lose focus. We can forget why we have been saved, and how much it cost the sinless Son of God to bear our sin - He was cut off from Father God for our sake (Matthew 27:46). And yet we can become so preoccupied with our own concerns or hurts that we want to grab the comfort of the cross without accepting its challenge (Matthew 16:24) – to reject our sinful nature and to accept His work in our lives until we gladly wear His righteousness. This is essential, practical discipleship rooted in our gratitude for His love to us.

Loving God. Thank You for loading all the sin of the world, including my sin, onto Jesus as He went to the cross for me. I repent of forgetting what it cost You, and of frustrating Your purpose of giving me Your righteous nature to wear. Please forgive me and give me a fresh insight into Your love for me, deepening my gratitude to You and stirring me to want to put off unrighteousness and choose to wear Your righteousness. In Jesus' Name. Amen.

MARIAN DOCTRINE - POPE BENEDICT

Pope Benedict on the Church's Marian Doctrine

Friday October 15, 2010

On Monday, October 11, 2010, at the opening session of the Seventh General Congregation of the Special Assembly for the Middle East of the Synod of Bishops, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a rare unscripted homily that may well be seen by future generations as one of the defining moments of his pontificate. In just under 2,200 words, the Holy Father demonstrated the depth of his theological understanding, explaining in simple terms the Church's Marian doctrine, Her understanding of the historical centrality of the Incarnation, the role of the Church throughout history, the false gods of the past and the present who stand in the way of the Church as She attempts to fulfill her mission, and the source of the Church's strength that will ultimately lead to Her triumph.

The homily is so rich that I intend to examine it in parts over the next few days. We'll begin, as Pope Benedict did, with his exposition of the Church's Marian doctrine.

October 11 was, in the traditional calendar, the feast of the Divine Maternity of Mary, and Pope Benedict noted that, when Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council on this day in 1962, he "wanted to entrust the entire council to the motherly hands, to the motherly heart of the Virgin Mary." The feast was introduced by Pope Pius XI to commemorate the declaration, at the Council of Ephesus (431), that the term Theotokos—Mother of God—was properly applied to the Virgin Mary. In this declaration, "the Council of Ephesus had summarized the entire doctrine on Christ, on Mary, the entire doctrine of the redemption."

God became man, through the humble and loving action of the Virgin Mary in accepting God's will. In allowing God to become incarnate in her, the Mother of God was "drawn by the Lord into himself, and so all of us with her."

But Mary's role in the divine plan of salvation did not end with the birth of Christ. As Pope Benedict notes, at the end of the Second Vatican Council, "Pope Paul VI acknowledged the Virgin Mary with the title 'Mater Ecclesiae'" (Mother of the Church):

Because Christ was not born as an individual among others. He was born to create a body for himself: he was born - as John says in chapter 12 of his Gospel - to draw all things to him and in him. He was born - as the letters to the Colossians and to the Ephesians say - to recapitulate all the world, he was born as the first-born of many brothers, he was born to reunite the cosmos in himself, such that he is the head of a great body. Where Christ is born, there begins the movement of recapitulation, the moment of the calling, of the construction of his body, of the holy Church. The Mother of "Theós," the Mother of God, is Mother of the Church, because she is Mother of the one who came to reunite all in his risen body.

We can see how the two titles, Theotokos and Mater Ecclesiae, are really one and the same, the Holy Father says, by examining the "parallelism between the first chapter of [Saint Luke's] Gospel and the first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, which repeat the same mystery on two levels." In Luke 1, Mary accepts the will of God at the Annunciation, and Christ is conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit. In Acts 1, Mary is in the Upper Room with the disciples at Pentecost, "imploring the cloud of the Holy Spirit": And so from the believing Church, with Mary at the center, is born the Church, the body of Christ. This twofold birth is the one birth of the Christus totus, of the Christ who embraces the world and us all.