2 Corinthians 5:16-21

From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we no longer know him in that way. 

So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; look, new things have come into being! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. 

So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ: be reconciled to God. For our sake God made the one who knew no sin to be sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Sermon Text

 Last week we looked at the way that our images of Christ impact our Christian walk. If we engage with Christ as anything but who Christ truly is, the perfect incarnate Word of God, then we miss out on imitating that same God in our walk to perfection. There is another way in which Christ acts as an image, however, or more properly how Christ acted as an image. Christ, despite living without sin and living perfectly from eternity to eternity, became the perfect image of human sin, so that humanity might aspire to the perfection of his divinity.

That language is too technical though. We could dig into hamartiology (the study of Sin,) for years and not come any closer to the central and simple truth of what Christ was able to accomplish for us in his death. The work of the Cross, a perfect sacrifice offered once and for all, was the moment that redemption and resurrection became possible for humanity. Yet, what does it mean for Christ to have “become sin?” Furthermore, what about dying as this image of Sin was means that we are saved by Christ’s work in the first place?

The general way we talk about Christ’s saving work is with the moniker of “atonement theory.” We use this large net because it covers all the different ways that people talk about Christ’s work to save us. You see, when you have something as major as Christ’s death on the cross and subsequent resurrection, no one way of talking about it is enough. Most people have a singular explanation that they focus on when they talk about how Christ saved us but each has a little bit of the picture within their vision of Christ’s work. Imagine you have a bunch of clear projection papers, each with a few lines drawn on them. Each one you stack on top of the other will give you a little bit more of the picture, and all of them will complete the picture. In the same way, we talk about God by stacking images of God on top of each other until we can see who God is, and more often who God is not.

Christ’s becoming sin on our behalf is ultimately a completion of his work in the incarnation. By becoming human, Christ experienced everything we as humans experience: sickness, tiredness, temptation, hunger, thirst, pain, and even death. The only thing Christ never experienced was sin itself. In becoming fully human, Christ took on all of humanity. In going to the Cross, he took on the penalty for all of humanity’s sin, and in his death therefore removed the punishment from the rest of humanity. Though flesh may die still, the soul could be freed and the resurrection that Christ himself would take part in was promised to all others who had faith in that same resurrection.

The thing that most people disagree with is in what way Christ “became sin.” Some put forward that Jesus, like the scapegoat of ages past, literally became filled with the sins of all humanity as he hung on the cross. Therefore, all sin died with him on the cross. Catholic doctrine asserts that the agony he felt in Gethsemane came from him looking ahead and seeing all of human sin, and still choosing to take it upon himself. Others see it simply as Christ, though innocent, died for our sins and therefore “became sin,” in the sense of taking punishment on despite having none of the spiritual taint of Sin within him. The difference in those two ideas is subtle, but it does lead to some interesting nuance in how we talk about Christ’s death.

I remember when I was at a funeral once, there was a plant in the crowd. Very strange to orchestrate a funeral like that, but so it goes. The minister leading the service “noticed,” another minister in the crowd and asked him to pray to close out the service. “Lord Jesus, we thank you for your mercy and for you substitutionary death upon the cross…” He began. Substitutionary here means that Jesus died in our place, took on the punishment meant for us, and so satisfied God’s wrath in his death. This idea is reflected in Hebrews where it speaks of God seeing Christ’s righteousness and not our sin, when God looks upon us.

The problem with substitutionary language is that, while it is true Christ died in our place, if we leave it only at that – where do we stand now? Between the life material and the life eternal, there has to be something more to what Christ did for us. Did Jesus die to free us from the consequence of Sin, or did Christ die to fully reconcile us to God? If Christ is just a divine distraction from God’s wrath, then the crucifixion was a singular act with a singular outcome. That, to me, does not reflect the wider narrative of scripture in what Christ did for us.

Christ did indeed die and take on the full consequences of sin, but as our scripture says in dying he became “Sin,” not merely the consequences of that sin but the idea in itself. In dying, Christ destroyed Sin in its entirety, leaving a shell of what the evil had been before. As John Wesley put it, when Christ saves he does not save by “mere deliverance from Hell,” but by completely freeing us from the weight of Sin and from its hold in our life.

A fully regenerated Christian, washed in the water and the blood, filled with the Spirit, has nothing in them that means that must sin. Ignorance or thoughtlessness is the only cause that must necessarily result in sin in our life. All other sin is a consequence directly of our habits that engrain sin within us, our conscious choice to sin despite knowing better, or our brokenness misleading us into acting in sin rather than facing our trouble directly. We who are saved do not sin out of powerlessness, we sin because we have allowed sin to be our nature even though sin was destroyed once and for all on a hill far away.

In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, he paints the image better than most. In the poem, after Satan decides to go to Eden and tempt Adam and Eve, he approaches the gates of Hell which are guarded by Sin and her horrible child Death. The gates of Hell are sealed, not from the outside, but the inside. Satan, Milton puts forward, chose his imprisonment, and in the same way we decide again and again to submit to sin rather than be free in Christ.

Christ lived a life of perfection, not only as a highlight of God’s goodness, but to demonstrate to us what was possible once we were freed from Sin. Christ was fully human, inclined to the same temptations and weaknesses we are, and yet Christ overcame sin in maintain his perfection of will as a human and as God. When Christ took on sin – literally or consequentially – he took on every aspect of it. He broke the chains that had held us forever in bondage, and offered us the key again and again through his grace. In descending to the dead, Christ suffered the fate of all who taste sin, proclaiming the Gospel even in the grave. In rising again, Christ was forever victorious over death – the ultimate consequence of sin.

The Gates of Hell were forever taken off their hinges. The vice grip that death had on humanity was shattered and the beast reduced to a whelpling. Satan was crushed and all his minions reduced to shades in a kingdom of shades. Christ, the Icon of Sin in death, is now the eternal emblem of God’s grace, power, and mercy – perfected humanity forever wed to the perfection of Godhead. All things began, and found their natural end and purpose through Christ’s journey to the cross and from the grave.

Whether we talk in terms of substitution or moral exemplars, in Christus Victor or ransom, Christ died for our sins. Christ in that death took on Sin in a substantial and real way. That taking on of our sin allowed for us to be freed from all of Sin’s power in our life. We can, in other words, be perfected, and Christ gladly will lead us toward that perfection if we willingly submit to the work Christ sets before us. Having been redeemed, justified, saved through Christ’s work on the cross – Christ now offers us the Spirit and the Church, and asks that we live so that we may know true abundance. Abundance of love, or mercy, of holiness… Life is born out of death, because Christ changed everything… Praise God, praise God, praise God! – Amen.