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The Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year C
March 21, 2004
Christ Church, Covington
“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 Cor. 5:21).
Mel Gibson’s movie, “The Passion of the Christ”, is keeping the
crucifixion of Jesus Christ before our eyes this Lent. Nothing radical
about that, since the Book of Common Prayer and our Church tradition have
been doing the same thing for centuries. Gibson’s movie, of course, is
portraying the crucifixion in a way that people can’t ignore as easily,
presenting us with disturbing images that may challenge our religious
faith. The challenge comes from the close juxtaposition of violence,
hatred, and death and the origins of our faith. Jesus Christ is crucified
for our redemption; a “scandal” as Paul calls it (1 Cor. 1:23) that
apparently still has the power to scandalize us by bringing into close
proximity our human sin and our human Savior.
So close are they, in fact, that Paul tells us that God made Jesus to “be
sin”: a most vivid commentary (like Gibson’s movie) on the desperate
reality of the crucifixion. Paul varies this in another place by saying
that Jesus became “a curse” for us (Gal. 3:13) by being hung upon the
cross; words which we might consider a variation on the theme.
The “sin” that Paul refers to here is not an isolated instance of sin, but
sin as a whole, as a system or “lifestyle” as we might say today. The
metaphor that Paul uses, however, is not these gentler ones, but the
hard-edged imperial metaphor borrowed by this Roman citizen from the
political world of his own day. Part of Paul’s vision is that sin
constitutes an empire, a jurisdiction within which human beings find
themselves whether they will it or not. But the empire of sin is not an
earthly empire; this is why Paul does not identify sin’s empire with Rome.
Yet sin has “servants” or “slaves”, according to Paul (Rom. 6:16-18); he
describes this reality as “a body of sin” (Rom. 6:6) or “this body of
death” (Rom. 7:24). Sin is a “body politic”, with worldwide ambition;
there is even “a law of sin and of death” (Rom. 8:2). Sin has all the
appurtenances of sovereignty, with law, order and constituency.
But unlike earthly empires, its borders are flexible and subtle, running
right through individuals, marking out territory within each of us. Do you
know what that feels like? Have you experienced the burden of this
experiential knowledge? In this realm we’re all implicated; we’re holding
the devil’s passport even though we do not wish it.
When Paul claims that God made Jesus to be sin, he’s telling the story of
our salvation. God’s method is to subvert sin’s order, it’s commonwealth,
by using its own tools against it. The crucifixion takes suffering
(suffering that’s good for nothing) and turns it into patience (a word
that in its origin, of course, means “suffering”); by his cross, Jesus
takes humiliation and turns it into humility, dispelling our quaint idea
that humility is a harmless virtue that costs nothing. The cross shows us
the real scope of humility.
Jesus uses sin’s own weapons against it. He died to destroy the imperial
pretensions of sin, to smash its commonwealth and to deprive it of its
constituency (that’s us). New passports have been issued, and we are
becoming servants of another Master, citizens with a new identity. Like
the younger son in our Gospel today, we’ve traveled to a foreign country
where we are miserable. Now he “comes to himself” (Lk. 15:17) and gets a
new passport that returns him home.
As Paul says, “Our commonwealth is in heaven”(Phil. 3:20), and it’s for
there we are bound. “When are we receiving our new passports?”, Charlotte
Fanz asked me after the 7:30 service. When we come to this altar rail to
receive the Eucharist we are receiving our new identity papers, our new
passports, purchased by the blood of Christ.
What we see on the cross is Jesus brought into juxtaposition with sin, the
sin that dominates us and our world. If the sight is not pretty, we should
not wonder. Jesus died for the sins of the world, to create a new world.
Redemption and re-creation are a messy business; empires are neither made
nor un-made without cost. He has borne the sin of the world, and turned it
into something beautiful and good: the action of a righteous man who knew
no sin, and who by his courageous act of self-offering has made us
righteous in him.
The Rev’d John Bauerschmidt is Rector of Christ Church, Covington.
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