If to be human means to
live in right relationship with God – always fearing Him, always
loving Him, always trusting Him -- then by nature each of us is
less than human. Because we don’t do those things. If to be
human means to live in right relationship with other people –
always loving them as we love ourselves – then by nature each of
us is less than human. Because we don’t do that either. Sin, you
could say, has dehumanized us. By ruining our relationship with
God and with other people, sin has made us less than what God
intended us to be. It’s scraped the dignity and splendor off our
humanity and left only the faintest traces of what God had in mind
when He made Adam and Eve.
Sin whittles us down to
a dim shadow and an empty husk. It isolates and segregates us
from God and from one another. It turns our focus inward, on
ourselves, rather than outward, in faith toward God and love
toward our neighbor. It is not good for the man to be
alone, God said of Adam before He made Eve. But sin locks
each of us up alone in a solitary confinement of self-interest,
self-focus, self-worship. What the Old Adam within us wants
becomes supreme, and God and other people are just handy tools to
achieve it.
It’s a travesty for us
created beings to expect God and our neighbors to bow down before
our every desire, to follow our whims, to do things our way. Yet
whenever we sin we’re living as though we thought God was the
creature and we the creator. Whenever we try to bend another
person to our will we’re living as though we thought that person
was a slave and we were the master.
If to be human means to
live in a consistently right relationship with God our Creator,
and with other people as our fellow creatures, then we’ve all been
dehumanized. Every covetous thought, every wrong desire, every
failure to love and trust in God above all things, every harsh
word we say, every sinful deed we do, shows that we’re less than
human because our relationship with our Creator and our fellow
creatures is not what it should be. We’re less than human because
we’re less than righteous.
And whose fault is
that? Is God to blame? Well, our fallen tendency is to blame
God, just as Adam subtly blamed his sin on God when he said,
The woman You put here with me – she gave me some fruit
of the tree and I ate it. When the spotlight of
condemnation falls on us we can sometimes find ourselves saying
God made us this way, that it’s His fault for the hurtful unloving
things we do, that it’s His fault we drink too much, eat too much,
spend too much, fail to live chastely, etc., etc., etc. Anything
to shift the blame away from us.
But by doing this we
condemn ourselves. The fact that we try to blame God for our
misdeeds and get ourselves off the hook that way, is further
evidence of our loss of humanity and loss of relationship with our
Creator. It betrays the lack of trust and lack of submission that
a creature should have before its Creator. The sin that comes so
easily for us imprisons and kills us. It destroys our humanity
and reduces us to hell-fodder worthy of eternal destruction. It
shows that according to our fallen nature we belong to the ruined
old creation under the curse of God’s judgment.
But today’s epistle
reading speaks of a new creation -- the new creation God has made
us to be through His Son Jesus Christ our Lord. The old broken
and fallen creation is marked by sin and self-centeredness and
isolation and death. But the new creation in Christ is the
reverse of all that. Where there was sin, now there’s the
righteousness of Christ. Where there was self-centeredness, now
there’s self-sacrifice epitomized by our Savior’s death on the
Cross. Where there was isolation, now there’s reconciliation to
God and fellowship with our neighbor. Where there was death, now
there’s eternal life in the One who died for the sins of the world
so that those who live should no longer live for themselves
but for Him who died for them and was raised again.
This isn’t imaginary.
The message of the Bible is that it’s for real. Just as our sin
is real and needed a real solution, God’s answer to our sin
problem is the real thing. As real as our Lord Jesus Christ
Himself, true God and true Man, come down from heaven for us men
and for our salvation.
When God becomes man, He
does it for real. It’s no fairy tale. When He names Himself
Emmanuel-- that is God-with-us -- it’s
not just a nice sounding name. It’s a description of who God is
and what He does and how He relates to us as One like us in all
ways yet without sin. In the Incarnation God really is with us –
through thick and thin, for better, for worse. In Jesus Christ we
have a friend that sticketh closer than a brother,
who promises never to leave us, never to forsake us. When God
becomes Man He does it for real. He does it for our
benefit.
The Incarnation of our
Lord Jesus Christ was not an illusion done with smoke and
mirrors. It was flesh and blood reality. How real was it? As
real as a Baby conceived in the womb of His mother and developing
there for nine months just as you and I did. As real as a toddler
falling and skinning His knees in the rocky streets of Nazareth
and getting His first taste of what life in a fallen world was
like. As real as the tears Jesus no doubt shed when His
stepfather Joseph died. As real as the compassion He felt for the
hungry multitudes when He fed them with miraculously multiplied
loaves and fishes, or when He healed their sick, and raised their
dead, or when He preached the Good News of God’s kingdom to them.
As real as His comforting, saving presence with His disciples in
the boat on the stormy Sea of Galilee. As real as the way Jesus
carried our sin, our sorrow, our sickness and mortality when He
was led to the Cross as a lamb to the slaughter and died there
like any one of us.
Don’t think that Jesus’
miraculous conception by the Holy Spirit and His birth of a Virgin
somehow make Him less-human than you and me. That’s not the case
at all. Rather since unlike us Jesus is without sin, it’s more
accurate to say that our sin has made us less-human than Jesus.
He’s the real Man! Our father Adam lost the dignity and splendor
of our humanity when He disobeyed God. But when God became Man in
Jesus Christ the Second Adam, that lost dignity and splendor were
restored. Only in union with Jesus do we now have the promise of
becoming fully human according to God our Creator’s design. Only
through Jesus is the defaced image of God restored within us.
That’s because the
divine judgment and curse that we each deserved fell on Jesus when
He died on the Cross in our place. We are convinced,
Paul writes in today’s epistle, that One died for all
and therefore all died. Christ died to pay the penalty of
our sin, to suffer the condemnation we each deserve. He died in
order to shed the holy Blood that washed our sin away. He died so
that the old fallen creation could die with Him and that a new
creation could take its place.
You and I entered that
new creation through our Baptism into Christ. But not only did we
enter that new creation; we also became a new
creation. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the
old has gone, the new has come! New life is ours through
Jesus Christ! A new status before God is ours – no longer are we
God’s enemies; now, united to Jesus by the grace of God, we are
sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. This is the
reconciliation Jesus accomplished by His death on the Cross. This
is the complete turnaround of our status that our Savior worked
for us by His holy life and His suffering, death and
resurrection. This is the promise of our Baptism, the gift of the
Gospel, the focus of the forgiveness Jesus gives as we eat His
Body and drink His Blood in Holy Communion. Where is the new
creation in Christ to be found? At the font, in the absolution
pronounced upon you as God’s people, in the bread and wine through
which Christ’s body and Blood are placed into your mouth.
And we weren’t the ones
who did all this, who brought this to pass. Jesus did it. And
according to today’s epistle here’s how it all happened:
God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, not counting
their sins against them. . . God made Him who had no sin to be
sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of
God.
Remember how I said that
because Jesus had no sin – that is, because He lived in right
relationship with God and man – He was more human than we are? As
the obedient Son of God, Jesus fulfilled all righteousness for us
by the perfection of His life before God. He showed His love for
us by going to the Cross to suffer the hellish penalty of our
sins. Living and dying for others was the measure of His love,
the measure of His perfect humanity. Jesus loved God. He loved
us. He submitted to His heavenly Father’s will by becoming
unclean and unrighteous with the guilt of our sin. He
became sin for us so that in Him we could become the righteousness
of God. He took all our sin, and gave us all His
righteousness. In His obedience, His love and His sacrifice, we
see what it’s like to be truly human. And He did it all for us,
to make us children of God. To make us human.
So now united to Jesus
by grace, through faith, we are a new creation. The old guilt and
condemnation have passed away for Jesus’ sake! A new life of
righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit is ours. Our
sins are forgiven, because on the cross Christ became sin for us.
We are justified – declared not guilty – because He paid the
penalty of our sin. We are reconciled to God because on the Cross
Jesus was willing to be separated from God. The old has gone, the
new has come! And we are a new creation in Christ, free to love
God and love and serve our neighbor. Free to follow in the
footsteps of our Savior’s life of love and sacrifice for the
well-being of others.
That’s what it means to
be truly human. Not human according to that pale, vaporous shadow
of humanity which our old sinful self was – but human as God
originally intended us to be. Living in trusting relationship with
our Creator. Living a life of loving service to our neighbor.
Knowing we’re forgiven. Knowing we have eternal life. Knowing
that for Jesus’ sake we are God’s children forever.
Only through faith in
Jesus can we live in right relationship with God. Only in Christ
can we begin learning how to truly love our neighbor. Only in
Jesus is our lost humanity restored and the image of God Adam
threw away given back to us. Jesus took our sin and God has
credited to us His perfect righteousness. Thanks be to God, we
are being conformed to the image of Christ. In Christ we are
becoming human once again. Because Jesus took our sin. And He
has given us all of His righteousness.
In Nomine Patris. . .
