Galatians
6:11-18; John 3:13-17
One of the most
dangerous temptations that we can face is to despair, to give up hope that we
and those we love will ever be any different than we are today. Too many of us have abandoned hope for anything
but more of the same. Sometimes we
justify that in the name of a false humility that says nothing more could be
expected of broken, imperfect people like us.
But when we do so, we turn away from the joy of the new creation that
our Lord has brought to the world through His cross.
If
there were ever a couple tempted not to have hope, it would have been Joachim
and Anna, an elderly Jewish couple with no children. In a faith that began with the promise that
Abraham would be the father of a multitude, that was a real problem. But God heard their fervent prayer and gave
them a daughter named Mary, who became the Living Temple of the Lord when she
freely agreed to become the virgin mother of the Son of God. Through this New Eve, the New Adam came into
the world in order to free us from the corruption and fear of death and to bring
life even from the tomb.
Ever
since our first parents became slaves to corruption, every generation had
repeated the cycle of life leading to death. But across the generations of the
Hebrew people, God prepared the way for the coming of the One who would destroy
death by His cross and resurrection. Like
Abraham and Sarah, Joachim and Anna were miraculously blessed by a child in old
age, perhaps in part to make clear that God was mercifully doing something new,
not simply calling them to continue life as they had always known it. With the birth of the Theotokos, the Living Temple
arrives through whom Christ brings us into the “new creation” of His salvation,
the “eighth day” of the heavenly kingdom.
As the Savior said to Nicodemus, He did not come to condemn the
creation, but to save it.
In
today’s epistle text, St. Paul refutes the Judaizers who required Gentile
converts to be circumcised and obey dietary and other laws in order to become
Christians. He saw the danger in those
requirements, for obedience to law does not bring us into the life of God or
make us participants in the new creation of His Kingdom. Following rules simply by our own power may
make us more religious, moral, or civilized, but it does not make us “partakers
of the divine nature.” (2 Pet. 1:4) Our
problems are not so slight that we simply need a few more instructions in order
to be set right. No, we need to be born
anew into eternal life, which is possible only through the One who conquered
death through His cross.
The
Judaizers wanted Gentile converts to obey the law of Moses, in which Nicodemus
was an expert as a Pharisee. But Christ
made clear His superiority to Moses by saying “No one has ascended into heaven
but He who descended from heaven, the Son of man.” Moses received the law and beheld the glory
of God, but only Christ is the God-Man who came down from heaven and ascended
in glory after His resurrection. The Lord referred to a miracle worked through
Moses when the Hebrews were saved from poisonous snake bites by looking at a bronze
serpent that he held up for them to see. (Numbers 21:9) The people were saved
through Moses from physical death on a particular day, but Christ—who will be
lifted up upon the cross at His crucifixion-- will give eternal life to those
who believe in Him.
As
blessed a prophet as Moses was, he did not bring anyone into the fullness of
the new creation. Only Jesus Christ is able
to do that. He is so unique that we
cannot talk about Him simply in terms of ideas, laws, or doctrines. Instead, we speak of profound realities such
as birth, death, creation, and resurrection.
We bring to mind outrageously shocking events such as barren senior
citizens having babies and a holy virgin who becomes pregnant with the Son of
God in her womb. We see the One who
spoke the universe into existence born in the humility of a barn with a manger
for His crib. We see Him rejected,
despised, and killed as He offers Himself in free obedience on the cross. “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the
sin of the world.” (John 1:29) And then
we see the strangest thing of all when He rises in glory after three days in
the tomb, bursting the bonds of Hades and defeating even death itself. That is what a new creation looks like, and
it is anything but life as usual.
As
hard as it is to believe, the Savior enables us to participate in the new life
of the heavenly kingdom even as we live and breathe in this world. To be in Him is to be set free from the fear
of death, from slavery to sin, and from domination by our disordered desires,
including the obsession with making ourselves worthy by our own accomplishments. Unfortunately, many of us remain addicts to
self-justification, to the impossible task of saving ourselves from shame,
anxiety, and despair by an outward show of respectability or success. Whether it is religion, work, money, physical
appearance, family or anything else, that kind of self-justification is
ultimately the idolatry of worshiping ourselves, of glorying in our own flesh,
as St. Paul said of the Judaizers. He
wrote, “But far be it from me to glory
except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified
to me and I to the world.”
Christ’s cross is the end of all human attempts at
self-justification, including of any form of religion that sees salvation as
just another human achievement. Our
problem is too grave to be solved by an outward show of piety, ethics, or
anything else. The glory to which we are
called is too sublime to be fulfilled even by our best efforts. It is beyond us to conquer death and shine
with divine light simply by trying really hard.
That is a path to worry, failure, and fanaticism, not to the peace, joy,
and holiness of the Lord. Like St. Paul,
we must die to our addiction to self-justification if we are to understand the
infinite love of the God-Man who offered Himself on the cross and endured the
wages of sin in order to conquer death on our behalf and for our
salvation. He died that we might
live. He went into the tomb and Hades in
order to bring us into the new creation, the “eighth day” of His heavenly
kingdom.
We will not secure the meaning and purpose of our
lives by self-reliance or maintaining an impressive outward appearance in any
way. Instead, we must become like
Joachim and Anna in their patient trust in God to bless them. We must become like the Theotokos, their
long-awaited daughter, who welcomed Christ into her life in a unique way as His
Living Temple. We must become like St.
Paul in dying to everything that keeps us from entrusting our lives fully to
the mercy of our crucified and risen Lord.
Following their examples, let us all embrace as fully as possible the
new life that He has brought to the world.
For that is truly what we all need:
a new life; a new birth; and a new creation. Those who worship the false gods of the world
may be able to achieve certain goals, but they will miss the one thing needful
that we cannot give ourselves. As Christ said to Nicodemus, “For God so
loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should
not perish but have eternal life. For
God sent His Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world
might be saved through Him.”
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