"Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" - Romans 7:24-25
"And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him." - Colossians 1:21-22
I was struck
by the connection I saw in the cry of Paul in Romans 7:24-25 for deliverance
from this “body of death”, and the affirmation by Paul in Colossians 1:21-22 that
we are reconciled through Jesus in “his body of flesh by his death”. I was also
encouraged with the apparent link to the incarnation, helped by the writings an
old voice from the 4th century church.
Paul does
not just say “thanks be to God” in Romans 7. He also says “through Jesus Christ
our Lord”. And, from other places in Scripture, we know that he does not just
mean through Jesus as if through a supernatural miracle that mysteriously
delivered us from a sinful body and reconciled us to a holy God. He does not
just mean through an appearing or a presence. He means through a physical human
body and a physical human death. The only way we could be delivered through Jesus,
and reconciled, is if it happened through a human body without the sin
corruption that we have. It couldn’t have happened through the Spirit, even
though the Spirit is without sin. It couldn’t have happened through Jesus
appearing as the Son of God only. And it couldn’t have happened through Jesus as
a man if he shared any part of our sinful nature. It had to have been through
God, in a body of flesh, without sin, through actual physical death. How
amazing was the incarnation of the Son of God, and Him taking on our likeness!
The incarnation (Christmas), is the miracle that made our deliverance possible.
And then the resurrection (Easter), is the miracle that makes our deliverance
actual and eternal.
Athanasius
explains this idea in his classic work “On the Incarnation”. While these words
are translated for the benefit of the “modern reader”, and is according to C.S.
Lewis, “written so deeply on a subject with such classical simplicity,” it is still
a very lofty arrangement of profound sentences. I pray that the depth and even
complexity of these words would stretch your mind and fill your soul, as you
contemplate the simply reality that Jesus had
to come to earth as a human and die as a human to deliver us from our humanness,
which was stained with the corruption of death. Then He rose from the dead to
conquer that death forever! Here is St. Athanasius “On the Incarnation”:
“The Word
perceived that corruption could not be got rid of otherwise than through death;
yet He Himself, as the Word, being immortal and the Father’s Son, was such as
could not die. For this reason, therefore, He assumed a body capable of death,
in order that it, through belonging to the Word Who is above all, might become
in dying a sufficient exchange for all, and itself remaining incorruptible
through His indwelling, might thereafter put an end to corruption for all
others as well, by the grace of the resurrection. It was by surrendering to
death the body which He had taken, as an offering and sacrifice free from every
stain, that He forthwith abolished death for His human brethren by the offering
of the equivalent.”
“For
naturally, since the Word of God was above all, when He offered His own temple
and bodily instrument as a substitute for the life of all, He fulfilled in
death all that was required. Naturally also, through this union of the immortal
Son of God with our human nature, all men were clothed with incorruption in the
promise of the resurrection. For the solidarity of mankind is such that, by
virtue of the Word’s indwelling in a single human body, the corruption which
goes with death has lost its power over all. You know how it is when some great
king enters a large city and dwells in one of its houses; because of his
indwelling in that single house, the whole city is honored, and enemies and
robbers cease to molest it. Even so it is with the King of all; He has come
into our country and dwelt in one body amidst the many, and in consequence the
designs of the enemy against mankind have been foiled, and the corruption of
death, which formerly held them in its power, simply ceased to be. For the
human race would have perished utterly had not the Lord and Savior of all, the
Son of God, come among us to put an end to death.”
- Page 35,
Popular Patristics Series, St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, SVS Press
