"For our sake [God] made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." (2 Corinthians 5:21)
At the beating heart of the Christian faith is this scandalous claim: in Christ, the holy God fully absorbed our unholiness into God's own being. In Jesus, the One who is perfectly just and righteous took on all of our injustice and unrighteousness. Or as these words we hear each year on Ash Wednesday put it, "for our sake, God made him [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin."
Yeah, you might need to read that again to make sure you got it right: Jesus, the Sinless One, "became sin" for us. That sounds impossible, doesn't it? Like matter colliding with antimatter, or a positive proton suddenly taking on the negative charge of an electron, or the North Pole suddenly pointing south. If "sin" is to some degree "whatever is opposed to God," then it sure sounds like in Christ, God took on all that was and is and ever will be anti-God, and swallowed it up in Jesus and nailed it to the cross. It sounds like the Source of All Holiness crossing into the territory of all that is unholy, for the sake of bringing us to God.
And yeah, that's essentially what the Apostle Paul is saying here: in Jesus, God has crossed the ultimate barrier, or to borrow the line from Star Trek, "the final frontier." At the cross, the love of God traversed the boundary we thought was uncrossable--God didn't even let all of humanity's sin, injustice, cruelty, and meanness stop God from meeting us in that mess, absorbing it all into Jesus, and neutralizing its power over us. Like drawing poison out of a wound, Christ takes into himself the venom that has been killing us all, even at the cost of becoming toxic himself. This is the love that embraces us from the center of the Gospel: that there is no length God will not go to, no depth God will not descend to, no line God will not cross, in order to bring us back to God.
Theologians, saints, mystics, and poets have all found themselves awestruck at this realization, because no matter how you describe it or what analogy you use to understand it, the Gospel's claim sounds impossibly good. The One who is the Resurrection and the Life crosses into the Valley of the Shadow of Death to bring us through. The Source of All Holiness takes on the whole of our unholiness into himself in Jesus. The God who is perfectly just and righteous absorbs our guilt and wickedness. It's like our human language itself falls apart in the face of this kind of love. Maybe that's how you know you've got the genuine gospel and not some cheap, moralistic knock-off: if it doesn't sound scandalous, it's not the real deal.
This is where we need to begin our Lenten journey this year, especially as our focus in our "Life on the Edge" for this Lent leads us to consider "Love Beyond Boundaries." Because before we get to any talk about giving up chocolate, or being extra nice to people, or recommitting our lives to Jesus, or renewing our discipleship, these forty days are meant to point us first to the impossible and infinite love of God in Christ. This season often gets a bad rap for being just a religious version of Sober January--a time for cutting out the "fun" things and being miserable for forty days, as though self-deprivation impressed God. (It does not.) But really, these forty days are meant to give us the time and space to be recentered in the love of God, since these days turn our focus to the cross, which is the center point of God's boundary-crossing, self-giving, sin-absorbing love. So in these days, we'll be looking especially at how God's love crosses boundaries, transcends limits, and exceeds the capacities of human language and thought. That's what the Christina good news is all about anyway!
So if you have been stuck in the mentality that somehow God's holiness meant that God is squeamish about going near sinners, or that a perfect and righteous deity cannot stand to be in the presence of stinkers like us, here's the actual good news from the actual Scriptures: in Christ, the Sinless One took on all our sin and absorbed it into himself once and for all, like a soldier leaping onto a live grenade in order to absorb the blast with his own body in order to save his comrades. God's holiness doesn't mean that God is allergic to our sin like Superman being weakened by Kryptonite; it means that God was willing to shield us from its deathly effects by bearing it all in Christ. God has swallowed all the iocane powder so we won't drink the poison. God in Christ has become the last horcrux to defeat the Dark Lord with his own wicked wand. God in Christ has crossed over into Mordor carrying the One Ring, bearing its malevolence like a weight around the neck for the sake of saving all of Middle Earth. Or again, maybe the way Paul says it is exactly the way it needs to be said: "For our sake, God made him who knew no sin to be sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God."
There is no boundary God hasn't crossed already to bring us back to God. This is how we are loved. This is what happens at the cross. That's why we are beginning this journey called Lent once again--to be re-centered in the love that goes beyond every boundary for us.
Lord God, let us be recentered in your love, in all of its impossible infinitude.
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