The Lengths God Has Gone To--February 18, 2026

The Lengths God Has Gone To--February 18, 2026

"We entreat you on behalf of Christ: be reconciled to God. For our sake God made the one who knew no sin to be sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." (2 Corinthians 5:20b-21)

A good way of knowing if you are getting close to the real mystery of Christ is when our words start to fall apart.  If we find that, as we try to describe what God has done for us, the news is so good that it boggles our minds or breaks apart the constraints of language, we might well be on the right track.  Any god whose plans or ways you can exhaustively describe in human terms has got to be a fiction of our own creation.  But a God who does impossibly good things and whose love explodes our old categories?  That sounds like the real McCoy.

And that, dear ones, is exactly what we have been given in the story of Jesus, especially as these verses from what we call Second Corinthians put it.  These words are traditionally spoken on Ash Wednesday, as we begin the season of Lent, which calls us back to the cross of Jesus and the road that leads to it.  And for as many years as I have heard these words over the course of my four-and-a-half decades of life so far, I find they still render me speechless and awestruck for what they say about the lengths God has gone to for us.

At the heart of these few sentences is an idea that pushes language to the breaking point.  The apostle Paul says that "God made the one who knew no sin to be sin" for our sake.  The "one" being referenced, of course, is Christ.  And the claim here is that at the cross, the Sinless One took on our sin wholly and completely--so as to "be sin" himself. And like I say, it is at this point that even the most precise and well-chosen of our words seem to fall apart.  What would it mean that the Sinless One became sin?  How could a God who is entirely holy and without sin absorb it into God's own being?  That sounds, to borrow a scientific analogy, like matter touching antimatter--which should make them both annihilate each other--and somehow instead producing a perfectly baked apple pie.  It sounds like God, the Immortal Source of Life, being swallowed up by death in order to break it from the inside out (which, of course, is precisely another thing we say about Jesus at the cross).  It's like saying that the Perfectly Healthy One took the disease out of our bodies and infected himself with it in order to destroy the sickness and make us whole.  It's like God in Christ chooses to become godforsaken--cut off from God--in order to restore us to relationship with God (and, yes, once again, that is also a thing the New Testament says about Jesus at the cross).  

Do you notice how each of those descriptions sounds impossible? Do you hear the tension of the paradox?   How could a God who is holy and perfect be willing, not merely to be "near" to sinners, but to absorb ALL of our sin into God's own being?  How could a God who is deathless then die on a cross?  How could the One who is filled with the very fullness of God then choose to empty himself all the way to death?  These notions stretch our minds beyond our ability to contain, or even grasp, them.  And yet, this is precisely what the apostle wants us to understand about what God has done in Jesus.  The Sinless Savior becomes sin for our sake, "so that we might become the righteousness of God."  These are the lengths God has gone to, because in Jesus, we get nothing less than the very fullness of God.

This is where we start the journey of Lent: with what God has done for us, the depth of God's relentless love for us, and the unfailing persistence of God's grace to us.  Let's not get the cart before the horse by focusing on whether we are supposed to give up chocolate or say extra prayers.  The practices of discipleship always have to come as the second step in the dance that began already with grace pulling us out onto the dance floor, as the response to the lengths God has already gone for us.

So today, for whatever things you may choose to do in this season to be drawn more deeply and closely to Jesus, let's start where the Scripture begin: with the news that God has already gone to infinite lengths and impossible efforts to reconcile with us, and that is an already accomplished fact.  Jesus has already absorbed the poison of sin from his side and given us his gift of life, so that is not ours to try to achieve, earn, or win.