Suffocating Christ: the Destructive Power of our Sins
Posted on 01 March 2010
Table of contents for On Death: Lenten Reflections
- Thinking Death Christianly
- Suffering with Christ for Sin(ners)
- Dying Christianly?
- Death is at Work in Us: A Lenten Sermon from 2 Cor 4.7-12
- Imaging Death
- Suffocating Christ: the Destructive Power of our Sins
- Loving Our Children by Dying Well
While speaking of how Christ’s death works in us, I used ‘death’ as a name for the event of sanctification, the process of being Christified. I want to speak now of the death of Christ in an entirely different sense. In the Pentecostal tradition the death of which I’m speaking now is known as ‘backsliding’, losing faith. Origen speaks of it in a homily on Judges:
God, Omnipotent Ruler, ensure that it should never happen to us that Jesus Christ, after he is risen from the dead, again should die in us. For what does it profit me if in others he should live on account of virtue and in me should die on account of the weakness of sin? What does it profit me if he does not live in me and in my heart and if he does not complete the works of life in me? What does it profit me if on account of good desires, good faith, and good works by another he is nourished and restored, but because of evil thoughts and impious desires by me and in my heart, because of wicked desires, he is, in a certain manner, suffocated and killed?
Origen is right, I believe. My sins do suffocate Christ, aborting his life (and his death) in me. How do my sins do this? By destroying character. Every act of bad faith works, cancer-like, to unmake me, to efface the image of God in which I participate and so find myself as human.
This is not mysterious. Sins accomplish their horrendous effects on us by making it less and less possible for us to love and to be loved, making it less and less possible for us to thrill at every occasion of the good, to stand in awe of the beautiful, to rejoice in the truth (1 Cor 13). So long as we are sin-sick, we can’t speak or listen rightly, we can’t touch or be touched rightly, we can’t judge ourselves or receive others’ judgment with anything like clarity and calmness of spirit. And every time we act from bad faith (or, if you prefer, faithlessly), the damage is deepened.
In this season, I am praying that God will help me to recognize the cancers at work in me.
1 Response to Suffocating Christ: the Destructive Power of our Sins
You never cease to amaze me Green…nicely put.