I concluded my preaching last Sunday with these words: The key thing is this: what makes Christianity happen is gospel joy: it is the antidote to spiritual desolation, and through it we plant the seeds of good intentions in our heart, inward seeds to which God gives the growth. All that lays behind the teaching today from Saint Paul: that if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away, behold the new has come. This teaching expresses Gospel joy, for by being in Christ through our baptism, and through keeping of the baptismal life through liturgy and works of sacrificial love, we are transformed (in Paul’s phrase, a new creation). The power of Christ is to transform us into the stature of Christ’s image in which we are created. The mark of a Christian life, a life following Christ through the Holy Spirit, is being transformed, changed, remade. In the words of the Church Father S. Irenaeus of Lyon, Jesus Christ, in His infinite love, has become what we are, in order that He may make us entirely what He is. The promise of being made by Christ into entirely what He is gives us an inexhaustibly joyful heart.
Saint Paul furthermore teaches us today that the love of Christ controls us. And he says why: because we are convinced that one has died for all. In teaching us this today, Saint Paul gives us more food for our reflection on what it means to celebrate the joy of the Gospel. The love of Christ controls us—or, put another way, Christ’s love is our control. Christ’s love is our norm—is the norm. Christ’s love is the measuring stick by which we measure all of reality, and all of who are are, and how we conduct ourselves in the world. Christ’s love is the pattern of being, the model of existence. The love of Christ—Christ’s love, His outpouring of Himself, His own Sacrifice—controls us.
And His love controls us because of our confession that Christ has died for all. It is not only that we are convinced that Christ died; we are even more convinced that Christ died for all. He gave Himself up for all, for the sins of all, giving Himself up for all persons, on behalf of all persons. On the Cross Jesus held all the sins of humanity in His most holy Heart.
Sin means separation between us and God. By taking on Himself all our sins, He took upon Himself all separation that is between us and God. On the Cross and through the Cross, through His Passion, Crucifixion, and Death, Jesus held in His most Holy Heart our relationship with God, distorted by sin, and as He offered Himself up to the Father on our behalf, He offered up for us our relationship with God. And because Jesus is the perfect offering for our sins, and not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world, God accepted Christ’s offering on our behalf, His vicarious offering of our relationship with God was accepted by God through Christ; and in accepting the offering of the Son, God took our distorted relationship with Him, transformed it, and gave it back to us, restored, transformed and made permanently holy through Christ. Just as God take the bread offered at the Altar into Himself, transforms it into His Son’s Body and Blood, and gives it back to us transformed and holy, God takes our sinful relationship with Him into Himself through Jesus, and gives it back to us transformed—that we might live no longer for ourselves but for Him who for our sake died and was raised.
When we live with the fact of Christ’s offering of Himself for us—this fact becomes what controls our life; this fact is another cause of a heart joyful in the Gospel. The love of Christ controls us, which is another way of saying that we have in remembrance Christ’s blessed Passion and precious Death; His mighty Resurrection and glorious Ascension. When we live within the fact of Christ’s love for us—an unfathomable love for us—we are truly in Christ, and through Him we are a new creation. Living with and within the great mystery of this all—living with it, recognizing it, reflecting upon it, making it a fundamental part of our daily thoughts: as we allow the love of Christ to control us, through the joy of the Gospel, we become by grace a new creation, because we live and move and have our being in Christ, Whom even wind and sea obey, and Who with the Father and the Holy Ghost is one God, unto the ages of ages. Amen.