The Kingdom Movement

A Literary & Pastoral Study Guide to the Gospel of Matthew

The Inspiration of Matthew,

by Caravaggio

On the King's Errand

Devotional Reflections on Matthew's Gospel

The Incarnation:  The Son of God Takes to Himself Sinful Flesh:  Mt.1:18 – 25

^1:18 Now the birth of Jesus Christ was as follows: when his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit…²⁵ she gave birth to a son; and he called his name Jesus.

         On December 22, 2011, a Brazilian woman named Maria de Nazare gave birth to a baby with two heads.1  She only found out about the complication minutes before delivery, and delivered by c-section.  Surprisingly, the baby was born healthy.  He has two brains and two spines, but one heart, one pair of lungs, liver, and pelvis.  The baby was in good health and started nursing at his mother’s breast…alternating between mouths.  The mother, eerily close in name to Mary of Nazareth, in a tribute to the Christmas season, named her baby both Emanoel and Jesus. 

I’m always stirred and somewhat sad when I see babies who are more clearly affected by the corruption of human nature. In this case, there were two fertilized eggs that somehow fused. Scientifically, we don’t even know exactly how birth complications like this happen. Clearly, we experience genetic corruption of some sort. Biblically, however, we know generally that the physical and spiritual corruption of human nature occurred because our first parents, Adam and Eve, rebelled against God. It’s not that God is punishing particular people, or humanity in general. Rather, putting God – the life source of all creation – at a distance from humanity and creation meant that all life started to go awry. An element of chaos entered into the physical world that was not there before. Human nature itself became corrupted. Physically, some of us manifest it more than others. Spiritually, we all manifest it.

Even Jesus inherited a corrupted human nature.  At his conception, Jesus received from his mother Mary, ‘fallen Adamic humanity…that is, our perverted, corrupt, degenerate, diseased human nature enslaved to sin and subject to death under the condemnation of God.’2  Yes, you read me right:  Jesus didn’t take a sinless, already-purified human nature.  Instead, he took a fallen, sinful human nature.  That is a major point.  By faith and her posture of openness to God, Mary allowed the Son of God to share in her sinful humanity.  Jesus drew from her very being his human nature. 

Now, let me be quick to add that Jesus never sinned in action, thought, or even inward emotion, though in all things he was tempted.  But he did take to himself flesh (sarx, Jn.1:14), which is the corruption in human nature, as when Paul said, ‘I know that no good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh’ (Rom.7:21).  Then, as Jesus grew up, he increased in stature (Lk.2:52).  But the word for ‘increased’ is proekopten, which is the Greek word that means ‘to hammer out with blows.’3  He was reshaping his flesh like a blacksmith reshapes a piece of metal.  Just as metal resists a blacksmith, so Jesus’ flesh resisted him.  Did he struggle?  Yes, his whole life long.  Jesus’ life was a life of struggle to manifest the pure love of the Father.  The letter to the Hebrews refers to the ‘loud cryings and tears’ of Jesus (Heb.5:7).  In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the two episodes that bracket Jesus’ public ministry – the wilderness temptation and the Garden of Gethsemane – show that Jesus’ massive struggle was costly in ways we barely understand; they not only bracket but characterize Jesus’ entire career.  Jesus fought the moral vulnerability to sin.  He resisted the temptation to indulge self-centered emotions.  Most importantly, he put down the desire to rebel against and resist God – a desire that comes from the relational alienation from God that had set into human nature from Adam and Eve.  Jesus forced his flesh to surrender throughout his life, bursting its bonds when he killed the corruption on the Cross and raised his physical body without it in his Resurrection.  He then offers back to us his new, God-purified, God-soaked new humanity, by his Spirit, so we, too, might struggle well, aided by Jesus’ Spirit, against our own sin and selfishness.

Since many people have asked me, ‘Is that ‘new humanity stuff’ a new way of looking at Jesus?’ I want to show here that this is the oldest way of looking at Jesus.  Then, I'll show why that's important.  Turning back the clock to the very first theologians outside the New Testament, we find Irenaeus, Tertullian, and an ancient Christian hymnal called the Odes of Solomon. 

Irenaeus of Lyons was mentored by Polycarp of Smyrna, a disciple of the apostle John.  Irenaeus (130 – 200 AD) became bishop of Lyons in now Southern France.  He was the first writing theologian outside of the New Testament, who wrote at length to confront Gnosticism and the heretical influence it had on Christian teaching.  Refuting the Gnostic view that Jesus was not truly human, Irenaeus said that Jesus must have been truly human.  What did this mean?  Irenaeus held that human nature had the pollution and corruption of sin within itself in this phrase:  ‘man, who had sin in himself, showing that he was liable to death.’  Jesus, then, recaptured human nature for God through his own life, destroying the corruption of sin and death in his own body through his own choices in each phase of his life:

‘Wherefore also He passed through every stage of life, restoring to all communion with God… For it behooved Him who was to destroy sin, and redeem man under the power of death, that He should Himself be made that very same thing which he was, that is, man; who had been drawn by sin into bondage, but was held by death, so that sin should be destroyed by man, and man should go forth from death… But if, not having been made flesh, He did appear as if flesh, His work was not a true one.  But what He did appear, that He also was: God recapitulated in Himself the ancient formation of man, that He might kill sin, deprive death of its power, and vivify man; and therefore His works are true.’ (Against Heresies 3.18.7, cf. 2.12.4, 3.18.1)

Tertullian of Carthage was a scholar and writer from Carthage in Roman North Africa (160 – 220 AD), called the first Latin and Western theologian.  He said the same thing:  Jesus’ uniting of divine nature and fallen human nature is the basis of God’s offer of salvation of human nature to others.  In essence, Jesus’ new humanity is for all humanity.  Tertullian writes about Jesus destroying the birthmark of sin in human flesh:  

‘Moreover it would not suit Christ’s purpose, when bringing to naught the sin of the flesh, not to bring it to naught in that flesh in which was the nature of sin: neither would it be to his glory.  For what would it amount to if it was in a better kind of flesh, of a different (that is, a non-sinful) nature, that he destroyed the birthmark of sin?  ‘In that case,’ you will reply, ‘if it was our flesh Christ clothed himself with, Christ’s flesh was sinful.’  Forebear to tie up tight a conception which admits of unraveling.  By clothing himself with our flesh he made it his own, and by making it his own he made it non-sinful.’  (De Carne Christi, 16.10 – 25) 

The Odes of Solomon are the earliest known Christian book of hymns, psalms or odes.  Many scholars believe the Odes date from before 100 A.D., and not later than the mid 2^nd century.1  The authors were probably Jewish Christians because the originals are in Aramaic.  This collection of 42 odes is called the Odes of Solomon because that is the name used in references to it in other ancient writings; the name probably connects Jesus to ‘Solomon,’ the royal Son of David.  The many parallels with the Gospel of John are striking: their references to ‘the Word’ and ‘living water’; the many references to the Holy Spirit; salvation consists in knowing and loving God; and the saving significance of the incarnation; etc.  Two of the odes are worth mentioning here.  Ode 11 describes salvation in Christ as causing a fundamental heart transformation:

^11:1 My heart was pruned and its flower appeared, then grace sprang up in it,

And my heart produced fruits for the Lord.

² For the Most High circumcised me by His Holy Spirit,

Then He uncovered my inward being towards Him,

And filled me with His love.

³ And His circumcising became my salvation,

And I ran in the Way, in His peace, in the way of truth.

The language of circumcision of the heart follows the usage by Moses, Jeremiah, and Paul regarding heart transformation.  God would circumcise hearts when he renewed His covenant with Israel following the exile.  Moses anticipated this in Dt.30:6, and Jeremiah in Jer.31:31 – 34.  Then Paul in Romans 2:28 – 29 says that circumcision of the heart is ultimately what constitutes the true Israel of God.  Hence this Ode is firmly anchored in biblical language of Israel’s heart-level renewal when people participate by faith in the circumcision of the flesh of Christ (Rom.8:3; Col.2:11), Jesus’ cutting away of sin’s corruption from the originally good human nature God designed.

Even more striking, for the purpose of my argument here, is Ode 15.  Ode 15 is one of the songs which use the startling convention of speaking from the first person as Jesus himself (Odes 8, 10, 15, 17, and 42 do this, and possibly 9 as well).  It says this:

^15:5 The thought of knowledge I have acquired,

And have enjoyed delight fully through Him.

⁶ I repudiated the way of error,

And went towards Him and received salvation from Him abundantly.

⁷ And according to His generosity He gave to me,

And according to His excellent beauty He made me.

⁸ I put on immortality through His name,

And took off corruption by His grace.

⁹ Death has been destroyed before my face,

And Sheol has been vanquished by my word.

¹⁰ And eternal life has arisen in the Lord’s land,

And it has been declared to His faithful ones,

And has been given without limit to all that trust in Him.

Ode 15 appears to speak of Jesus’ earthly life as he repudiated ‘the way of error’ (v.6a) in his struggle against sin in his flesh.  The ‘salvation’ he received ‘from Him [God the Father] abundantly’ might be physical salvation from death.  The contrast between ‘immortality’ and ‘corruption’ in v.8 along with the references to ‘Death’ and ‘Sheol’ in v.9 stress the physical deliverance from death that Jesus experienced.  But it also might be a spiritual-moral salvation from sinful actions as well, which is suggested by the Odist repudiating ‘the way of error’ and enjoying ‘delight through Him.’  And of course the ‘eternal life’ ‘given without limit to all that trust in Him’ (v.10) is not just physical, but spiritual-moral as well.  In any case, in biblical thought, physical death follows spiritual-moral death (e.g. Rom.5:12 – 21).  The former is an expression of the latter, because death is what relational alienation from God, as the source of life for all things, entails. 

Thus, Ode 15 attests to a very early Christian understanding of Jesus’ human nature, and what he accomplished for that human nature:  Jesus’ personal decisions to align his life and human nature (‘I repudiated the way of error’ in v.6) with the Father serves as the basis for his resurrected ‘new humanity.’  And this ‘eternal life’ – life centered and expressed physically, morally, and spiritually in Jesus’ own resurrection body – ‘has been given without limit to all that trust in Him’ (v.10).  The fact that these two songs are expressions of worship in liturgical settings makes this all the more significant for historical purposes.  This was the broad consensus-based understanding of the orthodox Christian community in its earliest stages of growth.  In fact, all of these theologians I have mentioned (and many others I have not), from Syrian/Semitic, North African, Greek, and Latin communities, were preachers, teachers, lecturers, and writers who ministered in Christian communities, who represented those communities, who had the approval of those who went before them, who sought to pass on faithfully to others what they themselves had received.  This was the mind of the early church, infused as it was by the voice of the apostles and Jesus himself.

Athanasius of Alexandria (298 – 373 AD), bishop of Alexandria, Egypt, one of the primary architects of the Trinitarian Nicene Creed, the first churchman to describe the New Testament as we now know it, and a courageous opponent of the Arian heresy who suffered five exiles from his home city because of the opposition of Arian Roman Emperors, said that the Son of God became incarnate in human flesh to cleanse its corruption,

‘Had it been a case of a trespass only, and not of a subsequent corruption, repentance would have been well enough; but when once transgression had begun men came under the power of the corruption proper to their nature and were bereft of the grace which belonged to them as creatures in the Image of God.  No, repentance could not meet the case.  What – or rather Who – was it that was needed for such grace and such recall as we required?  Who, save the Word of God Himself, Who also in the beginning had made all things out of nothing?... Thus, taking a body like our own, because all our bodies were liable to the corruption of death, He surrendered His body to death instead of all, and offered it to the Father…This He did that He might turn again to incorruption men who had turned to corruption, and make them alive through death by the appropriation of His body and by the grace of His resurrection.  Thus He would make death to disappear from them as utterly as straw from fire.’ (On the Incarnation 2:8 – 9)

         Gregory of Nyssa (335 – 394 AD) who was a bishop in Cappadocia in Turkey, a brilliant theologian, and a social activist vigorously determined to abolish slavery, said,

‘You ask the reason why God was born among men… If, then, love of man be a special characteristic of the Divine nature, here is the reason for which you are in search, here is the cause of the presence of God among men.  Our diseased nature needed a healer.  Man in his fall needed one to set him upright.’  (The Great Catechism, ch.15, emphasis mine)  Elsewhere, he wrote of Jesus’ divine nature cleansing his human nature, to prepare it to be shared with us by his Spirit:  ‘Although Christ took our filth upon himself, nevertheless he is not defiled by the pollution, but in his own self, he cleanses the filth, for it says, the light shone in the darkness, but the darkness did not overpower it.’ (Adv. Apol. 26)

Gregory of Nazianzus (329 – 389 AD), one time teacher of rhetoric in Athens, later archbishop of Constantinople and an accomplished preacher, and probably the most important teacher in the Greek-speaking Eastern Orthodox tradition, said,

‘In the character of the form of a servant, he condescends to his fellow servants and servants, and assumes a form that is not his own, bearing all me and mine in himself, so that in himself he may consume the bad, as fire does wax, or as the sun does the mist of the earth, and that I may partake of what is his through being conjoined to him.’ (Oration 30.5 – 6, cf. Oration 2.23ff.) 

In a letter, Gregory of Nazianzus wrote that because all of human nature was infected by sin, Jesus set about to save it all in order to offer back to us a healed human nature: 

‘The unassumed is the unhealed; but what is united to God is saved.  If it was half of Adam that fell, then half might be assumed and saved.  But if it was the whole of Adam that fell, it is united to the whole of him who was begotten, and gains complete salvation.’  (Epistle 101.7) 

In explaining Jesus’ incarnation further, Gregory wrote that it was necessary to cleanse all of human nature in his own person

‘He needed flesh for the sake of flesh which had incurred condemnation, and soul for the sake of soul, so too he needed mind for the sake of mind, which not only fell in Adam but was the first to be affected… that which transgressed was that which stood most in need of salvation; and that which needed salvation was that which he took upon him.  Therefore mind was taken upon him.’ (Epistle 101, cf. Oration 1.13; 30.21)

Basil of Caesaria (330 – 379 AD), also called Basil the Great by the Eastern Christian tradition, bishop of Caesaria Mazaca in present day Turkey, one of the three Cappadocian theologians along with his brother Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory Nazianzus, widely known for his care for the poor, monastic community life, and work on liturgy and prayer, said,

‘If Christ had not come in our flesh, he could not have slain sin in the flesh and restored and reunited to God the humanity which fell in Adam and became alienated from God.’  (Epistles 261.2)

Cyril of Alexandria (376 – 444 AD), in the next generation, bishop of Alexandria from 412 to 444, a central figure in the controversies of Christ’s two natures, and a prolific writer, wrote of the healing of human emotions through Jesus’ reunion of human emotional life with his heavenly Father: 

‘For unless he had felt dread, human nature could not have become free from dread; unless he had experienced grief, there could never have been any deliverance from grief; unless he had been troubled and alarmed, no escape from these feelings could have been found.  And with regard to every one of the affections to which human nature is liable, you will find exactly the corresponding thing in Christ.  The affections of his flesh were aroused, not that they might have the upper hand as they do indeed in us, but in order that when aroused they might be thoroughly subdued by the power of the Word dwelling in the flesh, the nature of man thus undergoing a change for the better... For the Word of God made one with himself human nature in its entirety, that so he might save the entire man.  For that which has not been taken into his nature, has not been saved.’ (Commentary on John 12.27)

The Ambrosiaster, a Latin commentary of unknown authorship, written between 366 – 384 AD, comments on Paul’s remark in 2 Corinthians 5:21, ‘Him who did not know sin, He made sin on our behalf.’  It says,

‘God the Father made his Son, Christ, sin; because having been made flesh he was not altered but became incarnate and so was made sin… On account of this his entire flesh is under sin, therefore since it has been made flesh, it has also been made sin.  And since he has been offered for sin, not undeservedly is he said to have been made sin; since also a victim which was offered for sins under the law was named sin.’  (Second Corinthians 5.21)

Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430 AD), bishop of Hippo Regius in Roman North Africa, the main influence on the subsequent Western, Latin-speaking church, said,

‘The Son of God assumed human nature, and in it he endured all that belongs to the human condition.  This is a remedy for mankind of a power beyond our imagining.’  (De Agone Christiano 12).  ‘Never would you have been freed from sinful flesh, had he not taken on himself the likeness of sinful flesh.’ (Sermon 185)

These ancient Christians would be a helpful corrective to those Christians today who say, ‘Jesus took on a sinless human nature’ (a Protestant tendency) or even ‘Mary was sinless’ (a Catholic tendency).  For if Jesus took on another kind of human nature – an already purified one – then he did not actually work out within himself our salvation from our own sinfulness and evil.  This is why, as I have written elsewhere, I believe the ‘ontological-medical substitution’ atonement theory is more historically grounded and theologically accurate than the ‘penal substitution’ view:  Jesus had to heal human nature in himself in order to give that new human nature to everyone else.  He had to work out his new humanity for all humanity.  The uniformity and consistency by which these documents tell Christian history is remarkable, and weighty.  They saw what was at stake in the biblical story:  the cleansing of the corruption that had set into human nature; the character of the Triune God in loving each human being; and many other issues.  They received this from the apostles in the New Testament, and from Jesus himself.  The entire Eastern Orthodox communion continues to express Jesus’ deep significance this way, as do some Catholics and Protestants. 

          Thank God for Jesus!  Jesus took to himself our fallen, genetically corrupted human nature in a loving embrace, even one that began with utter dependence on another human being so he could develop in his humanity.  Jesus, in the womb and as an infant, absolutely depended upon Mary his mother for sustenance.  But now we meet the fully mature Jesus by his Spirit, even as we learn about him in the pages of Matthew’s Gospel.  He is healing us spiritually now, by his Spirit, sharing his very life with us.  When he returns, he will heal us physically, renewing our physical bodies – even those persons who never made it to full adulthood – along with all creation. 

          When I first read of Maria de Nazare naming her baby Emanoel and Jesus, I thought it was eerily strange.  Would I have done that if my wife and I had a son with two heads?  But after more reflection, I wonder if Maria felt hope?  Who else but Jesus - our Immanuel, ‘God with us’ - will eventually separate those twin boys and give them full, glorious, redeemed bodies of their own, when he comes to heal all things?  Who else but Jesus can bring to full completion what creation and humanity could only produce in brokenness?