Nielsen’s Nook

Translation

1 So, they did not nail him to the pyre; rather they bound [a] him. He placed his hands behind [b] him and was bound - like a ram, outstanding from a great flock, for an offering, [c] a burnt offering acceptable to God having been prepared.

He lifted his eyes to heaven and said, “Lord, Almighty God, the Father of your beloved and blessed son, [d] Jesus Christ, through whom we have apprehended [e] knowledge concerning you, the God of angels, of powers, of all creation and of the entire people [f] of righteousness, which lives before you.

[a] προσέδησαν to bind or tie (BAGD, 712). 4 Maccabees 9:26 reads ὀργάνῳ καὶ καταπέλτῃ προσέδησαν αὐτόν. They bound him to the torture engine and the catapult (author’s translation). προσδέω does not appear to be an extremely frequent word; however, when it is used it seems to refer to the binding of people for the purpose of torture (c.f., 1 Clement 27:1). The passive form is also used in this verse.

[b] ὀπίσω an adverb of place only when articular is it translated behind (BAGD, 575).

[c] προσφοράν that which is brought, gift, and in this sense as an offering (BAGD, 720).

[d] Obviously, the technical terms for Christ’s sonship were not galvanized until much later when St. Athanasius and the Three Cappadocians would come on the scene. However, here when there is not the theological baggage, it is not υἱός but παιδός (παι̂ς) that is used to refer to the “son” of the Father. Perhaps, this is incipient Trinitarian subordinationism, for a παι̂ς was socially on the same household level as a servant or slave; whereas, a υἱός was a son come into his rights, an equal participant in the family.

[e] εἰλήφαμεν (λαμβάνω) to take, take hold of, grasp (BAGD, 464). Consider St. John’s use of παραλαμβάνω employing a double entendre in John 1:11 (NA27), εἰς τὰ ἴδια ἦλθεν, καὶ οἱ ἴδιοι αὐτὸν οὐ παρέλαβον. He came into his own and his own did not receive/apprehend him (author’s translation).

[f] γένος descendants, race, people, nation (BAGD, 156).

His part it was, and His alone, both to bring again the corruptible to incorruption and to maintain for the Father His consistency of character with all. For He alone, being Word of the Father and above all, was in consequence both able to recreate all, and worthy to suffer on behalf of all and to be an ambassador for all with the Father.

For this purpose, then, the incorporeal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God entered our world. In one sense, indeed, He was not far from it before, for no part of creation had ever been without Him Who, while ever abiding in union with the Father, yet fills all things that are. But now He entered the world in a new way, stooping to our level in His love and Self-revealing to us.

Merry Christmas,
St. Athanasius

St. Athanasius. On the Incarnation : The Treatise De Incarnatione Verbi Dei, trans. A Religious of C.S.M.V. (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996), 33.

Two and a half years ago I was overwhelmed by the Sermon on the Mount. An elder at my church took a few of us aside on morning a week over pancakes and taught us. Like many of us, this elder had read the Sermon on the Mount and been disturbed. We surely don’t measure up to the standards of the Kingdom of God. Righteousness is something that we are shown to lack, and yet Jesus tells us in Matthew 5:20 that if we haven’t righteousness that abundantly surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will in no way ever enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The scribes and the Pharisees were regarded as the most righteous people Jesus’ original hearers would have known. How could anyone be counted righteous before God?

The act of God justifying a sinner is where we find those who haven’t righteousness being accepted as righteousness. My confession of faith, the Westminster Standards, expresses it this way:

Justification is an act of God’s free grace unto sinners, in which he pardons all their sins, accepts and accounts their persons righteous in his sight; not for anything wrought in them, or done by them, but only for the perfect obedience and full satisfaction of Christ, by God imputed to them, and received by faith alone.[1]

Jesus comes to us as the Incarnate Word of God and in his perfect obedience, both active and passive, he purchased a people for the Father. Humanity was created wonderful, as the image of God, to live out the likeness of God in fellowship with Him. However, what we find is that as the image of God we live out an unlikeness to God and consequently live in dislocation from Him:

…the transgression of the commandment [not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden] was making them turn back again according to their nature; and as they had at the beginning come into being out of non-existence, so were they now on the way to returning, through corruption, to non-existence again.[2]

In the Incarnation we see both exaltation and humiliation. Christ comes and takes upon himself flesh. That God would become a human being most definitely exalts humanity immeasurably. Nevertheless, in becoming a human being (the image of God), Jesus lives out the perfect likeness of God, which was received by the Father a “full satisfaction” for the debt of sin of His people. The abundance of Jesus’ perfection and obedience, exposes our poverty, our unlikeness, bringing with it a balanced humiliation.

Apart from Christ, we are slaves to the unlikeness of God. It is like a great Egyptian taskmaster that takes away the straw, while cracking the whip across our backs to build more bricks (c.f. Exodus 5). Where we cowed to the whip in our weakness, Christ lay hold of the Egyptian taskmaster and threw him down, beating him with his own whip.

[Jesus] has come into our country and dwelt in one body amidst the many, and in consequence the designs of the enemy against mankind have been foiled, and the corruption of death, which formerly held them in its power, has simply ceased to be.[3]

After Jesus was born in Bethlehem, Herod the Great decreed that all the male children two years of age and under in the region where Jesus had been born. Joseph and Mary flee to Egypt, having been warned in a dream (Matthew 2:19-23). Jesus comes out of Egypt, through water (Matthew 3) and then into the wilderness (Matthew 4) before he ascends the Mount from which he might bring a New Covenant with its blessing for obedience and curse for disobedience.[4]

And so Jesus presents to us that declaration of the New Covenant:
³ “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
⁴ “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
⁵ “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
⁶ “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
⁷ “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
⁸ “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
⁹ “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
¹⁰ “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
¹¹ “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. ¹² Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.[5]

While the Incarnation humiliates us, showing to us our utter poverty, we find that the motive of the Incarnation was not spite but love. For God, made himself lowly, poor in spirit, emptying himself of his divine rights and became a man. He came to his own and his own rejected him. Jesus wept. And is there any doubt that our Lord was meek? That he was one who was absolutely submitted to another? Had he not come to do his own will but that of the Father? While we hunger and thirst for righteousness that we do not have, He hungers and thirsts for the righteousness of his Father. It is our Lord who has been merciful to us. It is Jesus who is alone ceremonially pure, who has seen the Father. It is Jesus who is alone the peacemaker who restored the fellowship of his people with God through the blood of his Cross. The one who is himself Righteousness, was crowned not with gold and gems but persecuted with the thorns that cursed the ground that Adam walked.

It is this one, the Righteous One, who has humbled himself and in becoming a man he proclaims to us the New Covenant. It is in this proclamation of the New Covenant that the one who made himself poor, declares to those enslaved to the unlikeness of God, that there is blessing for the poor, for those who mourn, for the meek, and the hungry. Indeed, we find that the Incarnate God has made a way for the captives to be free. That way is by grace alone in Christ alone through faith alone. For paupers have nothing else by which to lay hold of the Incarnate God who came near to save a people for himself.

[1] Westminster Larger Catechism, Question 70. I took the liberty to modernize the language a little bit here.

[2] St. Athanasius. On the Incarnation : The Treatise De Incarnatione Verbi Dei, trans. A Religious of C.S.M.V. (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996), 29-30.

[3] St. Athanasius. On the Incarnation : The Treatise De Incarnatione Verbi Dei, trans. A Religious of C.S.M.V. (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996), 35.

[4] N. T. Wright. Matthew for Everyone. 2 vols. 2nd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004) v1, 37.

[5] Matthew 5:3-12 (ESV)