Business As Unusual
What did it mean for Jesus to be the “spotless Lamb”? I affirm Jesus was without sin from birth to dead and in turn became the blood giver to reconcile us with God. Yet I am confused by the definition of sinless. As you might expect, I think of sin as what I am not doing. I am not lying to my wife, I am not robbing a bank, I am not kicking a dog, etc. However if Jesus’ life was summed up in a paragraph I highly doubt those highlights would speak of Jesus’ abstaining from the lures of a “fallen” world. It would be about what he did for those who were dealt a raw hand.
Jesus’ ministry was about doing what the Father business. He was so in tune with the Father’s desires Jesus had no time to let his humanness take control. I believe what made Jesus sinless was his commitment to be about the Father’s business at every moment. It didn’t revolve around what Jesus was abstaining from at all, but what he was proactively seeking.
I think on a good day I could be as moral (from N. American standards) as Jesus was. I think the majority of church-goers probably could too, but what good is abstaining from immoral lures when we aren’t about the Father’s business?
posted by jay baehr @ 10/04/2005
9 thoughts
9 Comments:
"I believe what made Jesus sinless was his commitment to be about the Father’s business at every moment."
I like that statement, and that's what we should seek to do. We should seek to love God and seek to act out His will in every decision we make. That's hard, but that's it.
So true. Sin is "missing the mark"- thus, failure to do God's best. Greed is not just bad in and of itself, but it is bad because it fails to be generous and sacraficial. More so, the sin of racism is not simply attitudes of superiority or prejudice towards other races, but a failure to proactively embrace and celebrate other cultures in our communities.
At any rate, great post.
Peace,
Jamie
So, its more than just the bad we don't do? Good word
Sinlessness, as you point out Jay, is a negation of a negative (sin and not sinning). Nothing positive there.
The other side of sinlessness, of course, is perfection -- and Jesus was perfect. We say his perfection is imputed to us and another way of saying all this is that he lived our life for us (recapitulation).
All...
Thanks for pushing my thoughts along, it's forcing my hand as I crawl towards a "believable" faith journey.
Scot...
Thanks for forcing me into a dictionary.
The more I think, it again comes down to action rather than what we are not to do.
And I like the idea of thinking of Jesus of "perfect" first, and the by-product of that was being sinless. I don't think Jesus walked around with blinders on to avoid sin.
In reponse to S McKnight
If I didn't know better, I would have thought you just wrote a book on the Atonement...
Where's my theological dictionary when I need it?
BJB
I like this perspective. It takes the primary emphasis off what we're doing wrong, and moves it to what we can be doing right.
In one of my Bible studies we're looking at the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus is making it pretty clear that the law is pretty tough to live up to. Sure, He says if you can live and not break any law, then you are righteous, and you will find heaven, but I'm pretty sure He's telling us it's impossible for us to do. That's the other half of His message. We need Him. And we need to live for Him.
Sorry I'm just seeing when the discussion is probably over, however, I think you're on the right track with the idea of being about the Father's business. I think we get tired up in the sin and sinning thing and what we miss is that Jesus was obedient to the Father. We will never be "perfect" (obedient from birth to death) as Jesus was, but we have the ability by the power of His spirit to walk forward in complete obedience. When that is manifest in our lives, we will be about our Father's business. P.S. I'm not there yet. . .
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