Last night we held our first night of Truth and Lies, a weekly occasion to delve more deeply into the mystery of Christ and his Church through discussion of aspects of the faith that often provoke questions and need for clarification. As is always the case when I speak, I had far less time to express all that my heart longed to proclaim, and so I find it bursting with joy, spilling over into this blog. During our discussion, I asked the question, “what does to mean to be redeemed?” Christians often speak of being redeemed, but I find that few can explain what this really means. Obviously it indicates a difference, a change in the person, but what kind of change?
Quite literally, redemption means a “reclaiming.” Something has been lost or captured, and when it is redeemed it has been restored, recovered, reclaimed. Our redemption, then, is a restoration, a reclaiming of some spiritual good – namely, the full expression of our humanity as the image of God. When Christians use the word “redemption” we are principally speaking of something that has to do with sin, because sin, in its very nature, is a corruption of human dignity and a diminishing of the image of God within us. When God created mankind, he created us to have life and to have our humanity a living reflection of His divine goodness, glory, and holiness. The sin of Adam and Eve (and all our subsequent sins) mutilated that image leaving it weakened and broken. But Christ proclaims, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). Because Christ is “the Word Made flesh,” God made man, in whom “the fullness of deity dwells bodily,” Christ redeems our humanity. In joining His divinity to our humanity by making it His own as well, he restores that image of God in its most pristine of expressions – His humanity, united permanently to His divinity, becomes the paradigm restoration of that likeness of God which was disfigured since the first sin. He has reclaimed it from corruption and redeemed it by taking it as His own, culminating this in offering it to the Father as a saving instrument of love on the cross. Our humanity, in Christ, was given to the Father in a genuinely human manner as the medium of devotion and sincere fidelity – the zenith of reclaiming our humanity from sin and reestablishing it as the image of God, giving that image a completeness as the expression of Love, the very essence of the one being imaged.
It is for this reason that the Church insists that the Divine Son took our humanity in order to accomplish our salvation within it. This is why it is possible for St. Paul to write such thing as “you have put off the old man with its practices and have put on the new man, who is being renewed in knowledge after the image of his creator” (Col 3:9-10) and “be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new man, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph 4:23-24) Because Christ’s humanity was the restoration and redemption of the image of God within our human nature, being joined to Christ is the application of this in ourselves. The humanity we possess is renewed into a more complete image of God because it becomes bound to Christ’s humanity, which was made for us the perfect “image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15).
But there is one more aspect to redemption, one linked to this notion of the image of God but infinitely more profound. Because Christ shared in our humanity, he made available to us a sharing in his divinity. Indeed, St. Peter insists that union with Christ permits us to “become partakers in the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4) and St. Peter announces that the Christian is “God’s temple” (1 Cor 3:16-17). Because the humanity that Son of the Father took as His own became the perfect temple of His divinity, our humanity united to Christ is made a suitable “temple” of God’s life and Spirit, an extension and reflection of the temple of Christ.
And so it is that perhaps the most succinct way of summarizing what it means to be redeemed can be achieved in two words – New Creation. As St. Paul declared, “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold the new has come” (2 Cor 5:17). By becoming man, God has united our very humanity to Himself, elevated it to the dignity of an instrument of divine love on the cross, restored the full image of God within it, and by the association of His own humanity with His divinity He has invited our humanity into a sharing in His own divine life. This is redemption. This is new creation. This is the delight of the soul, and the promise that Jesus alone can satisfy.
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