Tractates on the Gospel of John

⁵ From this bondage, then, we are set free by the Lord alone. He who had it not, Himself delivers us from it; for He alone came without sin in the flesh. For the little ones whom you see carried in their mothers' hands cannot yet walk, and are already in fetters; for they have received from Adam what they are loosened from by Christ. To them also, when baptized, pertains that grace which is promised by the Lord; for He only can deliver from sin who came without sin, and was made a sacrifice for sin.

For you heard when the apostle was read: “We are ambassadors,” he says, “for Christ, as though God were exhorting you by us; we beseech you in Christ's stead,”— that is, as if Christ were beseeching you, and for what?— “to be reconciled unto God.” If the apostle exhorts and beseeches us to be reconciled unto God, then were we enemies to God. For no one is reconciled unless from a state of enmity. And we have become enemies not by nature, but by sin. From the same source are we the servants of sin, that we are the enemies of God.

God has no enemies in a state of freedom. They must be slaves; and slaves will they remain unless delivered by Him to whom they wished by their sins to be enemies. Therefore, says be, “We beseech you in Christ's stead to be reconciled unto God.” But how are we reconciled, save by the removal of that which separates between us and Himself? For He says by the prophet, “He has not made the ear heavy that it should not hear; but your iniquities have separated between you and your God.” And so, then, we are not reconciled, unless that which is in the midst is taken away, and something else is put in its place.

For there is a separating medium, and, on the other hand, there is a reconciling Mediator. The separating medium is sin, the reconciling Mediator is the Lord Jesus Christ: “For there is one God and Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” To take then away the separating wall, which is sin, that Mediator has come, and the priest has Himself become the sacrifice. And because He was made a sacrifice for sin, offering Himself as a whole burnt-offering on the cross of His passion, the apostle, after saying, “We beseech you in Christ's stead to be reconciled unto God,”— as if we had said, How shall we be able to be reconciled?— goes on to say, “He has made Him,” that is, Christ Himself, “who knew no sin, [to be] sin for us, that we may be the righteousness of God in Him,” “Him,” he says, Christ Himself our God, “who knew no sin.”

For He came in the flesh, that is, in the likeness of sinful flesh, but not in sinful flesh, because He had no sin at all; and therefore became a true sacrifice for sin, because He Himself had no sin.