=Romans 8=

"God dealt with sin by sending his own Son in a body as physical as any sinful body, and in that body God condemned sin."

Jesus Christ as drug addict, Nazi, serial killer, pederast…no "sin" is outside the body of Christ. The worst you can imagine: Christ is all of that and worse. Christ is a fly strip of sin: being human, he attracts them all. He can forgive all sins because he has committed, at least in potential, all sins. Nothing, as the Roman playwright Publius Terentius wrote, human is alien to him.

"I cannot understand my own behavior. I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the very things I hate. The fact is, I know of nothing good living in me—living, that is, in my unspiritual self—for though the will to do what is good is in me, the performance is not, with the result that instead of doing the good things I want to do, I carry out the sinful things I do not want. When I act against my will, then, it is not my true self doing it, but sin which lives in me. This is what makes me a prisoner of that law of sin which lives inside my body. Who will rescue me from this body doomed to death? 


Well, it's obvious, isn't it? The body is an insufficient space-suit. We are literally not well-suited to this planet. But the ill-designed suit is a necessity to any kind of survival here at all, an "evil" necessity. Sin is bad only in the sense that we are incapable of doing all the things we want to do without doing harm to ourselves.  Recalling our unlimited abilities in the time prior to our "birth," we still desire to do all the things we were once capable of doing. We are tempted. We want to fly, change our form and consciousness at will, dissolve into universality & contract once again into individuality. We want to merge sensually with other beings beyond what we experience here as restrictive gender/sexual binaries, without moral strictures, without the threat of disease. We want, in other words, to be angelic. Divine. 

Christ, his definition debased as it has become, is originally the example of our true being released from the creaky, leaky, awkward space-suit of the body. Death is the shedding of the suit and the transcendence of sin, which is nothing more than limitation. That is the meaning of the resurrection stripped bare of superstitious accretion.