Gathered It All to His Chest

“Jesus died and in that death He embraced the pollutions of a very polluted world. He took onto Himself the wrath and anger of God, and He did this so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. He gathered up a world full of hatred, adultery, treachery, rape, murder, envy, genocide, religious hypocrisy, atheism, theft, lying, and all forms of arrogant haughtiness, gathered it all to His chest, and disappearing, sank into death. But what looked like death and sin overwhelming the Messiah was actually the Messiah overwhelming death and sin. That uncanny, numinous moment was actually the death of death in the death of Christ” (Letter From a Christian Citizen, p. 106)