The Sinlessness of Christ

Our Lord Jesus Christ, true God and true Man, is free from all sin, original and actual, because of his Virginal Conception and Birth by the operation of the Holy Ghost in the womb of Blessed Mary. Our Lord is completely free from original sin because original or ancestral sin is transmitted by normal human procreation and reproduction: the mortality and corruption of our wounded nature, alienated and separated from God, is passed from generation to generation by sexual reproduction and by birth into a corrupted and fallen world. By the Holy Ghost, Christ is given a totally new and renovated human nature in the virginal womb of Mary, for there is no sexual reproduction or generation in His human conception and birth. The Fathers of the Church refer to Mary as the New Garden of Eden - in the first garden, man was created free from sin, innocent, and capable of natural communion with God. Only because of the Fall of Man did the human race lose this natural state of union with God and the capacity for growth into the divine likeness, for God-likeness, theosis. Mary is the New Eve, a Virgin, who gives birth to the New Adam, the New Man, Who assumes human nature without the consequences or effect or power of sin.

Jesus Christ is the New Creation, Who was given a newly-created human nature without human seed. Thus, Christ re-creates, re-forms, re-generates, restores and renews human nature through His Virginal Conception, a Conception free from sin because there is no human father. Human nature was given a radically new start in Our Lady's body. Our Lord is truly, fully and completely human, but His humanity is like that of Adam in the original creation, pure, innocent, free from corruption, mortality, death and evil. It is precisely because Our Lord is the New Man, the Second Man, the Second Adam Who is the Lord from Heaven, that we can be saved: he imparts His new humanity, His new Manhood to us in the Sacraments. The Hypostatic Union, the union of the Person of God the Son to His perfect human nature, is Christ's gift of Himself to us in the Church and Sacraments - the Body of Christ in heaven, the Body of Christ in the Church, and the Body of Christ in the Sacraments are one and the same Body. In Baptism, we are plunged into His saving human nature and made one with His immaculate and all-holy Body; we are made members of His new humanity by being joined to Him in His Incarnation, Life, Death and Resurrection. In the Eucharist, the new life of grace, the Life of Christ's Human Nature in us, is nourished and replenished by His own Body and Blood, the substance of His new humanity. What is mystically infused into us at Baptism is empowered and intensified through Eucharistic Communion. And through union with Christ's human nature, we are united to and partake of His divine nature. We become by grace what God is by nature - God becomes Man so that Man may become God. 'Only what God assumed does He redeem' says the Church Fathers: so Our Lord assumed a true human body, mind, will and soul, perfectly human and totally like our own, with the exception of sin. The Blessed Virgin Mary did not transmit any sin, original or actual, to Our Lord because she did not conceive Him and give birth to Him in the natural way, but miraculously, supernaturally, through an act in which her Virginity was preserved before, during and after His miraculous conception and birth. The Virginal Conception and Birth are necessary for our salvation, for without these acts Our Lord would have inherited the original sin common to fallen humanity. But through the Virgin Birth, Christ offers to the whole of mankind that which by nature he cannot have, a human nature free from sin and united to God.

Our Lord's Baptism, as Blessed Lancelot Andrewes says, following the Fathers, is not a Baptism in which Christ is forgiven of sins, for Christ is perfectly sinless, but a Baptism in which Christ Himself hallows the water of our Baptism. He is baptised to identify Himself with sinful humanity as man's sole Redeemer, to show that He is truly human; He is baptised to manifest and reveal Himself as the Eternal Son of God in human flesh, the God Incarnate in true human nature; He is baptised to set the pattern for the Christian Sacrament of Holy Baptism; and He is baptised to reveal the Holy Trinity, the Father speaks, the Spirit descends in the form of a dove, and the Son stands in our human nature, anointed by the Holy Ghost in His human nature as the Messiah. Our Lord sanctifies the water for our own Baptism; it does not sanctify Him. Our Lord was baptised 'to fulfill all righteousness' and to become the model for our own Baptism into Him.