A Christian leads a double life—the life of the Spirit, and the mortification of the flesh. You see, when we have been justified and taken into the kingdom of God’s grace, we must still also mourn over our flesh; we must not merely mourn and lament our suffering Christ but also imitate Him; we must die along with Him and crucify our own flesh. Here, then, He is speaking about that mortification of the flesh and not about the grief of the Final Judgment, when every eye will see Christ judging the guilty and punishing the ungodly for crucifying Him. After all, the hands of the Jews which crucified Christ are the hands of all the wicked. But while Christians are alive on this earth, they mourn as they mortify their own flesh. This they do because of Christ. Indeed, as the apostle says in Romans 6, our old Adam was crucified, he died and was buried along with Christ. Consequently, to mourn for Christ’s sake is to imitate the crucifixion, death, and burial of Christ so that we mortify our flesh and the affections thereof either by ourselves or by others—that is, when Satan, the world, and our foes attack us. In this way all these ideas hold together beautifully, as if He were saying: They will see how I was crucified for them. In fact, they will see how they themselves crucified Me. After all, as Isaiah says, He Himself bore our sins (cf. Is. 53:11). Therefore, they immediately say with the apostle Paul: Those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its … lusts (Gal. 5:24). They gladly endure poverty, hunger, illness, and every adverse condition, even when they must put life itself on the line. All of these things are certainly serious and deserve to be called the cross.” Martin Luther Luthers Works, AE 20:140, Lectures on the Minor Prophets III, Zechariah 12:10
Posted on: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 10:49:25 +0000
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