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Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father, and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

“Hear me, all of you, and understand: There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him.”

If sin doesn’t come from “out there,” then, from where could it possibly come? So often, it seems that we are steered off course by “someone else.” So often, we can point to influences that supposedly drove us down into some kind of shame or vice. We had nothing to do with it. We landed in the mire “unwittingly.” We try and hide from the fruit of our sin, or from punishment. But there is no hiding from our sins. Wandering along on our own, the forest gets darker, gloomier. Our sins seem to grow up around us in thicker and thornier groves. Sometimes, we even become numb to them, voluntarily blind to their presence. The way is obscured. Our sins weigh us down. We can’t “shake them.”

Wandering along in such a state, we cannot leave our sins behind. We know this to be true. We know of Eden in the cool of the day, how pitifully Adam and Eve tried to distance themselves from their sin, how pitifully they tried to hide themselves. We remember Adam—“the woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit of the tree, and I ate.” Adam is often chastised for taking the fruit from Eve, for giving in to her wiles—as if he could’ve possibly resisted. No, Eve did not bring Adam down into sin. Sin doesn’t come from “out there.”

Our sins are not alien. They are not, properly, separate from us—we do not catch sin, like we might catch a disease—our sins grow up and out of us. “All these evil things come from within,” Jesus says, “and they defile a person.”

In the 14^th century, as the Black Death swept across Europe, delirious, feverish victims, suffering from huge, gangrenous sores and unable to keep down anything that was ingested, would begin to rot away while still alive. The skin would turn completely greyish-black, and a victim’s blood, long since poisoned, would seek to escape the body by any possible means, often working its way out through the eyes.

Such horrors are nothing…compared to the sinful corruption of our hearts. These hideous symptoms are just a fraction of the bigger picture of sin, they are an image, a manifestation in the body, of the heart of sin that lives within each and every one of us. There is no one else to blame. There is no use in pointing out where exactly we went wrong. Trying to belittle our errors only makes them grow larger. Indeed, in trying to explain our sins, we aim to justify ourselves. We think we can set ourselves straight, find our own way out of the forest.

But such a triumph would only be possible if the sin which we are trying so desperately to escape came from “out there.” “All these evil things come from within,” Jesus says, “and they defile a person.” We ourselves planted the forest. We obscure the road. We send the fog and gloom that shroud the way. We run up our own fever, spin our own delirium, poison our own blood. And as often as we turn to ourselves, as often as we strive to make our own way out, we find that we are only, ever, sliding down into sin’s end—death. Our sins are from our hearts. We cannot make our way out of ourselves…

For Jesus alone, sin is “out there.” For Jesus alone, sin is alien. Only Jesus can walk with seeing eyes through the forest of sin that we have planted for ourselves, he alone can penetrate the darkness and gloom that our sins have stirred up and can make a way, by his light and by his voice. In our darkness and decay, deep in our putrid hearts of sin, Jesus draws near.

And there, in that place, into our death, Jesus places his own.

Paul writes that we are “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies.” Jesus ventures down into our sinful, deathly hearts, and joins our death with his own. There, in our bodies, Christ clothes our death with his. His death is planted, and the fruit that it bears is anything but the wretched, tangled forest that we plant for ourselves. His death is planted in us, and the fruit that it bears is life. His own life.

What is in us—our sin, our death—defiles us. What Jesus puts into us, his death, his life-giving death, makes us holy. Paul writes, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection.” His death is perfect and holy. He is the spotless, sacrificial lamb of God. And he gives himself—his death and his life—to us.

“All that the Father has is mine;” Jesus says, “therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” Do you not see? Jesus asks. And he gives us eyes of faith. Are you also without understanding? And he gives us his mind. Is your heart defiled? Are you lost in sin, wandering toward death? Is your body rotting away? Jesus gives us his heart, his death, his body.

In giving us himself, Jesus gives us the separation from sin that is, apart from him, impossible. “As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.” In Christ, our transgressions are put away, and we are given a clean conscience. As Peter says, “Baptism now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” Dirt may be visible, but we know that there is something else there, in our hearts. Christ is there.

The way is not simply death for us, now. We may see horrors, and what lies ahead may remain unseen. But we are led along by a sure and clear voice. Our bodies are not rotting houses of death, our hearts are not merely manufacturing evil. Our lives are not spiraling down toward any lasting death. Our lives are Christ’s.

In the name of Jesus. Amen.