By Your precious Blood You have redeemed us from the curse of the law. By being nailed to the Cross and pierced with a spear, You have poured immortality upon men, O our Savior, glory to You!  

The above prayer by St. John Chrysostom is said by the priest as he prepares the gifts of bread and wine for the sacrifice at the altar every Sunday morning. This offering becomes Christ’s Body and Blood by the power of the Holy Spirit at the Consecration (the Epiclesis), and it means that we the faithful become one with Christ through this sacrifice. We offer ourselves to Christ in our gifts of bread and wine, and He offers Himself to us, eternally. It is a bond, it is reciprocal, and it is obligatory if we want to live eternally. For this is how immortality is “poured” upon us—by participating in this sacrifice, with all our heart, with all that we are.

What’s more, this is how we are redeemed from “the curse of the law”. For Christ came to save us from the curse of the law, not the law.

Let me explain. 

*

In the Old Testament, God’s law was external to man, not written on many hearts. It may have seemed a curse in that it proved man’s inadequacy, our inability to live up to the law. God’s law had not yet become flesh and blood. But then Christ came, as He said, “not to abolish the law but to fulfill it” (Matthew 5:17-20).

How does Christ fulfill the law?  It is not by coercion but by the Cross, by dying for us, and then by sharing His resurrected life with us. Jesus Christ is Emmanuel, “God with us.” In becoming a man, God makes us “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).  By eating and drinking His Body and Blood, we internalize God and thus are made capable of fulfilling God’s law. God’s law is no longer external to us. In Christ we are enabled to see God in our deepest heart and then begin to live in ways that are pleasing to God, in accordance with the law.

And then, being in Christ, we see that God’s law is not a curse. God gives us life, and this life is one with God’s law. God’s law is life.  It is a lamp.  It is a light: “Your word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path” (Psalm 119:105). We walk by the light of this lamp, His word, His law. Walking in the light of His law we come to know the truth that sets us free, free to live fully human lives, free to live as God would have us live. God’s law which is taken for a curse by the world and the worldly is revealed in Christ to be life and light, for He is the Word of God, God’s law made fully human.

*

The law of God comes down to this: it is the love of Christ, sacrificial love, agape. God’s law does not coerce. God is love, and His law is free. God’s law flies in the face of the world. God’s law judges the world for its failure to love, to live in love, to walk by the light of God’s love. And this failure is the curse of the law.

It is a death curse.

Fr. Paul Martin
Annunciation & St. Paraskevi Greek Orthodox Church
New Buffalo, MI