Christ in Baruch

Christ Connection - The One Who Bears Our Sins

Read this prayer beside the cross and a strange exchange comes into focus. The exiles say, "We are a sinful people," and stake everything on God hearing them say it. Paul describes the other half of the trade: "him who knew no sin he hath made to be sin on our behalf; that we might become the righteousness of God in him" (2 Corinthians 5:21). The sinless one takes the place of the sinful, and the very thing the exiles lack - righteousness, which they confess belongs to God…

Baruch 2 is the floor of all true repentance laid bare - a people saying without flinching that God’s judgment is just and that they themselves are the ones who sinned: To the Lord our God appertaineth righteousness: but unto us... open shame (v. 6); we have sinned, we have done ungodly (v. 12). That candor is exactly the disposition the Gospel calls for: if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us (1 John 1:9), the broken and contrite heart God will not…

Christ Connection - The Word Made Flesh

“Afterward did he shew himself upon earth, and conversed with men.” Early Christians recognized in this verse a prophecy of the Incarnation. John opens his Gospel with identical themes: “In the beginning was the Word... and the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:1, 14). The wisdom that belongs to God alone, that cannot be found through human effort, is revealed not through a book or a law, but through a Person. Jesus is God’s self-revelation. He is the wisdom…

Christ Connection - The Heavenly Jerusalem as Mother

Paul writes: "But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all" (Gal. 4:26). Just as earthly Jerusalem speaks as mother to her scattered children, the heavenly Jerusalem - of which the Church is a part - gathers the children of God. Jesus echoes this in Matthew 23:37: "How often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!" The mother’s longing in Baruch becomes Christ’s longing.

Baruch 5 is a short restoration poem, and its central images are the very ones the Gospel later takes up. Jerusalem is told to put off “the garment of thy mourning” and put on “the comeliness of the glory that cometh from God,” to wrap herself in “the righteousness which cometh from God” (vv. 1-2) - the same exchange of mourning for a God-given splendour that the prophet sang, “he hath clothed me with the garments of salvation, he hath covered me with the robe of righteous…

Christ Connection - The Righteous One

This chapter ends by blessing the just, whose righteousness stands before the Lord. The New Testament names one person as perfectly just. In 1 Peter 3:18 the apostle writes that "Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God." His righteousness covers those who could not produce their own. Those who trust him are counted just before the Lord.