At The Divine liturgy of the Maronites on Sunday the priest emphasised the verse in 2 Corinth:
Him, who knew no sin, he hath made sin for us, that we might be made the justice of God in him.
Jesus became sin the Priest emphasised. He must have been taught that protestant heresy in the seminary and have been repeating it without reflection because it is such an obvious misinterpretation of that verse.
Sin is any thought, word or deed in opposition to the will of God. Is it possible for Jesus, fully God and fully man, to be in opposition to Himself?
No.
This obvious heresy is on the order of thinking that because scripture reads:
Matthew 23: Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered together thy children, as the hen doth gather her chickens under her wings, and thou wouldest not?
It means that Jesus was poultry.
Despite the priests claim, and Bergoglio's repeated insane and heretical claim to the contrary;
What is reconciliation? Taking one from this side, taking another one for that side and uniting them: no, that’s part of it but it’s not it … True reconciliation means that God in Christ took on our sins and He became the sinner for us. When we go to confession, for example, it isn’t that we say our sin and God forgives us. No, not that! We look for Jesus Christ and say: ‘This is your sin, and I will sin again’. And Jesus likes that, because it was his mission: to become the sinner for us, to liberate us....
And this is the Mystery of Christ. Paul, when speaking about this mystery, said the Jesus [sic] emptied himself, humiliated himself and destroyed himself in order to save us. And (what’s) even stronger, ‘he became sin’. Using this symbol, he became a serpent. This is the prophetic message of today’s reading. The Son of Man, who like a serpent, ‘became sin,’ is raised up to save us. […] the story of our redemption, this is the story of God’s love. If we want to know God’s love, let us look at the Cross, a man tortured, a God, emptied of his divinity, dirtied [stained] by sin. But at the same time, he concluded, a God who through his self-annihilation, defeats forever the true name of evil, that Revelation calls ‘the ancient serpent’.
Sin is the work of Satan and Jesus defeats Satan by ‘becoming sin’ and from there he lifts up all of us. The Cross is not an ornament or a work of art with many precious stones as we see around us. The Cross is the Mystery of God’s annihilation for love. And the serpent that makes a prophecy in the desert is salvation, it is raised up and whoever looks at it is healed. And this is not done with a magic wand by a God who does these things: No! This is done through the suffering of the Son of Man, through the suffering of Jesus Christ....
[T]he Pope stated, referring to the passage from the Book of Numbers (21:4-9), “Jesus reminds us of what happened in the desert and which we heard in the first reading.” It is the moment when “the weary people, the people who cannot endure the path, turns away from the Lord, speaks evil of Moses and of the Lord, and encounters those serpents which bite and cause the death.” Then “the Lord says to Moses to make a bronze serpent and raise it, and the person who suffers a wound of a serpent, and that looks at the one of bronze, will be healed.”
“The serpent,” the Pope continued, “is the symbol of wickedness, is the symbol of the devil: it was the most cunning of the animals in earthly paradise.” Because “the serpent is the one that is able to seduce with lies”, he is “the father of lies: this is the mystery.” But then “we have to look at the devil to save us? The serpent is the father of sin, the one that made humanity sin.” In reality, “Jesus says, ‘When I am lifted up, everyone will come to me.’ Obviously this is the mystery of the cross.”
“The bronze serpent healed,” said Francis, “but the bronze serpent was a sign of two things: the sin done by the serpent, the seduction of the serpent, the cunning of the serpent; and it was also the sign of the cross of Christ, it was a prophecy.” And “this is why the Lord tells them: ‘When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am.’ “So we can say,” the Pope affirmed, that “Jesus ‘made himself the serpent,’ Jesus ‘made himself sin,’ and he took upon himself all the filth of humanity, all the filth of sin. And he ‘made himself sin’, he made himself to rise up so that all the people might look at him, the people wounded by sin, us. This is the mystery of the cross and Paul says it: ‘He made himself sin’ and he took the appearance of the father of sin, the cunning serpent.”
“Those who did not look at the bronze serpent after being wounded by a snake in the desert,” the Pontiff explained, “died in sin, the sin of murmuring against God and Moses.” In the same way, “those who do not recognize the strength of God, who made himself sin to heal us, in that man who is lifted up, like the serpent, will die in their sin.” Because “salvation comes only from the cross, still from this cross on which God made himself flesh: there is no salvation in ideas, there is no salvation in good will, in the desire to be good.” In reality, the Pope insisted, “the only salvation is in Christ crucified, because only he, as the bronze serpent signified, was able to take all the venom of sin and he healed us there.”
“But what is the cross for us?” is the question posed by Francis. “Yes, it is the sign of Christians, it is the symbol of Christians, and we make the sign of the cross, but we do not always do it well, sometimes we do it so so … because we do not have this faith in the cross,” emphasized the Pope. The cross, then, he stated, “for some people is a badge of belonging: ‘Yes, I carry the cross to show that I am a Christian.’ ” And “It’s fine,” but “not just as a badge, as if it were a team, the badge of a team’; but [rather], said Francis, “as the memory of the man who made himself sin, who made himself the devil, the serpent, for us; he debased himself up to the point of totally annihilating himself.” ...
https://onepeterfive.com/pope-francis-christ-made-himself-the-devil/
Well, to be fair to Bergoglio, he doesn't appear to be a Christian Catholic does he?
But back to The Maronite Priest, whom I will not name because not only is he a nice well-intentioned priest, his objective heresy is rampant among his brother priests in the Catholic Church - ABS has heard it many times over the years - and one way to combat the heresy is to know the orthodox exegesis of the verse.
To do that, we turn to Cornelius a Lapide:
Ver. 21.—Him who knew no sin. Experimentally, says S. Thomas, Christ knew no sin, though by simple knowledge He did, for He did no sin.
Hath made Him to be sin for us. For us, says Illyricus, who were sin; because, he says, sin is the substance and form of our soul. But to say this of ourselves is folly, of Christ blasphemy. (1.) The meaning is that God made Christ to be the victim offered for our sin, to prevent us from atoning for our sins by eternal death and fire. The Apostle plays on the word sin, for when he says, “Him who knew no sin,” he means sin strictly speaking; but when he says, “He made Him to be sin for us,” he employs a metonymy. So Ambrose, Theophylact, and Anselm. In Ps. xl. 12, Christ calls our sins His. (2.) Sin here denotes, says S. Thomas, the likeness of sinful flesh which He took, that He might be passible, just as sinners who are descended from Adam are liable to suffering. (3.) Sin, in the sense of being regarded by men as a noteworthy sinner, and being crucified as a malefactor. So the Greek Fathers.
Of these three interpretations the first is the more full, significant, and vigorous, and the one more consonant with the usage of Scripture, which frequently speaks of an expiatory victim as sin. Cf. Hosea iv. 8; Lev. iv. 24 and 21; Ezek. xliv. 29. The reason of this metonymy is that all the punishment and guilt of the sin were transferred to the expiatory victim, and so the sin itself might seem to be also transferred to it. In token of this the priest was accustomed to lay his hands on the victim, and call down on it the sins of the people; for by the hands are signified sinful actions, which are for the most part executed by the hands, as Theodoret says in his notes on Leviticus i. Therefore the laying of hands on the victim was both a symbol of oblation and a testimony of the transference of guilt to the victim, showing that it was expiatory, and that it bore the sin itself, with all its burden of guilt and punishment. In this way the high-priest on the great Day of Atonement turned a goat into the wilderness, having imprecated on it the sins of the whole people. Cf. Lev. xvi. 20.
That we might be made the righteousness of God in Him. (1.) That we might be made righteous before God, with the righteousness infused by God through the merits of Christ. So Chrysostom. He says righteousness and not righteous, says Theophylact, to signify the excellency of the grace, which effects that in the righteous there is no deformity, no stain of sin, but that there is complete grace and righteousness throughout. (2.) The righteousness of God was Christ made, in order that its effects, or the likeness of the uncreated righteousness of God, might be communicated to us by His created and infused righteousness. So Cyril (Thesaur. lib. xii. c. 3). (3.) Christ is so called because God owes not to us, but to Christ and His merits, the infusion of righteousness and the remission of our sins. Cf. Augustine (Enchirid. c. 41). Cf. also 1 Cor. i. 30. Heretics raise the objection that Christ was made for us sin, in the sense that our sin was imputed to Him and was punished in Him; therefore we are made the righteousness of God, because it is imputed to us. I answer that the two things are not parallel; for Christ could not really be a sinner as we can really be righteous, nor does the Apostle press the analogy. He only says that Christ bore our sins, that we through Him might be justified. Moreover, Christ actually was made sin, i.e., a victim for sin (this is the meaning of “sin” here), and therefore we truly become the righteousness of God. So easily and completely can we turn the tables on these Protestant objectors.