Natures do not sin, persons do. The Church teaches that Christ had both a human and Divine nature, but He was most definately a Divine Person, and therefore could not sin without ceasing to be Himself since to sin is to go against the Divine, to go against God.
Peace and God bless!
Verita:
Exactly, and how can God disobey himself? God cannot sin. Jesus was fully human, yes. But he was also fully God and therefore could not sin.
Let me say first of all that if anyone can demonstrate that I’m wrong I will gladly change my understanding of this. By demonstrate I mean from Church documents (e.g. the Cathechism) or from Scripture. In the meantime I continue.
As I said before Jesus was fully human with a human will. He was like us in all things but sin. He could not sin in his Divine nature but he could sin in his human nature.
467 The Monophysites affirmed that the human nature had ceased to exist as such in Christ when the divine person of God’s Son assumed it. Faced with this heresy, the fourth ecumenical council, at Chalcedon in 451, confessed:
Following the holy Fathers, we unanimously teach and confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ: the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and
truly man, composed of rational soul and body; consubstantial with the Father as to his divinity
and consubstantial with us as to his humanity; “
like us in all things but sin”. He was begotten from the Father before all ages as to his divinity and in these last days, for us and for our salvation, was born as to his humanity of the virgin Mary, the Mother of God.(CCC 467)
Moreover scripture tells us
“In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered;
and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him, (Heb 5:7-9).
Jesus never could have sinned. He was impeccable. His purpose in coming down was to be the pure, unblemished sacrificial lamb. If he had sinned this would have been impossible.
Jesus came to be the pure unblemished lamb, that it why he had to become perfect. He could have sinned, but he didn’t.
When we are baptized we are forgiven original sin. But as the Catechism says certain temporal consequences remain.
1264 Yet certain temporal consequences of sin remain in the baptized, such as suffering, illness, death, and such frailties inherent in life as weaknesses of character, and so on, as well as an inclination to sin that Tradition calls concupiscence, or metaphorically, “the tinder for sin” (fomes peccati); since concupiscence “is left for us to wrestle with, it cannot harm those who do not consent but manfully resist it by the grace of Jesus Christ.” Indeed, “an athlete is not crowned unless he competes according to the rules.”(CCC 1264)
Jesus competed according to the rules – and won – and therefore received the crown.
