St. Maximus the Confessor explains one of the more difficult verses in sacred Scripture: "For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him" (2 Cor 5:21). This is a reading of Question 42 from "On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios".

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St. Maximus taught:

Because Adam’s natural power of free choice was corrupted first, it corrupted nature together with itself, losing the grace of impassibility. And thus the fall of free choice from the good toward evil became the first and blameworthy sin. The second sin, which came about as a result of the first, was the blameless alteration of nature from incorruptibility to corruption. Thus two sins came about in the forefather through his transgression of the divine commandment: the first was blameworthy, but the second was blameless, having been caused by the first.

And for our sakes, through the passibility of nature, He became sin, but He did not commit voluntary sin, thanks to the immutability of His free choice—to the contrary, He corrected the passibility of nature through the incorruptibility of His faculty of free choice, making the end of nature’s passibility, by which I mean death, into the beginning of the transformation of our nature into incorruptibility.

The Lord, then, did not know my sin, that is, the turning away of my free will: He did not assume my sin, neither did He become my sin, but [He became] sin because of me; that is, He assumed the corruption of nature which came about through the turning away of my free choice, and He became, for our sake, man passible by nature, abolishing my sin through the sin that came about because of me.

The condemnation of my freely chosen sin—I mean, of human nature’s passible, corruptible, and mortal elements—was assumed by the Lord, who for my sake became “sin” in terms of passibility, corruption, and mortality, voluntarily by nature assuming my condemnation—though He is without condemnation in His free choice—so that He might condemn the sin of my free choice and nature as well as my condemnation, simultaneously expelling sin, passibility, corruption, and death from nature, bringing about a new mystery concerning me, who had fallen through disobedience: the dispensation of Him, who for my sake and out of His love for mankind, voluntarily appropriated my condemnation through His death, through which He granted that I be called back and restored to immortality.
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