Christ our Redeemer
Text:  Titus 2.11-14

Welcome everyone to this Christmas Eucharist.

One of the theological words we often hear at Christmastime is the word ‘redeem’ or ‘redemption’.  It occurs, for example, in the passage we read from Titus just now:

[Jesus Christ] gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous in doing good.

Tonight, just for a few moments, I want to explore what it might mean to believe in Jesus as our ‘Redeemer’.

The notion of redemption originates with a peculiarly Jewish understanding of property.  In ancient times the Jews believed that the land of Israel has been given them by God in an act of pure grace.  Each tribe and family was given a portion of the land as their inheritance, and this portion was to remain in the family forever as reminder that the gift of God can be neither bought not sold.  This meant that while the land could be leased to another family, for up to fifty years in theory, the title could never be permanently transferred to another family.  If someone else took possession of the land, you could always invoke the ‘right of redemption’, that is, you could always pay out their lease and bring the land back under your direct control.

Now, while the idea of redemption originally pertained to property alone, it was not long before Jewish thinkers began to apply it to the human person, to the people of Israel themselves.  There is a sense, these thinkers argued, in which every citizen of Israel belongs to God, whether in body or spirit.  The Jew as an individual, or as a tribe or nation, might then take a lease out on themselves, if you like, giving their bodies into the service of some other power for a while.  But in the end, no matter how ignoble or immoral those powers be, the Jewish body belonged to God, and God could therefore invoke his right of redemption at any time.

Late in Israel’s national history ‘redemption’ became another word for ‘salvation’ or ‘liberation’.  For by this time it has become clear that the nation has leased its body politic out to causes that made not for health and peace, but only for destruction and strife.  When the prophets came along to point this out, they began to speak of God as one who would rescue Israel from such miserable ends by invoking his right of redemption.  All Israel will be saved, they promised, because God is near to claim his ownership and pay the price of redemption.

And so we come to Christ.  In Christian theology, Christ is sometimes pictured as the divine redeemer who comes to claim his people back from their service to various sins and powers of evil.  But he is just as often pictured as the price that God pays in order to make that redemption possible.  In the passage from Titus, both pictures are present.  Christ is the redeemer, who claims us back from our destructive service to the power of ‘iniquity’; but he does this by a giving of himself ‘for us’.  Here Christ makes of his own body the redemption-price for taking back our own bodies.  In this view, the crucifixion of Christ is a price paid to the devil, and to all the powers that maim and destroy, that we might be freed and return to God’s possession.  Now, as with all theological imagery, we should not press the metaphor too far.  If we do, if we get too literal with this talk of paying a price, we might end up missing some of the other important meanings of the cross, most importantly its power to speak of God’s loving solidarity with his most wretched creatures.  Yet, the metaphor of the redeemer has a powerful legitimacy all of its own.

I want you to notice—in Titus, and in the whole of the Christian story—why it is that Christ is born to be our redeemer.  Not to free us from evil so that we are able to do as we wish, following our own lights to whatever future we choose.  Not to get us off the hook so that we can lease ourselves out to sin and evil all over again.  No.  Christ redeems us, as Titus says, ‘to train us to renounce impiety and worldly addictions, so that we can live lives that are self-controlled, upright and godly’.  Christ redeems us, in other words, so that we can return to the purpose for which God first made covenant with us:  in the words of St. Augustine, ‘to worship God and enjoy him forever.’  It is the contention of Holy Scripture that human beings will only find happiness, contentment, peace and the like, if we are willing to submit ourselves, freely, to God’s possession.  If we do it out of a sense of duty, of course we shall never find what is promised.  But if we do so freely, if we have courage to recognise that we have belonged to God from the beginning, then we shall find that God has already given us all that we spend our lives slaving for in a largely unsuccessful manner:  hope, peace, love, joy.  

Christmas, then, is not a one-off.  It is not the once-per-year visitation to God that it has become in contemporary Western society.  Christmas, rather, is the beginning of a pilgrimage in which the Christian learns how to live as human beings were destined to live.  In this, the Christian takes as his or her model Christ, God with a human face, the one who gave himself away in order that we might find ourselves anew in him.  If we are really to learn of this Christ, then Christmas is not enough.  We must immerse ourselves in Christ’s whole life—not only his baby-stage, but his adulthood and his teaching, and his confrontation with the powers of this world.  Only then shall we find what we are looking for, and it is the whole purpose of the Church and its daily disciplines of prayer and worship to help us do just that.

A blessed and holy Christmas to you all.  Glory be to God—Father, Son & Holy Spirit—as in the beginning, so now and forever, world without end.  Amen.

Garry J. Deverell
Christmas Eve 2005

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