Saved
– but how?
Texts: Genesis 6.9-22; 7.24; 8.14-19; Romans 1.16-17;
3.22b-31; Matthew 7.21-29
According to the Apostle Paul, you and I are made right in God’s eyes
not by our keeping of God’s law or commandments, but by our faith in
God’s gracious gift of righteousness which, we are told, comes to us by
way of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross. In this event,
we are told, God reconciles us to himself, for the death of Jesus is
not just any death. It is a sacrifice of atonement that takes
away our sin and reconciles us to God. Therefore, says Paul,
there can be no room for boasting in the Christian community. Who
we are and what we have is a gift, pure and simple. No one can
brag about how much they’ve achieved, because the power to be right in
God’s eyes is a power that comes not from the human person, but from
God.
Surely we moderns would have a few questions to ask about all this,
however. If God is willing to forgive our sins, no matter how
good or bad we’ve been, why doesn’t he just get on and do that without
any fuss? Why is it necessary to have all this complicated
business about sacrificing Jesus on the cross? Wouldn’t it have
been easier for God to say “I’m o.k., you’re o.k.” and leave it at
that? And wouldn’t Jesus himself have been significantly better
off?
Well, a number of theories have been put forward to explain why Jesus
had to die, some of them better than others. The one that has
been most influential in our own Reformed tradition was put forward by
Jean Calvin, and is often known as the theory of ‘penal
substitution’. Here God is likened to a Lawmaker and Judge who,
having made the laws that define sin and goodness, is now compelled to
enforce that law for the sake of consistency, even if the consequences
are catastrophic. For if the penalty of sin is death, then all
are destined to suffer the punishment of death, for all have
sinned. Now, that can be put in a more nuanced way, of
course. One could argue that death is not a penalty that God
imposes so much as the interior meaning of sin itself—i.e. that sin is
the beginning of death in the midst of life, because it is a straying
from God as the source of life—but the result, in the end, is still the
same. That everyone who sins dies, and that God, having made a
universe in which it works like that, is still ultimately responsible
for the fact. What Calvin proposed as a way of salvation for us
all, then, was the death of the righteous man Jesus, in the place of
the rest of humanity, who are sinners. Jesus is punished instead
of us. Jesus dies in our place, so that we don’t have to be
punished at all.
Now, there are a number of rather obvious problems with this account,
popular and influential as it has been. First, how is it possible
that the sacrifice of only one righteous man manages to pay the debt of
sin for all people? Isn’t there are serious mismatch there?
Why would God, under his own rule of an ‘eye for an eye, a tooth for a
tooth’ wipe out the debt of millions? Second, an more seriously
in my view, isn’t there something a little immoral in letting people
off the hook so easily? If people who are troubled by their own
sins, or the sins of their world, turn up to church and all we have to
tell them is that “God is no longer angry about your sin—all God’s
anger was spent on Jesus”, I’m not sure that they’re going to be that
impressed. Because the next day they’re going to be caught up in
sin all over again, and they’re not going to feel that sin has been
finally dealt with. There is something deep in the human psyche
that knows jolly well that sin cannot be entirely done away with apart
from an an act of the will, a deeply moral choice to turn away from
one’s past and live differently. We all know that moral truth,
deep down. From that perspective, then, a God who lets us off the
hook apart from that moral striving would be an immoral God. Note
that Paul himself, at the end of the passage we read just now, does not
exempt Christians from keeping the law of God. Finally then, the
biggest problem with the “penal substitution” theory of atonement is
that it is all so objective and impersonal. It’s like “O, so
Jesus suffered the punishment for my sin? Right. And all
this happened two-thousand years ago? Right. Well. That’s
great, I guess, but why don’t I feel forgiven?” To
summarise: we all know, deep down, that an objective transaction
between Jesus and his Father a long time ago is of no real help for us
right now, in this world, at this time, in the midst of the broken
lives we are dealing with.
So, if Jesus didn’t die to take God’s punishment for my sins, what
possible purpose can there be in his death? And, more
importantly, what relevance (if any) has that death for us today, here
in the midst of our struggles with sins both personal and
international? Well, strangely enough, some of the answers can be
found in the passage we just read. For what Paul says about the
death of Jesus is this: that his sacrificial death effects an
atonement or a reconciliation between God and ourselves.
Sacrificial. That word is the key. Let me dwell on that for
a moment. Now, any biologist will tell you that in order for some
kinds of lives to continue, other lives have to come to an end.
In order for human beings to stay alive, plants and animals have to
lose their lives. This pattern is repeated a hundred times over
in the biosphere of which we are merely a part. Now, this simple
biological fact has been dramatised since ancient times by means of
various rituals of sacrifice. For the Jewish people, a system of
ritual animal and vegetable sacrifices served to remind them that their
lives were made possible because of death. What the Jews added to
this basic anthropological understanding, though, was a theology—a
story about what this might mean for God. God, they believed, had
made a personal sacrifice even in creating the world. For the
existence of the world spoke of a God who had chosen to limit or
sacrifice God’s influence and power so that another reality or power, a
cosmos, could come into being—a cosmos inhabited by beings who were
genuinely free to exercise an independent will and power over and
against the will and power of God. Theologically, one could then
say that life itself, especially human life, can only be because God
chose, and continues to choose, to sacrifice something of his
sovereignty out of a desire to form a relationship or covenant with a
cosmos and humanity that are in no way simply puppets, plaything of
divine power. What this Jewish theology means, of course, is that
God can no longer be thought as a monarch or tyrant who always gets his
way. On the contrary, this God is one who freely chooses to be
vulnerable, vulnerable to all that we human beings would do. God
sacrifices God’s power and will that we human beings, might be capable
centres of will and power as well. We do not, of course, use our
freedom and power particularly well. By and large, we have used
our will and power to turn away from God, making the world according to
our own independent vision.
In this perspective, the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross should be
seen, first of all, as a divine self-sacrifice. Not the killing
of an innocent man to turn aside the wrath of an angry tyrant, but a
potent and effective symbol of the way God was, and is, and always will
be with the world. A God who sacrifices his own power and will to
create the possibility of relationship with his others, with you and
me. For Jesus is not simply you and me. He is God, the
divine Son who goes out from the Father to invite all to turn away from
the terrible wastefulness of sin, and be reconciled to God. Jesus
is God’s invitation to turn, to repent, and to accept God’s ever-new
invitation to be reconciled with God in making a world that is finally
healed and whole, a world of peace or shalom. Jesus is God’s
invitation to forgiveness which is, of course, nothing other than the
making-new of a broken relationship.
But there is another aspect to the sacrifice of Jesus, and this is the
bit of the story that Calvin and his followers have never, ever come to
terms with. The sacrifice of Jesus, you see, is a symbol not only
of God’s sacrifice for our sake, but also of humanity’s sacrifice for
God’s sake. Let me repeat that. The cross of Jesus is a
symbol not only of God’s sacrifice for our sake, but also of humanity’s
sacrifice for God’s sake. Jesus, you see, is not only God.
He is a human being who shares our nature in every way. He is one
who has none of the privileges of his father: he does not see
all, he does not understand all, he cannot do anything that he wishes
to. Christ confronted his own future with nothing other than the
resources that are given to everyone. In that, he was utterly and
entirely human. Yet, and this is crucial, Christ is unique in the
pantheon of human histories because he used his freedom, his will, and
his personal resources, not to please himself alone, nor even to serve
to collective will of his society and culture, but to do the will of
his Father God. What Christ desired, more than anything else it
seems, was to love and serve the one who loved and served him. In
this perspective, the sacrifice of Christ is the sacrifice that any
human being could make if they really and truly desired relationship
with God: the putting away of all that keeps us from knowing and
loving God, all those other unhealthy addictions and allegiances, so
that there is room in our lives for what God might will and
desire. In that sense, Christ is what each of us might be if we
truly loved and trusted God.
This, then, is how the death of Jesus saves us, right here and now, in
the midst of the world we must negotiate every day. It reminds us
that God is no tyrant, but one who continually sacrifices his very life
that we might be alive and free. It reminds us that God is
continually inviting us to have done with the way things have always
been, the seared, bleared practices of sin and despair and
socially-sanctioned violence, turning instead towards a reconciled
relationship with God, a reconciliation that makes for peace, justice
and love in the world. But the death of Jesus reminds us, also,
that there are no short-cuts to reconciliation with God. We, too,
are called to make our sacrifice. For that is how it is with
relationship. Each partner receives his or her life from the
other, from the other’s willingness to be hospitable, to make space in
their hearts for other’s desires and dreams. So let’s face the
fact, squarely: in a world such as ours, making room for God’s
dreams means, in the end, a very costly putting aside or sacrificing of
many of our own dreams, those dreams bequeathed to us by family and
society—the dream of a prosperity that doesn’t include people other
than own family or tribe, for example. Without dying to such
things, says the gospel, without joining with Jesus in his deliberately
counter-cultural lifestyle, there can be no salvation.
The grace offered us in Christ, you see, is not cheap grace but costly
grace. Yes God has invited us to his banqueting-table. Yes,
God has sacrificed his own self in order to make it possible for us to
be reconciled with joy. Yes, God has shown us to the way in
Christ. But no, we will never get there unless we struggle daily
to make Christ’s way our own, to accept God’s grace in the shape of a
daily discipleship that calls upon the power of Christ’s Spirit in
order to resist the spirit of the world in which we live. That is
how Christ saves us: by calling us to sacrifice ourselves as God
has done already, so that in dying to this world and its sin, we might
have done with such things, and share in the glorious future of the
children of God.
In the name of God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—as in the beginning, so
now and forever, world without end. Amen.
Garry
J. Deverell
2nd Sunday after Pentecost, 2005
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