Reflections on the Way to Easter
Every year many of our Christian denominations observe the season of Lent, the 40 days prior to Easter, as a time for reflection on the things most important in our faith. And even for us folks who belong to non-liturgical denominations it seems natural to engage in such reflections during the days leading up to Holy Week. So I have begun this year to engage in some of my own reflections concerning the meaning of the Easter events.
My thoughts have taken me back to my childhood understandings of Jesus’ crucifixion. Christian theology has had some fancy theological names for the view I received in earlier years, the most common being the theory of “propitiation,” or “penal substitution.” But I came to understand it as “the Tom Sawyer theory.” When I was growing up the elder folks in our church suggested to us that Jesus’ death was a kind of “sacrifice” that put us sinners in a right relationship with God. So far, so good.
But these good teachers and ministers also gave me to understand that such a sacrifice was a kind of punishment—that in ancient times when people sinned, God was angry, and that both God’s anger and God’s justice had to be satisfied by God’s seeing some punishment take place. And for some strange reason, it did not necessarily have to be the sinner himself or herself who took the punishment. I was told that spotless lambs had served the Jews quite nicely for centuries! But then Jesus came along and offered Himself as the “true” “Lamb of God,” so that from that point God’s anger and God’s justice would be satisfied permanently if people just let Jesus serve as our sacrifice. Not only would God be happy, and not only would we sinners be happy, but no doubt so would many a spotless lamb!
Now obviously that concept raised questions with us teenagers, so those good amateur Baptist theologians in our congregation provided us with an analogy. “Did you ever read Tom Sawyer?” they asked. “It’s right there in chapter 20,” they said. Now when you read that chapter, here is what you find: One day in school Tom’s girlfriend Becky Thatcher got curious about a book the schoolmaster, Mr. Dobbins, often read in his free moments. Mr. Dobbins had a secret desire to become a physician, and the book was Gray’s Anatomy.
On this particular day Mr. Dobbins was out of the vicinity, and Becky got the book out of the desk drawer and browsed through it. Just as she opened it to a full illustration of the naked human figure, she tore the page by accident. She quickly placed the book back in its drawer. Later, Mr. Dobbins discovered the torn page and began to seek out the culprit. As he gathered his wrath, his eyes searched every face in the room. It was well-known in the class that Mr. Dobbins had an eagle eye that could look into a person’s eyes and find guilt or innocence clearly written there.
And the schoolmaster began to look each student in the eyes: “Benjamin Rogers, did you tear this book?” A denial. “Joseph Harper, did you?” Another denial. “Amy Lawrence?” Another denial. Then his eyes fell on Becky Thatcher, who began to turn white with terror and had what Tom Sawyer described as the look of a “hunted and helpless rabbit.” Before she could respond to Mr. Dobbins, Tom sprang to his feet and shouted, “I done it!” And of course, Tom ended up taking the licking that Becky should have taken, and won Becky’s heart in the process.
Well, they used to tell us that Jesus’ death on the cross was a lot like that picture—that God needed somebody punished, and spotless lambs just weren’t good enough anymore. So Jesus volunteered to take the punishment for the rest of us—at least for those of us who were willing to believe that process was what God wanted—and we were then put in right relationship with God.
Now obviously that somewhat oversimplified analogy scarcely does justice to the more precise formulations of the theologians, either ancient or modern. But that’s the way it came down the pike in our local congregation, and I think that it’s pretty much the way many an unsophisticated believer still gets it in many a small rural or suburban neighborhood congregation in our country even today.
Now if that view provides a person comfort, I would hesitate to deny it unless I were able to share something more satisfying to take its place. Over the years I questioned those earlier views because they did not satisfy my own sense of the character of God, or even the requirements of logic. In Tom Sawyer’s case, Mr. Dobbins had no way of knowing that Tom was not the guilty party. But of course, Jesus’ crucifixion was never intended to deceive God. And Mr. Dobbins, if he had known that Becky was the guilty one, certainly would not have been satisfied to punish Tom, who was innocent. And most certainly, neither would God want to punish an innocent person for the sins of the guilty. To suggest otherwise, it seemed to me, would be to defame the very character of God.
Could it ever be true that God’s justice is satisfied, and that God’s anger about sin is dissipated, just because some punishment takes place, regardless of whether the one punished is the guilty sinner or not? Cannot something more positive be said? Far be it from me to claim that I have absolute knowledge and understanding of God’s purposes or methods! To the entire world that day in Jerusalem some nearly 2000 years ago the crucifixion of Jesus was simply the execution of a revolutionary. And it is only by a faith interpretation that any person can come to a different conclusion.
But from my standpoint as a person of faith I want to advance some positive suggestions for interpreting the Good Friday event. These thoughts are certainly not original with me, but here they are for what they are worth. I have come to believe that, whatever atonement or reconciliation with God there might be as a result of the death of Jesus, it does not come about because of what evil or misguided human beings did to Jesus. It comes about, I believe, because of what Jesus did in offering Himself freely to God and to other human beings; and this offering was not solely in His death, but also in His life.
Here was a human being, in Whom, we Christians have come to believe, God was working uniquely. He was willing to die rather than fail to love a fellow human being, willing to die rather than fail to tell the truth, willing to die rather than sin. I’m not certain whether Jesus Himself understood His life and death in terms of the suffering servant concept of Isaiah 53, although I think He might have. But I am personally convinced that His life and death were at least one fulfillment of that concept, even if not the only one.
Furthermore, I am convinced that God does not begin to love us just because Christ died for us. Rather, it is the other way around. Christ died for us because God has always loved us. The “sacrifice” of Jesus on the cross, however else one might interpret its significance, was one expression (and for us Christians it was the supreme expression) of the love that God has always had for those whom He created.
From my standpoint as a Baptist Christian, Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross was not an offering that we human beings gave to God in order to change God’s “desires” for, or “attitude” toward, us human beings. On the contrary, Jesus’ self-sacrificing life and death constituted an offering that God provided in order to change us human beings.
The cross of Jesus was never meant to effect a change in the attitude of God toward humankind. It was never meant to turn Divine hostility into love, to make God our friend instead of our enemy, or to fulfill some “need” in God to see some punishment take place for the sins of human beings. On the contrary, the cross of Jesus gave expression to the love that God has always had for the human beings whom He created. Those are the beginning points for my own understanding of Jesus’ life and death in relation to the idea of atonement.
Suppose you saw down a tree. If you look closely, you will notice a lot of tree rings. Those rings go up the tree from the roots to the very top. But you see the rings only at the point where the tree was cut. For us Christians the cross of Christ is like that. The cross, we Christians have come to believe, had its origin in the eternal purpose of God; but it was, nevertheless, an event in human history, wrought out at one particular time and place, in the life of a human being in whom God worked in a unique way. We see God's love at the place where the cut in the tree occurred, the crucifixion.
But I want to suggest to you that God always has been and always will be like that—offering Himself to His creation and even suffering on their behalf. When I read the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, I am compelled to conclude that our sins break more than laws; they break God’s loving heart as well. As C. A. Dinsmore once put it, “There was a cross in the heart of God long before there was one planted on that green hill outside Jerusalem.”
The witness of the New Testament is that Jesus’ death was the result of His dedication to the will of God. It was the inevitable conclusion of the sinless, obedient life He lived. And it was the result of human beings’ dedication to their sinful ways. Jesus’ life was poured out in complete self-giving and self-denial, and thus expressed God’s own self-offering to humanity.
The will of God is behind the giving of life, not the taking of it. Jesus gave His life; but Judas’ betrayal was his own guilty act, contrary to, and not expressive of God’s will. Redemption is in Jesus’ giving of His life, not in human taking of that life. There is nothing magically redemptive in what evil human beings did to Jesus. But redemption belongs to God’s sacrificial offering in the Person of Jesus Christ, Who both lived and died for us.
It is so easy sometimes to think of both God and sin as impersonal entities, and atonement as simply a mechanical operation. I still don’t have a complete theory about it. But I begin and end with the belief that God loves, and has always loved, sinful and rebellious humanity.
Thanks Mike. A good thoughtful approach.
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