Lord Jesus as we gather together this Eastertide we pray with Paul that in all we say and all we do we might proclaim Christ crucified, that we might know him and the power of his resurrection, and that in the sharing of his sufferings become more like him.
So as we have been discussing the last few weeks, Eastertide, the 6 weeks after Easter, is a time for the church to continue to reflect on the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We have been doing that by reflecting on the stories of Jesus post resurrection encounters.
The week after Easter we read the story of the Jesus meeting two disciples on the road to Emmaus. In that story two disciples were walking to a town called Emmaus and discussing Jesus death and the women’s claim to have seen angels who told them he was raised. Jesus comes to these disciples, although they do not recognise him. He asks them what they are talking about and they tell him. To which Jesus responds, “Oh, how foolish you are and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! 26 Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” 27 Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.
Later, Jesus breaks bread with these disciples and they recognise him and he vanishes. And they say to each other “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?”
I find this story such an evocative story of how it often feels to experience the risen Christ. My heart too is slow to believe, to trust, to hope and yet at the same it burns within me, with yearning, with desire for Christ and his Kingdom.
And yet sometimes I find it rather frustrating that Luke does not tell us what Jesus said when he interpreted all the things about himself in the scriptures. In what I think is a rhetorical question Jesus asks them, “was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” I would love to know how he answered this question, how he explained the meaning of his suffering on the cross.
Those who wonder about this, about the meaning of the cross, about what actually happened when Jesus died and rose again and how exactly God or humans or the world change after this event, more often than not go to Paul. He is arguably, the person who has most influenced how it is that Christians have come to understand and to speak about what the cross means.
Some of us have perhaps been taught that there is only one way to understand the cross but there are actually a lot of different ways, you have probably heard of some. Penal substitution is probably the most influential in the modern world. That is the idea that Jesus’ death is a substitution for human sin but there are others, Ransom Theory, Satisfaction Theory, Moral Influence Theory and Christus Victor Theory, to name a few. I cannot go into all of them but the names give you some clues into their meanings.
Paul has been used to justify all these theories. It seems once people have landed on a particular one they think is true they shape all Paul’s thought to fit into it. But Paul draws on a vast array of imagery and it does not always fit neatly into any of these theories. Despite his reputation what Pauls says is often rather mysterious and elusive. In todays’ reading he says,
“For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel—and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power.18 For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”
But what does that mean? What is the power of the cross?
He goes on,
“For Jews ask for signs and Greeks desire wisdom, 23 but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles, 24 but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
Again, what does that mean. What does it mean to proclaim Christ crucified.
Fleming Rutledge in her book “The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ” (that Mikaila gave me) defines two overall categories that she believes can (more or less) encompass all the theories and the motifs or themes of Paul and the whole Bible.
The first category she gives the title Atonement. The category defines the cross as God’s definitive action in making vicarious atonement for sin. This category focuses on sin and guilt for which atonement needs to be made.
And
The second category she gives the title Deliverance. This category defines the cross as God’s decisive victory over the alien Powers of Sin and Death. This category focuses on the slavery, bondage and oppression from which humanity needs to be delivered.
She argues that these are two quite different ways of understanding Christ’s death but unless we can get something of a grip on both of them there will be something missing in our understanding.
And so over the next two weeks we will be exploring these two categories.
This week we will start with atonement and next week we will delve into deliverance.
So as said, the atonement category defines the cross as God’s definitive action in making vicarious atonement for sin. This category encompasses the idea that Jesus died on the cross for us, for our sins, in our place. It should have been us on the cross, getting what we deserved, but instead He who knew no sin sacrificed himself for us.
I think something like this is probably how most Christians would respond if they were asked to explain what happened on the cross. And it is, I think, a good and true answer.
However, at times this has been further explained like this, Jesus, the Son, was crucified by God, the Father, in order to appease his wrath at human beings because of all the things that they as individuals have done and will do wrong. This horrific sacrifice of the Son enabled the Father to love humanity again and they could go to heaven if they believed this.
This kind of rendering of the cross has led to critiques of the cross as glorifying suffering and encouraging violence. This critique, in particular, has come from feminists who have argued this has been particularly damaging to women who bare the brunt of that violence. Some have gone so far as to describe the crucifixion of Jesus as some kind of divine child abuse.
These critiques are important and necessary. But I agree with Rutledge who says that this version is a distortion of the doctrine of atonement, not the doctrine itself. We might need to be more careful in the way we explain it in a couple of ways that I will outline, but we need not eliminate it.
Firstly, we need be careful to avoid any interpretation that separates Father and Son. This is a complete misunderstanding of the Trinity and how the Triune God working at Calvary. Rutledge describes it like this,
“God the Father and God the Son together with a single will enacted the eternal purpose of God, that the second person of the blessed Trinity would become one for all the perfect offering for us human beings and our salvation.”
Secondly, we need to be careful about interpretations that make it sound as though God had to have his mind changed by a human sacrifice. Again, it is crucial to maintain the agency of three persons of the Trinity. The Son is not intervening to change the Father’s disposition toward us. His disposition towards us remains the same as ever – unfailingly determined upon our redemption. Rutledge again,
The purpose of the atonement was not to bring about a change in God’s attitude toward his rebellious creatures. God’s attitude toward us has always and ever been the same. Judgement against sin is preceded, accompanied, and followed by God’s mercy. There was never a time when God was against us. Even in his wrath he is for us. Yet at he same time his will to destroy all that is hostile to perfecting his world. The paradox of the cross demonstrates the victorious love of God for us at the same time that it shows forth his judgement upon sin.
We need to put to rest any sense of the cross as placating, appeasing, deflecting the anger of, or satisfying the wrath of God. We must reject images of an enraged vindictive old man in the sky. In saying that we need not and should not reject the language altogether. Rutledge yet again, “this language does express the eternal opposition of God to all that would hurt and destroy his good creation.”
Some modern people have become deeply sceptical, hostile even, to the idea of Jesus dying for our sins, I understand this, I was one of them. And while as I have discussed we need to be careful in the way we explain this I have come to think that any understanding of the cross that does not take seriously, what Anselm called “the gravity of sin” will be seriously lacking. We live in a world in which the richest 1% of the population hold 45% of the world’s wealth while the poorest 45% have less than 1%, in which literally the world’s richest man is enabled to make the decision to cut aid to the world’s poorest nations, in which islands in the Pacific, who contribute 0.03% of the world’s greenhouse gases are the on the frontline of the climate catastrophe, in which a government can decide to just give away 40 gigalitres of water per year despite objections from the community who depend on that water for their survival, and in which obscenely rich men like Jefferey Epstein, Puff Daddy and others are enabled to traffic and abuse other human beings simply to gratify their own lurid desires without any acknowledgement of the humanity of the other. I could go on – slavery, war, genocide, the abuse of children. If we see this and our blood does not boil, we have not understood the depths of God.
And I want to believe this all has nothing to do with me but the truth is the same desire for more, for power, recognition and revenge that is behind all this is in me. We must acknowledge that something is wrong and needs to be put right. And not only with the whole human situation but with one’s own self. To do this God is willing to endure in our place, even the horror of crucifixion. In the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, of South Africa, “forgiveness is not cheap, is not facile. It is costly. Reconciliation is not an easy option. It cost God the death of his Son.
This is the power of the cross. The mystery we proclaim when we proclaim Christ crucified.
Although, without wanting to sound like an infomercial, there is more. Unsurprisingly, there is more than just one thing happening on the cross of Christ. Next week we will delve into the notion of the cross as Deliverance.
But I will sum up this week with a final quote from Rutledge, I recognise this sermon has been dense, if all you remember is this, that’s ok. “In the cross there is no sorrow God has not known, no grief he has not borne, no price he was unwilling to pay, in order to reconcile the world to himself in Christ. . . it is a love that has endured the bitterest realties of suffering and death in order that its purposes might prevail. . .
