'Saved by the Cross of Christ'. But How?

 Text:  Romans 3.22b-31

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 puts aside the sin that estranges us from God so that we might be reconciled to God once more. 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 the free sacrifice of God’s own son for our sake.

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 God 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 championed 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—which I think is right. Yet the logical 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 argued for, as a way of salvation for us all, 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.

There are a number of rather obvious problems with this account. 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, and 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 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 corporate? 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 it is his sacrificial death that 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 botanist or zoologist 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, for example, 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 God’s sovereignty out of a desire to form a relationship or covenant with a cosmos and humanity that are in no way simply puppets, playthings 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 of costly love. A God who sacrifices God’s own 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 the 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 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 real world we must negotiate every day. It reminds us that God is no tyrant, but one who continually sacrifices God’s own life that we might be alive and free. It reminds us that God is continually inviting us to have done with evil and violence and turn, 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 idols such as these, 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. I quote Bonhoeffer once more, of course. Yes, God has invited us to God’s banqueting-table. Yes, God has sacrificed God’s 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 to resist the spirit of the world in which we live. That is how Christ saves us: by calling us to sacrifice ourselves, via a thoroughgoing participation in Jesus’ own sacrifice, 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.

Garry Deverell

St Paul's Catheral

Evensong, 7th Sunday after Pentecost

Behold, I am making all things new!

Texts: Acts 11.1-18; Psalm 148; Revelation 21.1-6; John 13.31-35

‘I am making everything new . . .  The old order of things has passed away’.  These are the words of the one who sits upon the throne of heaven in John’s apocalyptic vision.  John writes for a church that is being persecuted under the tyranny of Rome.  It is crying out with a grief and pain that echoes that of Israel under the Pharaohs in Egypt.  What the seer has to say is meant to create a new hope for all who weep.  He imagines a completely new world, a new universe, where the apparent gap between the present reality and the promised peace of God is finally and completely bridged.  God will himself come to dwell with his suffering people and every tear they have ever shed will be wiped away and the thirst of all who cry out for justice will finally be quenched.

This is a bold theology, a theology that many a self-proclaimed ‘realist’ is likely to decry with words that echo Karl Marx’s critique of religion as nothing more than an ‘opiate’ for suffering people.  Is the hope of the Seer false?  Is his theology merely a panacea for pain rather than a genuine cure?  Not, I think, if one also believes in the truth of the Easter proclamation that ‘Christ is risen’.  For in the writing of that other John, John the evangelist, we find an Easter hope that actually begins in the midst of reality as it is, the reality of suffering, pain and injustice.  ‘Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him.’ (13.31).  This is John’s way of saying that the transformation of the whole creation from a dark place of suffering into a bright place of blissful peace is beginning right now with something that will happen to Jesus.  But when is it beginning?  Well, read the verse before this one.  ‘As soon as Judas had taken the bread, he went out.  And it was night.’  According to John, the transformation of the world begins not with Easter morning and with shouts of resurrection, but with the betrayal of Jesus by his friend Judas in the dead of night on a very ordinary Thursday.  This is where the transformation begins.  Here. With betrayal and failure and the departure of all that is good and true and noble.  The transformation begins then, in the midst of failure, the failure of all those moral codes that rule our society, our religion, our hearts.

That this breakdown can be not only an ending and a loss, but also the chance for a new beginning – a revolution, indeed – can be seen from the story of Peter’s vision at Joppa that we read in Acts.  Here we find out how the earliest church of the Jews learned that God loves the Gentiles too.  But it was a difficult lesson.  It was a lesson that the church could only learn with great a deal of pain and disorientation and loss.  For at the time of Jesus, Peter and Paul, most self-respecting Jews believed, deep down in their marrow, that it was only the people of Israel who were beloved of God.  Other races or ethnic groups, the 'gentiles' as they were called, had not been 'chosen' as Israel was, and were therefore unworthy of inclusion in God's family.  This understanding was carried into the earliest Christian church, which clearly believed that God's message of salvation in Christ was for the Jewish people only.  But all that is changed by a vision Peter saw one day in the trading city of Joppa . . .

Peter's vision was absolutely decisive for the earliest churches.  It showed them that Jesus had died not just for the Jews, but for everyone on the planet.  It also showed them that the most important matters of faith were not doctrinal purity and ethical legalism, but unconditional love and the works of compassion that flow from that love.  It's very instructive, I think, that the Spirit was given to Cornelius before either he or his family signed any doctrinal statement or made any promises about the ethical life.  God, at least, simply accepted them as they were.  Peter says of that experience, 'if God gave them the same gift as he gave us, who believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to think that I could oppose God?'

Nevertheless, it seems there are a lot of folks around these days who want to oppose God's universal love.  And they invariably do it in the name of some kind of moral code that has not yet been broken by the gospel of transformative love.  There are some who do it more obviously.  People like those in the neo-Nazi movement, who believe that God's earth is only for people with white skin and an Anglo-Saxon or Germanic background.  Consequently they persecute and terrorise anyone who is Asian, Hispanic or black.  Or the right-wing extremists of Christian America who believe that Christian faith and being homosexual are mutually exclusive options.  So they set up programmes to 'rescue' gays from their sin.  Or, worse still, they form gangs who wander the night streets looking for vulnerable young men to harass.

But there are others who oppose God's universal love in less obvious ways, which are nevertheless just as damaging.  This week the nation has celebrated ANZAC day.  ANZAC day celebrates a collection of myths that enshrine a particular moral code, a moral code that considers it a great good that a man or woman should sacrifice their lives for the glory of the nation.  The ANZAC mythology also says that it is a good thing, a thing to be memorialized and celebrated, that a man or woman should sacrifice the prohibition against killing another human being for the glory of the nation.  People who do this, so the ANZAC code of morality tells us, will be treated as heroes.  They will be given medals and honoured in parades.  Now I know very well that this is not ALL that ANZAC day celebrates.  I know very well that there is a legitimate mourning for fallen and traumatised comrades there in the mix as well.  But consider for a moment the terrible contradiction that recognition sets up, both for soldiers and for the nation.  On the one hand, the solider is told to kill other human beings, and to do so for the glory of the nation.  On the other hand, the soldiers who do so are then condemned to live with the terrible horror of what they have done for the rest of their lives.  Today the guilt and depression of that heart of darkness has been psychologised as ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’, but that name erases as much as it reveals. It erases the fact that even the most prestigious medal and even the most honorific parade cannot take away the simple fact that to kill another human being is to disown life itself, ANZAC morality notwithstanding.

Contrast the injunction to kill another human being for the glory of the nation with the compassion we are called to by Christ.  'A new commandment I give you' says Jesus.  'Love one another as I have loved you'.  The Greek word agape, here translated 'love' is probably being connected by John with a Hebrew word, hesed, meaning 'unconditional compassion or kindness'.  Compassion means, of course, to 'suffer with' someone.  And love in the agapic sense means to care for someone without condition.  So the love which Jesus calls us to exercise is a love like his own: an unjudging, unconditional compassion for all who suffer in whatever way.  It's the kind of love exemplified in our time by Mother Teresa, who cared for the social outcasts of Indian society, even though that meant breaking the very fabric of Hindu morality.  Such love perseveres beyond the boundaries of our various moral codes.  If any such code gets in the way of love, it must be broken!

The kind of love Christ calls us to offer is far from sentimental or traditionalistic.  It is very costly because it is a call to share the darkness of any who are hurting even to the point of shattering our most persistent notions of what is virtuous and just.  This is a very motherly kind of love.  A mother simply loves the ones she has given birth to, even if they pierce her heart, which they inevitably do to one degree or another.  A mother keeps loving even if her children go places and do things she would rather they didn't.  A mother keeps loving even when the pain of sharing her child's confusion and mistakes is very great.  So the call to love is a call to imitate the motherly love of God.

On this day which celebrates Easter, the ending that is a new beginning, let us learn this lesson: that the love of God is a shattering of the moral codes by which we live in order that we might be open to a world that no longer needs or depends on such codes.  Let us learn that the unconditional love of mothers actually provides us with a powerful picture of the transformative love of God in Jesus Christ.  For it shows us how love can plant a seed of hope in even the darkest of places, the darkest of times.  It reveals how such love may start a revolution that is eventually able to turn gentile-haters into gentile-lovers or betrayers of Christ into lovers of Christ.  In this we might even come to see that the hope of Christians is a real hope, a hope planted in the bedrock of what happened to the Christ who shared in our humanity. He was shattered on the cross, broken on the moral codes of Romans and Jews.  But when he was shattered, so were their codes, and ours!  For he rose to show us that the code of God is love, and therefore none of the ways in which we divide up the world into the virtuous and the less-virtuous will ultimately prevail.  Because Christ is risen, a new order has begun.  It is not yet entirely here, to be sure.  But it is coming.  It is coming!

Garry Deverell

This sermon was preached at St Columba's in Balwyn on the 5th Sunday of Easter, 2013.