When we say \u201cJesus died for our sins,\u201d what does that mean? It\u2019s undeniably an essential confession of Christian faith, but how does it work? This much I\u2019m sure of, it\u2019s not reducible to just one thing. I\u2019ve just finished preaching eight sermons on \u201cThe Crucified God\u201d and I know I\u2019ve barely scratched the surface of what the cross means. To try to reduce the death of Jesus to a single meaning is an impoverished approach to the mystery of the cross. I\u2019m especially talking about those tidy explanations of the cross known as \u201catonement theories.\u201d I find most of them inadequate; others I find repellent. Particularly abhorrent are those theories that portray the Father of Jesus as a pagan deity who can only be placated by the barbarism of child sacrifice. The god who is mollified by throwing a virgin into a volcano or by nailing his son to a tree is not the Abba of Jesus!<\/p>\n
Neither is the death of Jesus a kind of quid pro quo by which God gains the necessary capital to forgive sinners. No! Jesus does not save us from God; Jesus reveals God! Jesus does not provide God with the capacity to forgive; Jesus reveals God as forgiving love. An \u201ceconomic model\u201d of the cross just won\u2019t work. It\u2019s not as if God is saying, \u201cLook, I\u2019d love to forgive you, but I\u2019ve got to pay off Justice first, and, you know how she is, she\u2019s a tough goddess, she requires due payment.\u201d This understanding of the cross begs the question of who exactly is in charge \u2014 the Father of Jesus or some abstract ideal called \u201cJustice\u201d?<\/p>\n
When we confess with Paul that \u201cChrist died for our sins,\u201d we don\u2019t mean that God required the vicious murder of his Son in order to forgive. How would that work anyway? Did God have some scale of torture that once met would \u201csatisfy his wrath?\u201d Think it through and you\u2019ll see the problem. Was death not enough to satisfy this god? Did it have to be death by crucifixion? Did torture have to be part of the equation? And how does that work? Was there a minimum number of lashes required in the scourging? Did the thorny crown have to have a certain number of thorns in order for this god to call the scales balanced?<\/p>\n
Are you squirming yet? Do you want to say, \u201cWell, some of the abuse Jesus suffered was gratuitous torture by the hands of cruel men.\u201d But if that\u2019s the case, how does this division of labor work? How much was necessary to \u201csatisfy God\u201d and how much was just for the sport of it? No, this approach to understanding Jesus dying for our sins clearly won\u2019t work.<\/p>\n
So what do we do? Let\u2019s begin here: Before the cross is anything else, it is a catastrophe. It is the unjust lynching of an innocent man. This is precisely how the Apostles spoke of the crucifixion of Jesus in the book of Acts.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis Jesus … you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.\u201d \u2013 Acts 2:23<\/p>\n
\u201cYou killed the author of life, whom God raised from the dead.\u201d \u2013 Acts 3:15<\/p>\n
\u201cGod raised up Jesus whom you killed by hanging him on a tree.\u201d \u2013 Acts 5:30<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Righteous One you have now betrayed and murdered.\u201d \u2013 Acts 7:52<\/p>\n
The Bible is clear, God did not kill Jesus. Jesus was offered as a sacrifice in that the Father was willing to send his Son into our sinful system in order to expose it as utterly sinful and provide us with another way. The death of Jesus was a sacrifice in that sense. But it was not a sacrifice to appease a wrathful deity or to provide payment for a penultimate god subordinate to Justice.<\/p>\n
Let me suggest that when we say Jesus died for our sins, we mean something like this: We violently sinned our sins into Jesus, and Jesus revealed the heart of God by forgiving us. When Jesus prayed, \u201cFather, forgive them,\u201d he was not asking God to act contrary to his nature. When Jesus prayed, \u201cFather, forgive them,\u201d he was, as always, revealing the very heart of God!<\/p>\n
At the cross we violently sinned our sins into Jesus, and Jesus absorbed them, died because of them, carried them into death, and rose on the third day to speak the first world of the new world: \u201cPeace be with you.\u201d<\/p>\n
When I say \u201cwe\u201d violently sinned our sins into Jesus, I mean that all of us are more or less implicated by our explicit or tacit support of the systems of violent power that frame our world. These are the very political and religious systems that executed Jesus. At the cross we see where Adam and Eve\u2019s penchant for blame and Cain\u2019s capacity for killing have led us \u2014 to the murder of God! At Golgotha human sin is seen as utterly sinful. God did not require the death of Jesus \u2014 but we did!<\/p>\n
So let\u2019s be clear, the cross is not about the appeasement of a monster god. The cross is about the revelation of a merciful God. At the cross we discover a God who would rather die than kill his enemies. The cross is where God in Christ absorbs sin and recycles it into forgiveness. The cross is not what God inflicts upon Christ in order to forgive. The cross is what God endures in Christ as he forgives. Once we understand this, we know what we are seeing when we look at the cross: We are seeing the lengths to which a God of love will go in forgiving sin.<\/p>\n
The cross is both ugly and beautiful. It\u2019s as ugly as human sin and as beautiful as divine love. But in the end, love and beauty win.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When we say \u201cJesus died for our sins,\u201d what does that mean? It\u2019s undeniably an essential confession of Christian faith, but how does it work? This much I\u2019m sure of, it\u2019s not reducible to just one thing. I\u2019ve just finished preaching eight sermons on \u201cThe Crucified God\u201d and I know I\u2019ve barely scratched the surface […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3265,92,632,3266,716,633,3267,345,570,107],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5814"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5814\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}