Incarnation and the Cross

Incarnation and the Cross

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

March 28, 2018

One of the great misrepresentations of the age is the claim made by some Christians, styling themselves as “Evangelical,” that the reason “Jesus had to die on the Cross” was to pay the penalty for our sins, suffering in our stead, to satisfy the wrath of God.  They portray this as a biblical idea, but nowhere in the Bible is it to be found as such.  The idea is actually very recent, and not part of traditional, ancient Christianity.   Often tied to St. Augustine’s version of the doctrine of Original Sin, pathological in its hatred of the body and pessimism, this doctrine is highly problematic since it portrays God the Father as a vengeful child-abusing monster interested more in blood than in justice. 

Though the early Church defined an orthodox and catholic doctrine of who Christ is (“Christology”), it never defined clearly what exactly it is that Jesus did for us in his death and resurrection (“soteriology.”) 

St. Paul gives us more than a dozen vivid images to describe what Christ did:  he liberated us from oppression, he saved us from danger on the battlefield, he created us anew, he purchased us back out of slavery, he reconciled us to God as one would reconcile friends who had quarreled, he propitiated an angry deity, he declared us innocent as in a court of Law, he transformed us like in the Greek myth of metamorphosis.   Paul is searching for the right image, drawing them from a wide range of human life, but clearly is not completely satisfied with any single one of them.

Over the ages, the Church has explained the atonement in different ways. For the first four or five centuries, both Eastern and Western preachers simply declared that Christ was a victor:  on the cross he took on sin, death, and hell in a battle, and on Easter beat them all.  Once feudalism had become the main social arrangement where Christians lived, they used its sense of honor based in social rank and began to say that Christ offered the “satisfaction” to a Deity insulted and dishonored by the failings of mere human beings, who could never repay their debt of honor to such a superior.  In the High Middle Ages, secular-leaning scholars like Peter Abelard argued that the example Christ set encourages us to behave better and thus be freed of sin, while the more churchy ones like St. Thomas Aquinas argued for a sacramental view, directly linking Christ’s death on the cross with Holy Communion, which they called the sacrifice of the Mass, and which they saw as directly transformative on those who not only partook it, but merely gazed upon it in reverence.  It was only during the Renaissance, with its greater emphasis on the individual; political economy, and legal reasoning, that Christians began primarily explaining atonement as substitutionary punishment.

All of these ideas are simply different ways of describing how Jesus closed the gap between us and God and what God intends in us.  The different images and doctrines just emphasize different parts of the chasm.  And none is ideal. 

I was raised in a denomination that did not display or wear crosses: they said the point was Easter, not Good Friday.  But without a clear understanding of the cross, and reverence for it, Easter is impaired and diminished. 

The heart of the matter, I believe, is incarnation: God taking on human flesh in Jesus, and becoming one of us.  God made flesh in Jesus had to die as all of us have to die.  He had to suffer all the horrors that the rest of us face, because he lived and died as one of us.  The Romans dished out unjust torture and death to many, as have all nations at various times.  And Jesus would not let the threat of this deter him from proclaiming the Reign of God.  And so he suffered and died.  And God on the Cross calls us too to take up the Cross and follow him. 

The victory of Jesus over horror, suffering, and death opens the way for us to communion with God and each other.  It turns aside meaninglessness and despair.  As we live in Jesus, we suffer with him, and we are also raised with him. 

As we prepare for Holy Week, with all its talk of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and how this was for our sakes, let us remember to place these stories, texts, and doctrines in a broader context than one that assumes (I believe wrongly) that God demands violence and suffering to make things right, even if we may have been raised with such a view.

Peace and Grace,

Fr. Tony+