Participation, Not Substitution (midweek message)

The Crucifixion, Peter Gertner

 

Participation, not Substitution

 The Rev. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

The Evangelical “Alpha Course” asks “Why did Jesus have to die?” and answers, “he died in order to pay the punishment for the sins of those who have faith in him.”  The reasoning behind this is as follows: God is Holy and by God’s very nature must punish sin.  So he sent his only Son to suffer the punishment deserved by others.    

 

This idea of substituted punishment is portrayed as a biblical idea, and its supporters trot out plenty of proof texts from the Bible that supposedly teach it.  But nowhere is it taught as such in the Bible.  The closest the Bible gets to it are phrases like “Christ died for our sins” (1 Cor 15:3) and “he bore our sins in his body on the cross” (1 Peter 2:24).  But these can simply mean Jesus suffered as a result of the sinful way we treated him, or as a way to help us out of our sinful ways through his example and love, without even a whiff of a bloodthirsty Deity demanding punishment inflicted on someone, anyone.  

 

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, the sacrifice of the Mass as they understood it, 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.  The idea has had a profound influence—and not for good—on how most of us moderns experience Christianity. We think salvation is all about being forgiven by God.  When we read about John the Baptist, for instance, we think he preached a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, though the Greek means something more like “a baptism of changing one’s mind, so that sins may be sent away,” i.e., we may be freed from them.  Focusing on forgiveness alone rather than liberation and healing is part and parcel with the image of an angry, petulant Deity who needs to be placated by punishment or sacrifice.       

How Christ on the Cross frees us from and heals us of sin is deep mystery, far more complex than this wrongheaded but simple idea of a blood-thirsty Deity’s transactional evening of scores.   Christ had to die because Christ was a human being, and human beings die.  We suffer from unjust death all the time.  The cross is part of the incarnation, God taking on human flesh and becoming one of us.

 

The idea of the atoning power of Christ’s incarnation is found frequently. The Collect for the First Sunday of Christmas expresses it this way:  “O God, who wonderfully created us in your own image and yet more wonderfully restored … the dignity of human nature… through your Son Jesus Christ: Grant that as he came to share our humanity so may we share the life of his divinity…” The Collect for the Marian Antiphon for Christmastide and Epiphany says it thus: “Almighty and everlasting God, you have stooped to raise fallen humanity through the child-bearing of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  Grant that we who have seen your glory revealed in our human nature and your love made perfect in our weakness, may be daily renewed in your image, and conformed to the pattern of your Son, our Savior Jesus Christ.” 

 

Paul in the letter to Romans is pretty explicit:  Christ’s cross rescues  or saves us through participation, not substitution.  He teaches that when we have faith in Jesus, we participate in his death on the cross through baptism and turning aside from sin, and also participate in Christ’s risen life.  He expresses it thus in the passage that provides much of the text for the great Easter Canticle “Christ our Passover”:   

 

“How can we who died to sin go on living in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in such a death as his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Romans 6:2-11).

 

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 Empires 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 “newness of life,” 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. 

 

Christ is a healer and friend who shows us the way, not a policeman, officer of the court, or, worse, a masochistic substitute whose sufferings appease an angry Deity for us. As we hear and read scriptures about Jesus’ death and resurrection, and how this was for our sake, let us remember to place these stories, texts, and doctrines in a broader context than one that assumes wrongly that God demands violence and suffering to make things right.

 

Thanks be to God.   

 

 

 The Nativity with Saints, Ridolfo Ghirlandaio