For Our Sins (Palm/Passion Sunday A)

“For Our Sins”
Palm/ Passion Sunday A
5 April 2020 10 a.m. live-streamed Ante-Communion  

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP

Isaiah 50:4-9a ; Philippians 2:5-11 ; Luke 23:1-49 ; Psalm 31:9-16

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

The other day, I sang the entire Great Litany, complete with the Supplication the Prayer Book tells us to use “in times of war, … national anxiety, or … disaster” (BCP p. 154).  In it, we read, “With pity behold the sorrows of our hearts; Mercifully forgive the sins of [your] people.”  The implication, of course, is that our suffering is punishment for our sins.  When we are sick, grieving, or afraid, it often feels like that:  the Supplication seeks to answer just these feelings, not provoke them or suggest doctrinally that we should feel guilty for disaster.

The Vatican issued this week a solemn collect in times of pandemic, for use on Good Friday.  In it, there is not a whiff of “we are suffering this contagion as punishment for our sins.”  Some traditionalists took to the social media complaining that Pope Francis was “soft pedaling” the Christian faith by omitting from the prayer for deliverance a confession of sin.  One Jesuit friend replied, “This virus is a virus, communicable by evolution-driven biological rules.  Righteous and wicked are equally liable to get sick and perhaps die from it.” 

Amen.  People who think that somehow they will be protected by God if they break social distancing and hygiene rules out of a desire to practice their faith, I fear, are going to find out that viruses don’t discriminate based on your religion or your intentions.  

Yet we feel guilty and pray for deliverance.  It is easier for us to blame this on our sins than to admit the sometimes random element of our lives and how pandemics, especially particularly virulent ones like this one, transmit.  But know this:  God does not intend ill for any of his creatures. God hates nothing he has made.  So let’s not blame God and think that this is punishment.

When we fear and need help, it is right and good to pray to ask for God’s help.  We sophisticated post moderns tend to shy away from this, not wanting to “put God to the test,” and afraid we will be disappointed  no matter how hard we pray.  But remember, Jesus told us to pray ceaselessly, and put our needs before God.  Pray in faith and trust, he says, God will give us what we need.  As an asthmatic ridden with pollen and mold allergies with their attendant coughs and sneezes, and with my wife disabled and relying on me for help, and as a priest serving in a parish full of people most at risk from this virus, let me tell you, I’ve been praying a lot this last couple of weeks.

But we do not pray to convince God to do the right thing, despite himself,  but to reveal to God our hearts, which he already knows. Our willing self-revelation in prayer helps us become closer to God.   There is no situation, no matter how dire or catastrophic, where God cannot help.  Our self-revelation helps us see this, and trust God will care for us, no matter how things turn out.  As we say in the prayer on Covid-19 from VTS professor Dr. Kate Sonderegger: “Make even this hour a season of blessing for us, that in fear we may find you mighty to save, and in illness or death, we find the cross to none other than the way of life.”

As we go into Holy Week, let us remember that these stories and rites use metaphors, limping and imperfect, to express what is beyond our ability to understand or express.

From the beginning, we Christians have seen the death of Christ on the cross as not simply a case of miscarried justice, but something much more.   St. Paul, writing just 20 years after Jesus’ death, quotes the apostolic tradition he received from others and affirms, “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins” (1 Cor. 15:3-5) and “in Christ, God was reconciling the world unto Himself” (2 Cor. 5:19).  But Paul never says exactly how this was so.  And neither has the Church. 

The idea that the Cross was transferred punishment, Jesus tortured and put to death in our stead to satisfy the honor of, or placate the anger of a Deity demanding violence and blood for our sins, is never taught as such in the New Testament.   The idea first arose in the late Middle Ages in the writings of St. Anselm of Canterbury.  In Anselm’s society, a feudal lord’s honor could only be upheld by a social equal.  For him, God became man because man couldn’t satisfy the debt of honor due to God caused by human sin.  Anselm’s theory of Atonement is known as “satisfaction”; this later evolved into a doctrine of judicially transferred punishment.  But the feudal idea is still at its core.  Though not biblical, the idea became a cornerstone of Calvinist and Evangelical doctrine. 

The hymn “In Christ Alone” puts it this way, “… on that cross as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied, for every sin on Him was laid, here in the death of Christ I live. ”

I share the feelings of dependence on Christ expressed here. But I reject transferred punishment as a doctrine, root and branch.  It sees God as bloodthirsty and unrelentingly demanding violence as a way of fixing what is wrong with the world.   Further, it confuses and corrupts the idea of the self-sacrifice of Jesus.   The ancients never viewed ritual sacrifice as a transfer of deserved pain and suffering onto the sacrificial victim.  Sacrifices were never about making an animal suffer.  Rather, it was food offered to God to create a common sharing and reconciliation. Early Christians felt Jesus’ death was like a ritual sacrifice because in it God in Jesus shares with us and we humans in Jesus share with God, all as a means of creating communion and reconciliation between us and God.  Calling Jesus’ death a sacrifice was never intended to demand a sick Mel Gibson-esque sado-masochism and suffering for suffering’s sake.

I would prefer that hymn read, “...on that holy cross so blessed, God’s love for us was manifest: our savior died as one of us, here in the death of Christ, I live.”   

When Paul says “Jesus died for our sins,” it does not means “died to pay the punishment for our sins” but rather, “died as a result of our human failings, our systems of imperial power, our desire always to divide and to scapegoat, and our violence.”

The fact is, the “wrath of God” describes more how our relationship with God feels to us when we are alienated from God than it describes God’s heart.   And it is we human beings who tend to think that violence can make things right, not God. 

In this light, our belief that Christ “died for us” takes on deep meaning. In Jesus on the Cross, we see God suffering right along with us, dying as one of us; in Jesus in Gethsemane, a human being alongside us, praying fervently with us, and, with us, not getting what he asks for.  

Today’s reading from Philippians says that Christ “emptied himself” of glory, even “until death on the cross.” This understands Calvary as part and parcel of the Incarnation, God being made fully human.  Why did Jesus have to die?  Not to suffer and pay for the sins of others, but because Jesus was fully God and fully human, and being human means suffering death. 

When Paul says that Christ was “obedient, even to the point of death on the cross” he is not saying that God commanded the death of Jesus.  He is simply saying that Jesus accepted the inevitable.   The Greek means “to listen attentively.” Jesus was mindful, was present, even on the way of the Cross.  

Paul says we must cultivate the same mind that Christ had.  We must empty ourselves, humble ourselves, become heedful and attentive in all things. In emptying ourselves we are filled; in being heedful, we find empowerment.   It is in losing ourselves that we find ourselves, it is in dying that we are born to life.

This week, let us put on the mind of Christ.  Let us follow Jesus to dark Gethsemane and stark Calvary.  In emptying ourselves as he emptied himself,  in being mindfully present as he was in all things, we will share not only in his suffering, but in his glory and the life everlasting revealed on Easter morning. 

Beloved—we’re going to get through this, and in the end, all will be well.  If we look around and all isn’t well, we can be sure that it is not yet the end.  Amen.