Was Dying Jesus’ Reason for Living?

Craig Anderson

Isaiah 49:1-7            March 28, 2004

 

            One of the first things you learn at a Habitat for Humanity site is that demolition is one thing, and reconstruction another.  Almost anybody qualifies for demolition.  Just show up and get hired.  The bosses aren’t too fussy.  Given enough leverage and a bigger hammer, dust will rise and debris will fly.  But while anybody can knock down a wall, it takes skill to put one back up.  Suddenly the bosses are more selective and diplomatically they send the likes of me to re-stack the lumber and sort out nails from the screws.  To be destructive, and by extension, to be critical is relatively easy.  It takes some skill and creativity however, to restore and rebuild.  As you can tell, I have topics other than home building in mind this morning.

 

            The last couple of weeks I’ve taken some hefty swings at what in my trade is called atonement theology.  As I’ve suggested however, demolition is comparatively easy.  What can be offered as a positive alternative?  That is the task before us on this morning’s shift. Put on your gloves and dust masks and let’s see what we can do with this mess.

 

            First, for those of you who have either not studied your blueprints or left them at home, atonement is about “at-one-ment,” being reconciled, being put right with God.  You will recall, that boiled down to its essence, such a theology is based on the idea “that human beings are so dad-blamed bad, and God, so gosh-darned angry, that Jesus had to die a horrible death in order to set things straight.”  Last Sunday night at Hilltop Church, and then again in a discussion on Tuesday at St.  Joseph’s Rectory, I was reminded how prevalent this theology is, and how much people are influenced by it.  Discussing Mel Gibson’s film, with its unremitting, hour and 28 minutes of violence, versus 32 minutes of relative peace, humble and contrite statements of gratitude were made about the horrible sacrifice which Jesus had to offer on our behalf.  Sacrifice and human sin are at the heart of atonement theology.  The degree of Jesus’ suffering was necessitated by the extent of our sin.

 

            Doing some additional reading this week, I discovered that it was the medieval theologian St.  Anselm who proposed the formula for atonement.  As summarized by one author, “Anselm suggested that human sinfulness required divine punishment, but since we are inadequate to repay our offenses, only a divine Son of God could substitute for us.”  That is an accounting formula.  Atonement is a matter of balancing the books: of setting the ledger straight, our sin offset by Jesus’ suffering.  A straight business deal.  If God is rigorously and inflexibly just and fair, there is simply no alternative: make the whips ready, gather a cross-piece and nails, and make way for Golgotha.

 

            We know this formula: it is as old as an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.  Revenge, retribution, retaliation, three horsemen of apocalypse now: playing in our theaters, Israel, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Congress.  Talk about demolition!  Is there no other way?

 

            At lunch on Tuesday, having made my displeasure with atonement theology apparent, one of my colleagues asked our guest for the day, a wonderful Rabbi from Succasunna, what he makes of atonement.  Given the suffering servant figure in the prophet Isaiah, one of whose poems I’ve read today, and the old customs of animal sacrifice in ancient Israel, I believe my colleague expected that his embrace of atonement theology would be affirmed by the Rabbi.  It was not.  A product of the Enlightenment, and sounding similar to a 15^th century Protestant reformer, the Rabbi spoke of his conviction that our relationship with God is direct and personal.  In his view, human beings do not need intermediaries in their dealings with God.  So much for rabbis, ministers, and priests.  So much for substitutionary atonement.  So much for a Jewish messiah standing in to take our medicine. 

 

            Back to my reading.  I also discovered this week that some parts of the Jewish community have stopped referring to the Nazi genocide as a holocaust.  Why?  In his book Constantine’s Sword, the Church and the Jews, James Carroll explains that “some Jews have rejected the word, because in Greek it means ‘burnt offering.’  The notion that God would accept such an offering is deeply troubling.  When the genocide is instead referred to as the ‘Shoah,’ a Hebrew word meaning ‘catastrophe,’ a wall is being erected against the insults of a sacrificial atonement theology.”  We can readily understand why Jews don’t want 6 million executions associated with or justified by a questionable piece of Christian theology, lest someone be tempted to try such a “final solution” again.  Shoah, not sacrifice.  Catastrophe, not an offering.

 

            But what is the creative alternative?  So far we’ve only produced more dust and debris.  Wipe off your safety goggles and recreate in your mind’s eye the scene you have just been witness to, the baptism of Anna Lynn Bradshaw.  What did you see there?  If you weren’t listening to the words, but simply recalling an old story, you might have thought we were cleansing from that child the taint of original sin.  You might have sighed with relief when we finished, because now that the child is done, we do not put her at risk of languishing in purgatory should something unspeakable happen.  But wait, aren’t we back-sliding into atonement theology again, the notion that we must be saved from our sins through the sacrifice of Jesus?  Yes we are.  And for twenty five years, I presided over that form of this ritual.  But I’ll have to confess, that try as I might, I could never conceive of baptism as an act which cleanses an infant of sin, or guarantees something which is already a given, God’s love for us and all humanity.  This gift of love has been described as being “as consistently present as the air that surrounds us or the gravity that supports us.”  (Dominic Crossan)

            I think it must have been those innocent little eyes looking back at me all those years which finally penetrated my hardened heart.  So then, not convinced that infants are guilty, I reread the Gospel stories about Jesus’ baptism, and finally noticed there words which Jesus heard, and experienced within: that he was God’s child, one whom God blessed, and with whom God was pleased.  My aim ever since has been to re-enact that experience, to repeat those words, to affirm God’s pleasure at the birth of another holy child.  So perhaps baptism is not about original sin, but can be understood instead as a sign of God’s original blessing: a blessing of goodness in Genesis, delivered at the end of each day of creation; one of pleasure spoken to Jesus as he clambered up the banks of the Jordan; and one of joy reenacted before our very eyes this morning.

 

            On movie posters advertising Gibson’s Passion, there is a subtitle: “Dying was his reason for living.”  But suppose there was another reason.  James Carroll suggests that rather than dying to substitute for our sin, Jesus lived to reveal God’s gracious and compassionate love: “as a light to the nations,” to borrow an image from Isaiah.  This puts us into an entirely different spin cycle doesn’t it?!  From demolition we have turned the corner toward new birth and a new creation.  Perhaps however, you are willing to concede that infants are innocent, but that adults are not, and that if we did it right, baptism would be postponed until it might do some good!  I know that the risk of the direction we have steered onto now is that of being soft on sin, and naive about the existence of evil.  Maybe.  On the other hand if God is supposedly capable of revenge, of meting out distributive justice, what about another possibility, that God rises above our human ways of settling scores and out of compassion for us creatures, practices more creative forms of justice, which include mercy, grace, and forgiveness? 

 

            As always it is easier to be negative, to think the worst, and imagine the coming hell-fires of ever-lasting damnation, unless we recite the proper religious incantation.  But you know I look from that infant’s eyes into yours, and still have trouble seeing absolute degradation and unworthiness.  You are not innocents anymore than I, but does the sum of our lives add up to the need for Jesus to have suffered horribly on a cross in order to make things right with God? Whining one time to a friend about my many inadequacies and failings, he looked at me and said, “yeah but, you don’t look like an axe-murderer.”  And you know what, I’m not, and as far as I know, neither are you!  Yes, such creatures exist, and I suppose one of us might snap someday, but again I find it hard to believe that each of us is without a clue or a chance, so vile that we stumble along a precipice, protected only by the sacrificial offering of Jesus.  Even we, in our faults and failings, are still loved by God, and forgiven, granted a gift of grace, as ever-present as the air we breath or the gravity which keeps us from spinning off into space.