HERE I STAND
Dear Friends in Christ:
In my sermon on the Second Sunday in Lent, I promised to write something about the Atonement for The Apostle. I believe that theology, thinking about God and our relationship with God, is important. Bad theology can often lead to bad actions on our part, as it did during the apartheid era in South Africa. Good theology helps to deepen our relationship with God and to shape our Christian discipleship.
Some weeks ago, I was involved in an exchange of e-mails about the doctrine of the Atonement, the Church’s teaching that we are reconciled to God through the sacrificial death of Jesus. Since the very beginning of the Church’s history, this doctrine has been open to a variety of interpretations, but in the Western Church one interpretation has become dominant since the 11th century. The substitutionary interpretation of the Atonement asserts that God’s justice required that satisfaction be offered for human sin. Since human sin is an infinite offense against God, an infinite satisfaction was required, and only God could provide that satisfaction through the sacrificial death of Jesus.
I am uneasy with this interpretation because it tends to emphasize God’s justice and God’s wrath rather than God’s mercy and God’s love. To listen to some preachers who embrace this interpretation, one might think that all that can be said about God is that God is very angry with us and will continue to be angry unless we accept Jesus as our personal Savior. I am also uneasy with it because it tends to make Good Friday the center of God’s revelation in Jesus, making of Christmas and the Incarnation a prologue, and of Easter, the Ascension and Pentecost an epilogue to the really important event of the Crucifixion.
I have become very wary of theological theories, of attempts to explain definitively the mystery of God’s love for us. But I would suggest another way to look at the Good Friday sacrifice of Jesus and the victory of Easter. The interpretation that I offer below is far from perfect and does not answer all the questions that we might have about the meaning of Good Friday and Easter. I am aware that it may not be at all helpful for some – maybe many – of you, but I offer it in the hope for some of you it will be helpful.
The interpretation that I am proposing begins with an understanding of sin as a form of scapegoating. The scapegoat in human societies is the person or group that is considered to be so different from us that expulsion, driving out, destroying the scapegoat is not only acceptable, but also necessary for the society. I think that when we sin, we are treating the other, the person who is the target of our sin, as something very much like a scapegoat. When we tell lies about someone, or steal from someone, aren’t we treating that person as being so different from us as to be unworthy of our respect and concern? Aren’t we acting as though what we really want is for that person to be no longer part of our society? Don’t we often hear as a justification for some sin that the other person had it coming to him? While I may be exaggerating a bit, I think sin has in it this element of scapegoating.
Jesus is often seen as a scapegoat. The religious and civil authorities saw him as so alien, so threatening to the social order, that his death was not only acceptable but also necessary. And Jesus accepted the place of shame and suffering on Calvary, not, I think, as a way to pay the penalty that God demanded for human sin, but as a simple expression of suffering love. In his death Jesus said that we could do our worst, we could treat him like human garbage, but he would not stop loving us. We could make of him a scapegoat, treating him as the guilty one, the one whose death would insure the good order of society, but he would not stop loving us. In a sense the death of Jesus is totally unsurprising, but was simply a deeper expression of the love that he showed in his healing of the sick, his forgiving of sin, his preaching and teaching about a loving Father. And on Easter, in the Resurrection, we discover that this suffering love, the love of the Crucified One, is not defeated by death, has indeed defeated death. In the light of Easter we can see that this suffering love is the power at the heart of creation.
I believe that the Paschal Mystery of Good Friday and Easter overturns our human tendency to treat others as scapegoats, as the aliens who are not worthy of our concern, as those who must be driven out and destroyed. God in Christ has occupied the scapegoat’s place of suffering and shame and has stripped it of its power. No longer can we claim that someone else is really to blame for our sin, for the mess that we have made of our lives and of our world. Scapegoating just won’t work. We are the guilty ones, we are responsible for our sin, but God still loves us, God still shows mercy to us, God still calls us to come home into the saving embrace of the Crucified and Risen Jesus.
Your brother and priest,
Daniel
