Atonement

by The Rev. Dr. Max Lynn
SCRIPTURE READINGS Revelation 5:1-14, Isaiah 54:4-12
Transcribed from the sermon preached on AUGUST 21, 2022

Atonement can mean reparation for an offense, injury, or sin. It can mean reconciliation with others or God. Rita Nakashima Brock called sin brokenness. Sin is breaking away from God. Atonement might be understood as at-one-ment, or making us one with God again. Since we are born and made in the image of God, by the spirit of God, sin also breaks us away from ourselves: our integrity is broken.

Martin Luther was a monk obsessed with being perfect before God. He became so anxiously self-critical that he had a nervous breakdown. Many of us know that feeling. We find ourselves in a conflict. Maybe we have been hurt or accused of something. done something wrong. Despite ourselves we say or do something wrong, and we become so self-absorbed trying to work our way out of our dilemma, to prove or earn innocence, we blow our top off or break down or burn out. But Luther read in Romans, we are saved by grace through faith, not by the law. In Ephesians 2 we read: “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God.”

In other words, we don’t work our way to God, God comes to us. God’s love is sovereign, it is greater than our sin. We find this message in the person of Jesus, both spoken and embodied. God comes to us, God loves us. God forgives us. With grace we receive and are opened to the Holy Spirit, who then empowers us to reverential integrity, to have a loving and gracious heart, and to live from this heart as our center.

Now before I go into a few of the more prominent explanations of the Doctrine of Atonement, I want to say that we don’t fully come to understand how Jesus unites us with God by thinking and talking about it. We find out who Jesus is for us and what Jesus does by following him on the Way. He asks us to follow him first, even before understanding. In other words, we can’t earn our way to heaven by being smart about Christian doctrine.

By faith, we ask God for forgiveness and then we receive it. This is not an intellectual exercise; it is an act of faith. Now grace is not just forgiveness but also freedom. Knowing we are forgiven and loved unconditionally by God, we are free to act and do our best. When we mess up, God picks us back up right where we are. We know and God knows that in our heart we seek the good, so in grace we are free to act. Grace is not just forgiveness and freedom; it is also unity or oneness. As we are not so concerned and anxious about earning our own personal salvation through works, our vision is opened to see the connecting Spirit of all life. So, by grace our focus is not narrowed onto ourselves but leads us to live, work and love others in community. In other words, by grace we walk the Way of Jesus and find forgiveness, freedom, and connectedness. Intellectual understanding is one of the tools God gives us to live and work in the world. But as a Christian we come to understand Jesus and grace by living it in community. By grace we are saved through faith.

So, everything else I have to say is trying to explain what we come to feel by being in relationship with Jesus. The explanation comes after the feeling, after the relationship.

When Jesus was alive as a human being walking on earth, he was such a powerful and wonderful prophet that people started to call him the Messiah, the savior. But he was soon arrested, tried, and crucified. The question naturally arises, if he was the Messiah, the son of God, the savior, why would God let him die? Why would God let the powers of this world try to snuff him out?

I will give you a brief summary of a few of the explanations. The first one is called the Christ the Victor theory. Daniel Migliore writes, “According to this view, the work of atonement is a dramatic struggle between God and the forces of evil in the world.” Satan tempts humans to sin and break our relationship with God. Satan wants us to deny God and for God to deny us. Similar to the book of Job, Satan roams the earth causing trouble. In Job, Satan makes the argument that Job is faithful because everything is going right for him. If God lets Satan strike him down, Job will not be faithful. In other words, if people experience hardship and suffering, they will give up trying to be good. God can’t send down God’s son as God to show people how to be good because that is too easy for God. When God is above human temptation and suffering, it is easy to be loving. So, Jesus has to be fully human and be tempted and suffer as all humans are. We can imagine Satan saying, “Let’s see how faithful, forgiving and loving he is when he faces the wrath of human suffering, sinfulness and evil firsthand.” So, this life is both a test for God and humans, a cosmic battle between the forces of evil and the forces of light. Satan and the powers of the world can’t break Jesus in life, so they use their greatest weapon, death. But even in death Christ overcomes and rises again. Poverty, hardship, suffering and death cannot kill the love and grace of God. Christ rises victorious. Through his victory we are also victorious, forgiven and given hope for a future at one with God.

We see this in Revelation chapter 5: the Lion of Judah becomes the lamb who is slain, and by blood did he ransom people for God. We also see this theory in our hymn, A Mighty Fortress in Our God.

Now the problem with this Christ the victor idea of atonement is that sometimes Jesus the human being is left in the dust by the cosmic warrior Jesus. So, the words and actions of the historical Jesus, the grace and love he showed to others, takes back seat to the fact that his blood was spilt. The suffering, blood and death of Jesus, and our entrance into Heaven, might be seen as more important than his life, and some detached cosmic battle takes precedence over living like Jesus in this world. And, as we have seen with some Christians, fighting and winning the cosmic battle justifies the means. We can see our competition with our enemy as allied with the Devil and therefore we are justified in defeating them by any means necessary. But according to Jesus and the book of Revelation, this is precisely wrong. Non-violent love is the method by which Jesus wins victory.

Another influential explanation is the Satisfaction theory of atonement. The full explanation of this theory is developed by St. Anslem in the 11th century, and we can see reflections in our hymn O Sacred Head Now Wounded and, in the reading, today from Isaiah 53. “He was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.” In the Satisfaction Theory “God and humans are related like feudal lords and their serfs. Any act of disobedience dishonors the Lord, and satisfaction must be given. The satisfaction that is due to God on account of the offense of sin is infinite. While it is humanity’s offense, humanity must account for the sin,” but since humans are fallible and finite, they can never come up with a payment worthy enough. Therefore, God must provide it. Therefore, God becomes human in Christ. In his perfect obedience unto death, satisfaction is rendered, justice is done, and God’s honor is restored. Thus, sinners are forgiven. (Migliore, Daniel: Faith Seeking Understanding. P. 152)

But this theory seems to create a bit of contradiction in God. God has been dishonored so God must send down his son, have him killed, and only then does God have the power to forgive.

A third theory of atonement is called the Moral Influence theory. Our final hymn today, God of Grace and God of Glory reflects this point of view. In this theory God shows Her love to us in such a wonderful way through the person of Jesus that we are led to respond in thanksgiving and faithfulness. This theory emphasizes the unconditional love of God and the importance of our human response.

But this theory has its weaknesses too. It tends toward a naïve sentimentalization of God’s love, underestimating the power of evil in the world and sin in our lives, and makes Jesus nothing more than a good example. H Richard Niebuhr’s speaking of this liberal theology in American noted: A God without wrath brought a people without judgement through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” (Migliore, p. 154)

John Calvin, the father of Presbyterianism spoke of the three offices of Christ: Christ is our prophet, priest, and King. Migliore notes that “We might restate Calvin’s teaching of Jesus of the three offices of Christ as follows: Christ as prophet proclaims the coming reign of God and instructs us in the form of life and appropriate to that reign (moral influence); Christ as priest renders to God the perfect sacrifice of love and obedience on our behalf (satisfaction); Christ as designated king rules the world despite the recalcitrance of evil and promises the ultimate victory of God’s reign of righteousness and peace (Christ the victor). (Migliore, p. 155)

Now Liberation theology helps to check some of the sentimentality of the liberal moral influence theory. In liberation theology, there is a strong emphasis on the life Jesus lived. He came and lived in solidarity with the poor, speaking truth to the powers and principalities, to Satan’s world of greed, oppression, exploitation, and violence. Liberation theology which covers several perspectives, including Latin American, Black, and Feminist theologies, recognizes both the individual and political nature of the sin that keeps people in bondage. Jesus came to judge and save not just individual souls, but history and social structures, including religious structures and the church.

It is in the Way of Jesus, in the process of leading a life like Jesus, a life of integrity and truth, a life of inclusivity and love even with the outcast and the poor that we discover God’s word for us.

I think there is another question that the doctrine of atonement attempts to answer. In this world so evidently filled with evil, sin, lies, confusion, oppression, exploitation, and suffering, where is God? We might be led to think that God is with those who suffer the least, with the wealthy and healthy and powerful. Or maybe there is no God, so we are simply forsaken. Get what you can while you can. Now if God is proven to be with those society considers the winners, where does that leave the rest of us?

The crucifixion answers that question in a most profound way. Carl Jung calls the crucifixion the ultimate archetypal tragedy. We might say a tragedy is when something bad happens, or worse when something bad happens to someone who doesn’t deserve it, someone who is innocent and good. Now Jesus is innocent and good, and he had foreknowledge that it was coming, he knew if he proceeded as he was that it would lead to his death. He was betrayed by a close friend, arrested, and tortured by the powers of violence, convicted by a mob of his own people who in turn are under the tyrannical power of the world in Rome. They know he is innocent and given the chance to let someone go, they let go a guy they know is guilty. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me,” is a cry from the cross and a cry way too many people have uttered. But right there, in the most forsaken place we can imagine, in the midst of the archetypal tragedy, God is there. It is God nailed to the cross.

Elizabeth Johnson in her brilliant book She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse notes: “What is affirmed as faith, for evidence continues to contradict this, is that overwhelming evil does not have the last word. The crucified one is not, in the end, abandoned. Sophia-God gathers her child and prophet into new transformed life, promise of a future for all the dead and the whole cosmos itself. The feminist vision of wholeness, of the value of bodily integrity of each, even the most violated, and the interconnectedness of the whole, is here inscribed at the very center of the Christian vision.” (p.159)

How is our broken relationship with God made whole? How do we get close to God? Really, we don’t need all this doctrine. We just need the story of the Gospels. God bridges the gap. God comes to us. God comes to you.

Christ demonstrates the presence of the loving God even in the most horrible and terrifying situation. Maintaining integrity of his divine calling to justice, love, and grace, even to the point of death, even death on a cross. It is precisely here where we witness the power and sovereignty of God. It cannot be killed by sin, even our sin, death cannot contain this divine love and justice. It will rise again. Christ rises again to be embodied in us by the power of the Spirit, women and men, Jew and Greek, well-to-do and the poor, when we act with integrity and love, even and especially when it is costly.

Where is God when we are at our worst? Where is God when the cosmic powers of darkness decent upon our souls and bring down suffering on the world? Jesus comes right into that situation and with his human body says, God comes to us. God is with you. Nothing can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. By grace we are save through faith.