“A building is on fire, and a child is trapped upstairs; a firefighter rushes in to get him and manages to drop him safely to the next below before the roof caves in and kills her. The next day the local paper headlines ‘Firefighter Sacrifices Her Life’.”
So begins a story about redemption and atonement shared with us by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan – authors of the book we are discussing in adult Christian education, The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem.
The authors continue:
We are not ancients, but moderns, and yet (the headline “Firefighter Sacrifices Her Life”) is still an absolutely acceptable statement. On the one hand, all human life and all human death are sacred. On the other, that firefighter has made her own death peculiarly, especially, emphatically sacred by giving it up to save the life of another.
“So far, so good. Now imagine if somebody confused sacrifice with suffering and denied it was a sacrifice because the firefighter died instantly and without intolerable suffering. Or imagine if somebody confused sacrifice with substitution, saying that God wanted somebody dead that day and accepted the firefighter in lieu of the child. And worst of all, imagine that somebody brought together sacrifice, suffering and substitution by claiming that the firefighter had to die in agony as atonement for the sins of the child’s parents.
“That theology,” the authors assert, “would be a crime against divinity.” (p. 38)
“A crime against divinity”: Strong words! But how easy it is to feel this way when that’s the dominant storyline for many of how Jesus brings atonement for the sin of the world. A storyline that includes a God who demands bloody agony from his only child, in the most hideous death imaginable, to somehow substitute for all our suffering. An atonement storyline that did not even exist in a formulated way until eleven centuries after Christ. And yet, thanks to the guilty and the ashamed and such gruesome vehicles as Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ”, it’s a storyline etched across the dominant church landscape.
Over the centuries, passages plucked from scripture’s netherlands have lent theological heft to religious abuse disguised as atonement. From the most maudlin of our Puritan forebears to Mel Gibson today, these atonement abuses have given and continue to give credence to a stubbornly pervasive belief: that Jesus had to die on his cross for our sins. Not that his crucifixion became inevitable through his voluntary suffering – no, that’s somehow not enough. But that it was absolutely and involuntarily necessary he suffer so! Not that Jesus’ crucifixion path – his way of the cross, and not the event –could serve as a representation of what is best about our discipleship: voluntarily sacrificing on behalf of others. It can’t be a representation or a model for us, we are told. It has to be instead a compensation: God’s will compensating for our sins by necessarily crucifying the Son he … loved?
A ransom – a purchase for our sins – soaked in his blood. And the bloodier, the better – or so we’re led to believe. As a once-popular T-shirt put it, in words superimposed over a blood-soaked cross, “Jesus Died for Our Sins … Can You Imagine the Pain?”
How can we put our lives in the hands of such a sadistic, capricious God, controlling and coercing a masochistic automaton for a son? A Jesus who is not just willing to suffer, but who must? Is this a belief we want our children and grandchildren, our nieces and nephew to mimic – regardless of the intent of Christ-did-it-so-we-don’t-have-to? To pass along a belief that they may win God’s favor by obeying – read, suffering – likewise?
Well, we have. And the results?
Church marketers are fond of calling us to reach the “unchurched” in our world today. And yet, saddled with an atonement theology such as the one I’ve just described – explicit or implicit in the words, “Jesus died for our sins” – perhaps the people we really need to reach with the healing of this church are those a colleague of mine calls not the unchurched, but the “dechurched”. The dechurched: Those who came to church as a child, were saturated with the blood-necessity of Jesus on his cross, and who went running for the door when they were old enough to flee such a demanding and – let us say it – such a child-abusing divinity.
I have a friend who grew up as a regular churchgoer with his family. “My sister thought (our church) was the most wonderful, friendly place in the world,” he recalls. He, on the other hand, “thought it was a Nazi boot camp.”
When he was nine, my friend said he had his first spiritual experience in that church. “I was sitting (there), staring at (the cross), which was about 20 feet high, hanging from the ceiling. And it’s as if (that cross) spoke to me. And it said, ‘Little boy, do you see this?’ ‘Yeah, yeah – can’t miss it!’ ‘Well: This is what God did to his only son that he loved. Guess what he’s going to do to you!’
“All on my own,” my friend adds, “I created a very scary god. All on my own.”
And why shouldn’t he have heard and then created that god? That god seems to be everywhere. A god of an atonement described not just in terms of sacrifice, but of God’s child substituting for us, by satisfying his father through a requisite act of suffering. And all the while our children wonder, “If this is true, how truly loving could God really be?”
And so where's the Good News, in all of this? Stay Tuned for Part 2, next Tuesday! -- CB
And so where's the Good News, in all of this? Stay Tuned for Part 2, next Tuesday! -- CB
