4. Atonement: putting things right
The ancient chapel of King’s College, Cambridge is renowned for its annual candlelit Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. On Christmas Eve, some 1,800 people crowd in for the 3 p.m. service, which is broadcast to millions of listeners around the world.
One of the centrepieces of the chapel is a large seventeenth-century painting by Sir Peter Paul Rubens depicting the Adoration of the Magi – the visit of the mysterious wise men from the east to the infant Jesus. In 1974, the painting was vandalized by intruders. Large crowds gathered to look with sadness at the damaged masterwork. Yet soon afterwards, one visitor recalled, a notice appeared which read ‘It is believed this masterpiece can be restored’.
Restoration is a central theme of the Christian doctrine of atonement and an idea that’s hardwired into the New Testament. God’s masterpiece, the height of creation, has been wounded and damaged. It has fallen and been broken. Yet although we are broken, we can be mended. Our wounds can be healed. Jesus ‘himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed’ (1 Peter 2.24). We shall be exploring this great theme in more detail in this chapter.
But before we do so, let’s look at how Christian thinking about the atonement fits into the bigger scheme of things. Christian theology aims to help us appreciate and understand the ‘big picture’ of faith in all its fullness. It helps us grasp its comprehensiveness, its richness, and its capacity to make sense of things and offer hope and transformation. The creeds tell us about a glorious, loving and righteous God, who creates a world that goes wrong, and then acts graciously and wondrously in order to renew and redirect it, before finally bringing it to its fulfilment.
Yet it is all too easy to form the impression that Christian doctrines are like watertight compartments, each of which can be studied in isolation from others. It’s a neat idea, and may be helpful pedagogically in instructing people in the basics of faith. But it’s misleading. Christian beliefs are not a set of individual, unrelated ideas. They are interconnected, like a web, held together by the compelling and persuasive Christian vision of reality. They are snapshots, part of a greater panorama.
That’s why we can’t see the doctrine of the atonement in isolation. It is connected with so many other leading themes of the Christian faith, such as the nature of God, the identity of Jesus of Nazareth, and the Christian understanding of human nature. The ‘big picture’ of faith is all about who we really are, what is really wrong with us and the world, what God proposes to do about this, and what we must do in response. The doctrine of the atonement is one piece in that jigsaw, joined up to other pieces. It’s pointless to ask which comes first. They all come together and belong together, as the grand vision of the Christian faith.
So let’s sketch the ideas that we will explore in this chapter. We can think of the doctrine of the atonement as a node on the spider’s web of faith, a point at which multiple strands of theological silk converge and connect with each other. That’s what gives a web its strength and allows it to hold together. One of these strands is the loving purpose of the God who created the world. Another is the realization that human nature is wounded, damaged and broken. It needs to be fixed, healed and repaired. But we can’t do this ourselves. It lies beyond us. We need a saviour, someone who is the solution to our problem, not part of it. A third strand is the doctrine of the Incarnation, which affirms both that God is with us and that a redeemer has entered the world. The person who went to the cross and died there was no ordinary human being. His death thus had a deeper, extraordinary meaning.
But enough by way of introduction. Let’s begin to explore the theme of atonement in a little more detail.
Theories of the atonement
When I was about eight, my form teacher at school asked everyone in our class to write a short essay on the greatest human invention. Most of my friends chose entirely sensible things, like antibiotics and electricity. For some reason I can’t quite remember, I suggested that one of the best things ever invented was the deodorant. Perhaps a little unwisely, I then went on to suggest that my form teacher had yet to make use of this wonderful invention. That was how I came to discover the meaning of the word ‘detention’.
As I’ve got older, I’ve come to appreciate the wonder of many other things. I now think one of the greatest human inventions is the rewind button. When I watch movies like Mission Impossible or The Matrix, I often find I have to rewind. Why? Because I’ve lost the plot, or failed to appreciate the significance of an event that took place earlier on in the film. Being able to zoom back allows me to try to make more sense of what is happening. The only problem is that it now takes me twice as long as anyone else to watch a movie!
There’s a serious point here. It is very easy for us to overlook points of importance, or to fail to grasp the deeper significance of something that truly matters. We see something, but don’t realize its significance. Or we read something, and think we’ve understood it, only to discover later that we missed what was really important. That’s why we need to read the Gospel story of Jesus of Nazareth again and again. We miss lots of things the first time round!
In this chapter, we are focusing on the meaning of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. We’re going to try and tease out the significance and relevance of the cross of Christ. Let me suggest a few ground rules to guide us as we think about this.
First, we must never think that the significance of Jesus is related only to the mechanics of securing salvation, though that’s certainly the impression some theologians give when they talk about ‘theories of the atonement’. Securing salvation is part of the Christian picture. But it’s only part of it.
For a start, we have to take into account that much Christian devotion is focused on the person of Jesus. Bernard of Clairvaux’s great twelfth-century hymn captures this well:
Jesus, the very thought of Thee
With sweetness fills the breast;
But sweeter far Thy face to see,
And in Thy presence rest.
Theories, which are really ways of seeing things, as C. S. Lewis points out, are useful in that they help to highlight things and bring them into sharper focus. But a theory can never be a substitute for the thing itself. Theories try to describe reality – but they are not themselves that reality.
There is a middle way between musing on abstract theories about Jesus and focusing on personal devotion to him. It is easy to dismiss the former as a form of dogmatism and the latter as a form of pietism. Yet when properly grasped, each can enrich the other. Doctrine can deepen our appreciation of Jesus of Nazareth, and hence increase our devotion to him. Reflection on the person of Jesus – as we see, for example, in his encounters with people in the Gospels – can prevent us from falling into some abstract way of thinking about Jesus. Jesus must be an object of our adoration, not merely a theological puzzle we try to understand.
And second, we must never treat the death of Jesus on the cross in isolation from his life and resurrection. It is no accident that most Christian churches recognize three days of particular significance in the year: Christmas (when we celebrate Christ’s birth, and think about the doctrine of the Incarnation); Good Friday (when we recall Christ’s death on the cross, and think about the doctrine of the atonement); and Easter Day (when we think about Christ’s resurrection and the doctrine of Christian hope). Each of these is part of the opulent Gospel witness to the meaning of Jesus, and all can enrich our understanding and strengthen our devotion.
The theme of incarnation thus underpins our thinking about the meaning of the cross. If Jesus were an ordinary human being, we could interpret the cross in a number of ways – such as a tragic miscarriage of justice, or an ideal of self-giving love. But if Jesus of Nazareth is God incarnate, then the cross calls out to be understood as representing a crossing of the ways of God and the ways of human beings. It is a place with both vertical and horizontal axes, where the story of God and the story of humanity intersect.
The unusual word ‘atonement’ has already come up several times in our discussion, but I haven’t yet explained what it means. The English word can be traced back to the sixteenth century when William Tyndale used it in his ground-breaking English translation of the New Testament (1526). Tyndale found himself encountering some difficulty in conveying the concept of ‘reconciliation’ to his readers (in that this now-familiar English word ‘reconciliation’ had yet to be invented). The idea, however, was clearly present in the New Testament. So how could it be expressed in English? How could anyone talk about ‘reconciliation’ when English words like ‘reconciliation’ or ‘reconcile’ had not yet been coined?
Tyndale solved the problem by minting the word ‘atonement’ to express the state of ‘at-one-ment’ – that is, reconciliation – between God and humanity as a result of the death of Jesus of Nazareth. Tyndale’s translation was so influential that this hitherto unfamiliar word gained growing acceptance, and was used in perhaps the most celebrated English Bible of all time – the King James Bible of 1611: ‘We also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the atonement’ (Romans 5.11). This suggested that the benefits won by Christ through his cross and resurrection could be summarized in the phrase ‘the atonement’. And so the term passed into wider use. ‘Atonement’ has come to mean something like ‘the benefits that Jesus won by his life, death and resurrection’.
In what follows, we shall try to make sense of the death of Jesus of Nazareth on the cross by following the trails left by the earliest Christians in the New Testament, as they tried to find words and images capable of expressing the new world of life and thought opened up by his resurrection. We’ll begin with one of the most dramatic themes of the New Testament – the victory of Jesus of Nazareth over sin and death.
Victory over sin and death
‘Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ’ (1 Corinthians 15.57). The early Church exulted in the triumph of Christ at Calvary over sin, death and Satan. The powerful imagery of the triumphant Christ rising from the dead and being installed as ‘ruler of all’ (Greek: pantokrator) seized the imagination of the Christian east. The cross was seen as the site of a famous battle, comparable to the great Homeric epics, in which the forces of good and evil fought and the good emerged victorious.
There was rather more interest in proclaiming Jesus’s victory over the enemies of humanity than in speculating precisely how it came about. Early Christian liturgies were saturated with the thought of the cosmic victory achieved by Jesus on the cross. His resurrection and triumphant opening of the gates of heaven to believers were proclaimed and celebrated, rather than made the focus of theological debate.
There is ample historical evidence that the first Christians lived out their hope in the face of persecution and opposition. Christianity was an illegal religion until the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine in the year 313. Christians were regularly martyred for their faith. Roman commentators often noted how Christians met their deaths with remarkable bravery and courage, and wondered why. The answer is clear: because of the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, death had become a gateway to the New Jerusalem. It was no longer to be feared.
Some Christian thinkers visualized the triumph of Jesus over death and sin through the cross and resurrection as a victory parade comparable to those of ancient Rome. In its classical form, a general’s soldiers, often leading the chain-bound leaders of the cities or countries they had defeated, went ahead of the victorious military leader through the streets of Rome, preparing the way for his triumphant arrival at the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill.
It was a small step for Christian writers to encourage believers to think of the risen Jesus exultantly processing through the world, leading his conquered enemies – such as sin and death – behind him. Such powerful symbolism was firmly grounded in the New Testament, which spoke of the risen Jesus as making captivity a captive (Ephesians 4.8).
This theme can be seen in the art of this early period and, more easily, in hymns such as the great Easter anthem ‘The royal banners forward go’, written by Venantius Honorius Clementianus Fortunatus (c. 530–c. 610):
The royal banners forward go,
The cross shines forth in mystic glow;
Where he in flesh, our flesh Who made,
Our sentence bore, our ransom paid.
A further development of the theme of ‘Christ the victor’ depicts Christ as extending the triumph of the cross and resurrection to the realm of the dead. The medieval idea of ‘the harrowing of hell’ holds that, after dying upon the cross, Christ descended to hell, and broke down its gates in order that the souls imprisoned there might go free. The idea rests (rather tenuously, it has to be said) upon a biblical text (1 Peter 3.18–22) which refers to Christ making ‘a proclamation to the spirits in prison’. The dramatic power of this scene was such that, despite its slightly questionable theological foundation, it was picked up and incorporated into countless popular accounts of the significance of Easter. The hymn ‘Ye choirs of New Jerusalem’, written by Fulbert of Chartres (c. 970–1028), expresses this idea in two of its verses: Christ, as the ‘lion of Judah’ (Revelation 5.5), has by his death and resurrection defeated Satan, the serpent (Genesis 3.15):
For Judah’s Lion bursts his chains,
Crushing the serpent’s head;
And cries aloud through death’s domains
To wake the imprisoned dead.
Devouring depths of hell their prey
At his command restore;
His ransomed hosts pursue their way
Where Jesus goes before.
C. S. Lewis wove this thread of theological reflection into The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Remember, the book tells the story of Narnia, a land which is discovered accidentally by four children rummaging around in an old wardrobe. They soon encounter the White Witch, who keeps the land of Narnia covered in a perpetual wintry snow. We discover that she rules Narnia not as a matter of right, but by stealth and deception. The true ruler of the land is absent; in his absence, the witch has subjected it to oppression, imprisoning many of Narnia’s inhabitants as stone statues in her castle.
As the narrative moves on, we discover that the rightful ruler of the land is the great and noble lion Aslan. As Aslan advances into Narnia to reclaim his kingdom, winter gives way to spring, and the snow begins to melt. The witch realizes that her power is beginning to fade, and puts Aslan to death on a stone table. Lewis’s description of the resurrection of Aslan is one of his more tender passages, evoking both the deep sense of sorrow evident in the New Testament accounts of the burial of Christ, and joyful recognition of the reality of his resurrection. Yet Aslan defeats death, and ends its baleful rule. Lewis then describes how Aslan – ‘the lion of Judah, who has burst his chains’ – breaks into the witch’s castle, breathes upon the statues and restores them to life, before leading this liberated army through the shattered gates of the once great fortress to freedom.
We might ask quite a reasonable question here. If the death and resurrection of Jesus are a victory over sin and death, why do they remain part of our lives? What kind of victory can we possibly be we talking about?
I remember changing flights at Changi airport in Singapore on my way from London to Australia in the early 1990s, and getting into a conversation with an elderly fellow passenger. This old man told me that the Changi area of Singapore had been the site of a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp during the Second World War. He himself had been a prisoner there and, as a result, always felt distressed when passing through the airport. It brought back many traumatic memories.
The man described the bleakness of camp life, and the virtual absence of hope. Then he told me how one of the prisoners, who owned an illegal short-wave radio, had heard a news broadcast in the middle of 1945: it stated that the Japanese war effort had collapsed as a result of some new kind of bomb being used by the Allies. The news travelled through the camp like wildfire. Although the prisoners were still captive, they knew that the enemy had been beaten and it was only a matter of time before they were released. I was told they began to laugh and cry as if they were already free, though that freedom was still a matter of hope and promise rather than an actual reality.
I hope you find this illustration helpful in thinking about the meaning of the cross and resurrection. Sin and death remain realities in our world. But their power has been broken. We live and struggle on in hope. We know what the final outcome of the battle will be, even though it still rages around us.
Entering God’s presence: the cross as sacrifice
The New Testament speaks of the death of Jesus of Nazareth on the cross as a sacrifice. What does this mean? To the modern age, the notion of sacrifice seems strange and distant. A chess player might speak of sacrificing a pawn in order to gain a tactical advantage over his opponent. A busy manager might decide to sacrifice her lunch break in order to finish a project on time. In each case, the term ‘sacrifice’ really means giving something up. Yet it is clear that the Old Testament uses the word in a very different sense.
We must remember that the first Christians were deeply immersed in the language, ideas and practices of Judaism. Jesus of Nazareth was the fulfilment of the hopes and aspirations of Israel. It made perfect sense to think of Jesus’ death as a sacrifice, along the lines of the sacrifices offered in the Temple at Jerusalem. Yet this was not about a repetition, or even an extension, of Israel’s religious system. It was about bringing it to fulfilment – with such effectiveness that it was no longer required.
An example of the use of sacrificial ideas and images to make sense of the identity of Jesus of Nazareth is found in John the Baptist’s declaration that Jesus is ‘the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’ (John 1.29). This image calls to mind the great Passover celebrations of Israel, when a lamb would be slain as a reminder of God’s faithfulness in delivering his people from captivity in Egypt (Exodus 12). Speaking of Jesus in this way suggests that the people of God are in captivity to sin, and need a new act of redemption and deliverance to set them free from its bonds.
The image of Jesus as the ‘the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world’ also taps into the prophecy of Isaiah, who spoke of a coming suffering servant who would be slain like a lamb, for his people (Isaiah 53). This suffering servant of God would be ‘wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities’ (Isaiah 53.5). This prophecy of Christ compares him to ‘a lamb that is led to the slaughter’ (Isaiah 53.7), on whom the guilt and sin of the world is laid. (There may also be an affinity with the scapegoat (Leviticus 16.21–22), which was sent into the wilderness bearing the sin of God’s people.)
We see here a theme about the human predicament that plays an important role in Christian thinking about the meaning of the cross: exclusion from the presence of God. There is a fundamental breach in the relationship between God and humanity on account of sin. We need to be purified and sanctified before we can hope to see and approach God. Access to God depended on the purity of the individual. Guilt and sin had to be purged before it was possible to enter into the presence of God.
Two Old Testament passages echo this theme with particular force. The first is the Genesis account of the Fall, which ends with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden (Genesis 3.24). There would be no going back to the garden. Intimacy with God was a thing of the past. Yet writers such as Augustine of Hippo argue that we retain a distant memory of Eden, and a hope that we might one day return – both to paradise, and to fellowship with God.
The second passage is the account of the ‘Day of Atonement’ (Leviticus 16), which depicts Israel’s high priest making an annual sacrifice on behalf of the nation. This solemn ritual reminded Israel that God alone could cleanse her from her sin. We should not be surprised that the New Testament framed its understanding of the significance of Christ’s death using language and imagery borrowed from the solemnities of Israel’s worship – the ‘holy of holies’, the Temple, its altar and sacrifices, and the ritual washing away of sin through blood sacrifice.
Access to God was understood to require a state of purity. However, we need to make a distinction between ‘being impure or unclean’ and ‘being sinful’. Burying the dead was seen within Jewish culture as a necessary and charitable action. Yet anyone burying a dead person would have to touch the corpse, which would make him unclean (but not sinful). If someone who had buried a corpse wanted to enter the sacred space of the Temple afterwards, he would first need to undergo a purification ritual. In the same way, ‘being pure’ is not the same as ‘being without sin’, even though the ideas are similar. The New Testament holds that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth breaks down both barriers to entering the presence of God, by abolishing the need for ritual cleanliness on the one hand, and by purging the guilt of sin on the other.
What we find in the New Testament is not really an extended and detailed theory of Jesus’s death as a sacrifice. Rather, we see the language and imagery of sacrifice used to affirm that Jesus actually achieved what sacrifices were meant to. Guilt and impurity were removed. The most extended discussion of the theme is found in the letter to the Hebrews, which develops the illuminating and important idea that Jesus is both a perfect high priest and a perfect sacrificial victim, so that his sacrifice is ‘once for all’ – that is, something that never needs to be repeated. In other words, Jesus has made the cultic system of Israel redundant by achieving for Christians what it promised, but did not deliver.
There is therefore no longer any need for priests, sacrifices or temples in the Christian vision of life. Jesus has accomplished something so significant and important that it obviates the need for the Old Testament religious cult, even if its language and images remain helpful in understanding his triumph. Christians thus use imagery from Israel’s past to make sense of the Christian present.
This caused few problems in New Testament times, when many were familiar with sacrifice, both as an idea and a practice, in the religious traditions of Rome, Athens and Israel. Yet as the Christian Church became increasingly distant from the ideas and practices of Judaism, the idea of sacrifice needed explanation, as its imagery became less and less familiar. Many Christians today find older ways of speaking about the sacrificial death of Christ puzzling, if not alienating. For example, consider this section of a nineteenth-century hymn, based on Revelation 7.14.
Are you washed in the blood,
In the soul-cleansing blood of the Lamb?
Are your garments spotless? Are they white as snow?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
Many now find this imagery incomprehensible, even repulsive. Perhaps for this reason, recent Christian writings have focused on communicating the significance of the cross as a sacrifice, rather than emphasizing its bloody imagery.
After agreeing to baptize him along with the sinners, John the Baptist looked at Jesus and pointed him out as the ‘Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world’. By doing so, he reveals that Jesus is at the same time the suffering Servant who silently allows himself to be led to the slaughter and who bears the sin of the multitudes, and also the Paschal Lamb, the symbol of Israel’s redemption at the first Passover. Christ’s whole life expresses his mission: ‘to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.’
Let’s move on and look at another aspect of the death of Jesus on the cross – the idea that his death is a ‘ransom’. What does this mean?
Ransom
Unfortunately, the concept of ‘ransom’ is as familiar to us today as it was in the ancient world. People continue to be kidnapped and held to ransom, with money demanded to secure their freedom. The more important the prisoner, the greater the ransom likely to be required. In the end, the amount paid to secure a loved one’s freedom may reflect how much that person is valued and esteemed. (Of course, some people are strongly opposed to giving in to kidnappers’ demands, whatever the consequences of this might be.)
In the Old Testament, when the people of Jerusalem are exiled in Babylon, God speaks of ransoming them from their captivity by handing over some of the ancient world’s greatest nations in exchange. ‘For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Saviour. I give Egypt as your ransom, Ethiopia and Seba in exchange for you’ (Isaiah 43.3).
It is not surprising that the New Testament should use this image as a natural and powerful way of expressing the significance of Jesus’ death on the cross. It is a ‘ransom for all’ (1 Timothy 2.6). Most significantly, the Gospels indicate that this specific word is used by Jesus himself to refer to the meaning of his own forthcoming death: ‘For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many’ (Mark 10.45).
The concept of ransom appeals to our imaginations because it is accessible and doesn’t need explanation. But we will still benefit from considering it from various angles.
To start with, let’s reflect on the context that the image of ransom presupposes. Someone has been captured. He is being held against his will. He is trapped, and cannot break free. His freedom depends utterly on the willingness of someone else to meet the demands of his kidnappers.
This frames the Christian understanding of salvation. We are trapped in a web of sin. We’ve fallen into a pit, and can’t get out. We are ensnared. Many scholars see this theme as lying at the heart of Paul’s analysis of his predicament:
I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate . . . But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me . . . For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me . . . Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
(Romans 7.15–25)
Second, a ransom is a price paid to secure liberation. This might take the form of money, possessions or territories. But in every case, the point is that freedom does not come easily. We have neither the power nor the resources to liberate ourselves. Someone else has to set us free as an expression of their love and commitment to us. We are to think of Jesus as someone precious and valuable, handed over so that we might be released.
This is a prominent theme in Paul’s letter to the Christian church at Corinth. Christians, he declared, ‘were bought with a price’ (1 Corinthians 6.20; 7.23). The same idea lies behind the image of ‘redemption’, used frequently by Paul as a way of illuminating what Jesus achieved on the cross (Romans 3.24; 8.23). To redeem someone is to buy that person back from bondage, whether this servitude was imposed or chosen. The ancient world had a thriving slave trade, and some people were forced to sell themselves into servitude as a way of paying off debts. To redeem a slave was to bring about a radical change in the slave’s status: that individual was no longer someone’s possession, but a free person. We have been ransomed ‘with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish’ (1 Peter 1.18–19). In other words, there has been a radical transformation in our status and way of life as a result of Jesus’s death on the cross.
And finally, the image of ransom speaks of liberation. When the ransom is paid, the prisoners regain their liberty. They are set free from bondage. The prison doors are thrown open. Once more, this chimes in with one of the great themes of the New Testament. Jesus brings freedom – freedom from bondage to the law, bondage to sin, and bondage to the fear of death. Through his sacrifice, Jesus is able to ‘free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death’ (Hebrews 2.15). ‘The creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God’ (Romans 8.21).
The demonstration of divine love
Everyone loves a page-turner. I think I was about ten years old when I read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. This novel, published in 1912, was a precursor to Jurassic Park and other adventure stories dealing with lost (or recreated) worlds inhabited by dinosaurs. A London journalist, Edward Malone, sets off with an eccentric professor to explore a mysterious raised plateau in South America, and has lots of adventures with dinosaurs.
But why did he do this? Because the woman he loved thought he was far too boring. If he really loved her, she declared, he would have to do something bold, dangerous and interesting to prove it. Actions speak louder than words. She wanted to marry a hero! So after fending off countless dinosaurs and hostile tribes in South America, Malone returned to London, only to find that the woman he had loved had got bored in his absence, and had married a rather dull bank clerk instead.
What we do shows what we are like. The Christian gospel speaks of a God who loves us, and who shows this love by acting. Earlier, we noted C. S. Lewis’s image of God as a diver, who plunges into the depths of cold, murky, muddy water to retrieve a precious object – namely, humanity. It’s a memorable image of someone doing something dangerous because they want to save something that’s important to them. It’s a theme that we find in the New Testament. God is love – and God shows that love by sending Jesus of Nazareth into the world as an atoning sacrifice for sin (1 John 4.9–10).
In his poem ‘The Dear Bargain’, Richard Crashaw (1612–49) reflects on the astonishingly high value placed on people by Jesus. Like Paul, Crashaw found it difficult to grasp why Jesus died for sinners. You could understand a person laying down his or her life for someone really important (Romans 5.7). But for those as ordinary as us?
Lord, what is man? Why should he cost Thee
So dear? What hath his ruin lost Thee?
Lord, what is man, that Thou hast over-bought
So much a thing of nought?
Crashaw here picks up a leading theme of the New Testament: ‘God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us’ (Romans 5.8). A loving God acts in love to make salvation possible in and through Jesus of Nazareth and invites us to return this love in response. ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life’ (John 3.16).
Some preachers occasionally suggest that Jesus’s death on the cross changes God’s character; that the angry and unforgiving God of the Old Testament is displaced by the compassionate God of the New. But this is not so. The cross expresses the way God is, and always has been – loving, gracious and righteous. God’s chosen way of saving humanity weaves together divine justice, love, mercy and compassion in ways we can never fully understand.
Forgiveness of sin
Finally, we turn to the great theme of forgiveness. The death of Jesus of Nazareth makes forgiveness possible. This theological insight is deeply embedded in popular Christian piety, such as the well-known Good Friday hymn ‘There is a green hill’:
He died that we might be forgiven,
He died to make us good,
that we might go at last to heaven,
saved by his precious blood.
There was no other good enough
to pay the price of sin;
He only could unlock the gate
of heaven, and let us in.
The death of Christ is the basis of our forgiveness – a powerful reminder of its costliness and reality.
The great theme of a loving God who forgives people is movingly portrayed in the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15.11–32), with its vivid depiction of the waiting father who rushes out to greet his wayward boy. But the story also raises an awkward question for many people. How can the father just forgive his son like that? It seems to suggest that the past can be forgotten as if it never happened or didn’t really matter. We often find that our sympathies lie with the older brother, who is both hurt and outraged by his father’s behaviour.
And we are surely right to be worried here. It’s easy to cheapen forgiveness. I could say ‘I forgive you’ to someone who has deeply hurt me, and not really mean it. My resentment against that person would remain, and I would have ‘forgiven’ him or her in word only, not in reality. But let’s remember that this parable only illuminates some of the aspects of God’s forgiveness of our sins. There is more that needs to be said.
In terms of our relationship with God, the cross brings home to us the deep hurt, offence and pain we have caused. God is angered by our sin, and in Christ, makes clear how painful and costly true forgiveness really is by demonstrating how serious sin is in the first place. The offer of forgiveness of our sins is both deeply humiliating and deeply satisfying. It is humiliating, because it forces us to recognize and acknowledge how far short we fall; it is satisfying, because the very offer of forgiveness implies that we matter to God. To put it very simply: God wants to be friends with us again. And for that reason, Jesus ‘suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God’ (1 Peter 3.18).
Real forgiveness is not an easy thing to encounter, because to accept an offer of forgiveness is to admit to ourselves and the other party involved that we have done something for which we need to be forgiven. Of course, it may even be that we are unaware of the hurt and pain we’ve caused by our actions to those who we love.
God’s forgiveness is both about liberation from the power of sin and about living the kind of life that God wants. We’ll look at this in more detail in the next chapter. The point is that Jesus models the redeemed life. Not only does he make this new life possible; he also shows us what we are meant to be like, rather than merely telling us what we ought to be like. Just as Jesus forgave those who crucified him, so we ought to forgive those who offend or oppress us. God’s forgiveness of our sins can release in us the generosity of spirit we need to forgive the sins of others. As C. S. Lewis put it, ‘To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.’
Now there’s more that needs to be said about how forgiveness is established and mediated through the death of Jesus on the cross. We need to ask: what is meant or implied by the declaration, which we noted earlier, that Jesus ‘himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed’ (1 Peter 2.24)?
The New Testament writers saw a clear parallel between the suffering and death of Jesus and the figure in the Old Testament often referred to by scholars as the ‘suffering servant’. This mysterious figure is presented as a sin-bearer – someone who takes on our burdens of guilt, impurity, punishment and illness – though no explanation is provided of how this process takes place. Let us remind ourselves of one of the most evocative descriptions of this figure.
Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But 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. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
(Isaiah 53.4–6)
The New Testament doesn’t offer a detailed theoretical explanation of how Jesus bore our sins: that’s something that later theologians tried to develop, though in doing so they were going beyond the cautious statements of the New Testament itself. What the New Testament does say is something along these lines: ‘We don’t quite understand how this happened. But it did. And it fits into a pattern of God’s dealings with Israel.’ What Jesus achieved on the cross thus brings to fulfilment some of the great themes and aspirations of the Old Testament. Looking back now, we can appreciate that God has acted just as we would expect, in faithful accordance with his promises, showing both mercy and righteousness.
But the really important thing is this: real sin has been really forgiven. We may struggle to grasp how this has happened, or could happen. But salvation does not depend on our understanding of the process by which it is possible. An illustration might help here.
When I was young, I developed a bad infection which had to be treated with antibiotics. I took penicillin as directed by my doctor, and the infection quickly cleared up. I hadn’t the slightest idea what penicillin was, or how it worked. I just trusted the doctor’s diagnosis and the cure he prescribed.
Many years later, as an Oxford undergraduate studying chemistry, I attended a course of lectures on the effects of drugs on living organisms. I discovered that penicillin destroys bacteria. But the drug had worked perfectly well for me a decade or more earlier, though I hadn’t understood exactly what was happening at the time.
The cross is a ‘mystery’, in the proper sense of that word – it is something we can never fully grasp. But though we don’t entirely understand how it works, we trust that it does. One of the favourite hymns of the nineteenth century was penned by Joseph Hart (1712–68). Though rarely sung now, it was widely appreciated for its strong statement of trust in the saving power of the cross:
The moment a sinner believes,
And trusts in his crucified Lord,
His pardon at once he receives,
Redemption in full through his blood.
How does this happen? What is the inner logic of this process of transformation? Hart didn’t really care. The all-important point was that Christ’s death on the cross, embraced through faith, was able to bring about the transformation of our situation. Like penicillin, it worked. Others could worry about the theory. For Hart, all that mattered was trusting that Jesus had done whatever needed to be done – and done it well. Some will sympathize with him at this point! But part of our ‘discipleship of the mind’ is to try and go beneath the surface of our faith, and explore and appreciate its deeper structure and logic.
In this chapter, we have looked at a number of New Testament snapshots which capture aspects of the significance of the cross and help us put together a more panoramic vision. But there are still many questions. For a start, how do we connect up with Jesus of Nazareth? How can we benefit from something that happened far, far away, and long, long ago? And what difference do the life, death and resurrection of Jesus make to us? In the final chapter, we will explore these themes.