You may be aware of the well-known worship song by Stuart Townend and Keith Getty, How Deep the Father’s Love For Us. (If not, you can listen to it here.) It’s popular for good reason: well crafted, theologically rich, and with a strong and memorable melody.
But some of the lyrics have got me thinking.
Let’s take a look at verse two:
Behold the Man upon a cross,
My sin upon His shoulders;
Ashamed, I hear my mocking voice
Call out among the scoffers.
It was my sin that held him there
Until it was accomplished.
His dying breath has brought me life;
I know that it is finished.
I want to focus for a moment on that fifth line, “It was my sin that held him there”.
Any twenty-first century Protestant singing this song is very likely to understand this line in a particular way. It’s the way that I’ve always understood it – until quite recently, at least – because it’s the way that’s been handed down to me as the only acceptable, orthodox way to understand it.
The scheme is this: at the cross, God somehow took my sin and placed it upon Jesus, who as a result became the object of the outpouring of all of God’s wrath against sin. So when we sing “It was my sin that held him there”, the kind of image we might have in our minds is that of our sin being placed upon Jesus like a great weight pinning him to the cross.
To the extent that I’ve understood Jesus’ atoning death at all, this is pretty much how I’ve always understood it. The dominant metaphor is a legal one, and the key outcome is about guilt removal. Jesus goes to the cross in my place, my guilt is divinely transferred to him, and the Father punishes him in my place so I can be free of guilt. It all seems to work.
Except…
I’m increasingly realising that the kind of God who would underwrite such a scheme doesn’t square with the kind of God Jesus came to reveal:
– It would have to be the kind of God who cannot simply forgive sinners because He is instead bound by a “scales of justice” type principle under which blood must be had for sin.
– It would have to be the kind of God who is separated from us by His anger, and who thus cannot be reconciled to us until that anger is extinguished by being poured out on an innocent victim.
Does that sound like the kind of loving, compassionate God who would go to any lengths to bring His children back to Him? Really?
Consider this: if Jesus told his followers to forgive those who offended them not just seven times but seventy times seven, how is it then that God Himself was unable to forgive our sins without exacting punishment on Jesus in our place?
And if God could not forgive our sin without punishing Jesus on our behalf, how is it that Jesus was able to pray “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do” before he was crucified?
Now, you may have entertained these kinds of questions, and if you have, you may well have ended up scratching your head – like I have – and concluding “Oh well, I may not fully understand the cross, but I guess I should just accept it and be grateful”. That’s certainly how I’ve tried to deal with Jesus’ death on the cross for most of my Christian life.
But now I think there’s a better way to understand this – a way that’s fully aligned with the God of mercy, compassion and love that Jesus endlessly talked about, pointed to and embodied.
I can still sing “It was my sin that held him there”, but I’m starting to understand these words quite differently. I no longer believe God somehow invisibly transferred my sin onto Jesus so He could then punish him in my place. The reason my sin held him there is that it was my sin that put him there in the first place: I am in the crowd shouting “Crucify him!”, I am Caiaphas tearing my robe and pronouncing the death sentence on the blasphemer, I am Pilate washing my hands of innocent blood, I’m the torturer tearing strips off his back with my lash, I’m the guard spitting in his face and mocking him, I’m the executioner pounding the nails into his flesh.
My sin put him there, not merely in some abstract, metaphysical way, but in a very real, literal, visceral way. The sin in which we are all complicit is what nailed Jesus to the cross.
But if Jesus didn’t have to die to satisfy God’s anger, why then did he have to die at all?
What I’m seeing more and more is that Jesus came not to enact some mechanical operation of divine justice, but to show us once and for all, beyond any possible shadow of doubt, this one truth: God loves us. He loved us enough to take on flesh, come into our world of sin and shame, and physically demonstrate his love by healing the sick, sharing table with the marginalised and the excluded, and showing Pharasaical religion up for the hollow shell that it was. And He did all of this knowing that, sinful and consumed with ego as we are, it would cost him his life.
Now tell me, a God who is prepared to go through all of that just to convince you that He loves you: does that sound like a God who has an anger problem? Or a justice problem that requires the death of an innocent victim to resolve it?
So let me put it to you: the scheme under which Jesus on the cross is punished by God for our sins has more in common with pagan religions of human sacrifice that it does with the God who said “To obey is better than sacrifice”. It’s the kind of scheme that, far from being congruent with a God of relentless and furious love, compassion and forgiveness, belongs instead in a religion of weights, balances and retributive justice.
[I realise some of my readers may be running for the hills crying Heretic! at this point. So let me reassure you: the “legal satisfaction” view of Jesus’ death – usually referred to as penal substitutionary atonement – that is commonly taught in Protestant circles and widely assumed to be the only orthodox understanding of the atonement is, in fact, a relative latecomer, having only come to prominence in the past few hundred years. It’s a view that was absolutely foreign to pretty much all of the early Church Fathers, and one that remains foreign to the Eastern Orthodox church.
Let me reassure you also that, even if we have different views on the inner workings of something as central as the atonement, we can still be friends, brothers and sisters. We can still look to Jesus together and say, with the Apostle Paul, “He loved me and gave himself for me.”]
[ Image: Lawrence OP ]
