Lenten Meditations In The First Person (2): A Full, Perfect, And Sufficient Sacrifice

It is quite a leap, theologically, from the idea that Jesus loves the world’s children to the idea that Jesus died for the world’s sins. “Christ died for us while we were yet sinners,” Paul wrote, as a kind of bottom line statement of what grown up Christians are supposed to believe. (Romans 5:8a) Even so, the first idea still seems the better one, particularly when to the second is added the Pauline embellishment “and that is God’s proof of his love to us.“ (5:8b) What should be the old, old story of Jesus and his love becomes instead the tough, tough story of Jesus’ pain --- pain that is properly ours to endure. At every telling of this latter story, my mind is aswirl with questions more than my heart is becalmed by gratitude.

What questions? Well, for one, proving his love by sending an innocent man to die raises makes one wonder about what kind of a God it really was who was moving over the swirling turbulence of that primordial chaos. In spite of its many inspired flourishes, the Bible sometimes seems to bring God down to the least attractive levels of human behaving, after the fashion of pagan mythologies long rejected by philosophers and plain-speaking believers alike. If the Bible’s God is truly an atonement-obsessed God, there seems little difference between him and the capriciousness of a mountain-dwelling Zeus, except perhaps in the former's graciously refraining from messing with people sexually. (Although on this latter, there is still Genesis 6:2,4 to be dealt with.)

Another question has to do with the proper way to give this one true God his due. Most certainly, everyone owes God a lot. For our sins, we all have a lot of making up to do. But I find neither credibility nor comfort in the idea that someone else has already paid the price for those sins, that a deal made long ago between him and God (and possibly the Devil as well) was accepted long before we would commit even the first of them, and that we are now free from having to make anything up to the God we continue to dishonor.

Closely related to this question about giving God his due should be at least some wonderment about what we hear from a lot of sweat-soaked preachers about the cost to Jesus of saving us from our sins. Mark's Passion Narrative --- the one that Mel Gibson parlayed into a blockbuster movie --- powerfully exhibits the pain and humiliation God's only Son had to endure to free humanity from its Creator’s wrath, but with a result quite different from what its author/compiler intended. Instead of making thoughtful people humbly grateful, Mark's account (and Gibson's even more so) should only leave them astonished, angry more with God than at the Jews and the Romans. What kind of strange logic is it to claim, with Isaiah, that by his stripes, we are healed?

And then there is the question of why a gracious, merciful, forgiving, and loving God keeps getting calumnied by references to the divine rage, reprisals, violence, and terrorization that dominate so many of the Bible's pages. My own first encounter with God was with a Being patient enough to have listened to my doubts that he even existed, and caring enough to have assured me that he still loved me with all his heart, in spite of both my doubts and my sins. (I never considered doubts themselves to be sins.) No one had to get up on a cross to make this God more hospitable to me than he otherwise might have been inclined to be. Forgiveness from this God is one on one, wholly undeserved on our part, a transaction that leaves no one else writhing in agony or despair, and that asks of us only a loving, not a blind loyalty, and a willingness to share a loving spirit wherever we can, asking nothing in return.

It is still blindingly clear to me how much greater God's capacity to love is than human beings‘, and that this gap is not something to be narrowed by any third party acting on our behalf, whether Jesus as an agent of pardon or the Holy Spirit as an agent of perfection. The only way that I can see toward becoming a more loving person is to traverse a lonesome valley that I and everyone else --- and not just Jesus --- must walk alone. The idea that Jesus somehow loves us for doing it, though, still counts for a lot.