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Sermon
Sunday 1 March 2015
Lessons Genesis 17: 1 – 7, 15 – 16 Romans 4: 13 – 25
St Mark 8: 31 – 38
Prayer of Illumination
Let us pray.
Encircle us in Your love. Draw us ever nearer; may we know the ruach, the
breath of life, in our lungs, Your Spirit filling our soul to overflowing. In
Jesus name, we pray. Amen.
Just over two weeks ago, I was a guest of the University of
Edinburgh Humanist Society, part of a panel of four. The Society
was celebrating Darwin Day with an evening discussion. One of
the questions which I faced concerned the death of Jesus. The
student said, ‘Do you believe that Jesus died for your sins? I
thought Jesus’ death was part of God’s plan. I thought he had to
die?’ With grace, I replied, ‘No! No! No! No! That’s ghastly
theology; you don’t want to go there!’
It is no condemnation of the student that she thought this. She
will find it almost everywhere in Church life: in theology, liturgy,
sermons and hymns. In the seventeenth century hymn, ‘O Sacred
Head! sore wounded’, we sing the lines:
Thy grief and bitter Passion
were all for sinners’ gain;
mine, mine was the transgression,
but thine the deadly pain.
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In Charles Wesley’s magnificent hymn, ‘And can it be’, we sing:
And can it be, that I should gain
an interest in the Saviour’s blood?
Died he for me, who caused his pain –
for me, who him to death pursued?
Jesus’ death is foundational for Christianity and there is a
widespread understanding that He died in our place: Jesus paid
the price for our sins. In my view, this theology is an obstacle to
evangelism in the 21st century. It is an obstacle because it portrays
God as a potentate who demands blood for offences He has
suffered: our sins have offended Him and He demands a blood
sacrifice.
Known as substitutionary atonement, because Jesus is our
substitute, He dies the death we deserve, God’s forgiveness is
‘applied’ to us. In this theology, Christ is an atoning sacrifice and,
on account of Jesus’ death, a propiation or ransom for sin, God
chooses to see us as righteous. His wrath is satisfied. I’m almost
embarrassed explaining this theology because it is well past its ‘sell
by date’ and, in some sense, is immoral. I do not mean to mock
those of previous generations who believed it or those who believe
it in our time, but it is a theological argument which no longer
works. It is damaging the Church. It is particularly prevalent in
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the Protestant traditions but, crucially, the theology of
substitutionary atonement does not go back to the Bible. Some of
the words may be there, such as ransom, but the theology is not.
The theology started with Anselm of Canterbury in 1097. It was
based on a legal model of retributive justice. Like every human
discipline, theological understanding must evolve and reform.
In the Gospels, Jesus was killed by the Roman authorities because
He was deemed to be a threat to the state: He died a terrorist,
albeit a man of non-violence. He was crucified: a very public,
humiliating death. The message of crucifixion was clear for all to
see: Rome was saying, ‘This is what happens to those who
challenge us.’ The history of His death is that He was killed by the
powers that ruled the world, not as a payment for our sins.
Within substitutionary atonement, another word used or misused
is ‘sacrifice’. Jesus’ death is understood as a sacrifice made to God
in the same way priests in the Old Testament made a sacrifice of a
lamb to God but the Old Testament sacrifice had nothing to do
with sin. The word ‘sacrifice’ means ‘to make sacred’. In killing
the lamb, offering it to God, the meat was made sacred. It was
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then eaten by the community; as a sacred meal, it was one they
shared with God.
I could go on about the theology of Anselm of Canterbury but my
point is that, as prevalent as it is within and outwith the Church, it
is time to ditch substitutionary atonement. It is time to ditch it
because it obscures the real meaning of faith. A forgiveness which
is ‘done to us’ is one which leaves us unchanged when, in fact, the
central focus of all the world’s great religions, including
Christianity, is about inner change, change within us,
transformation. Substitutionary atonement makes sin,
forgiveness and the afterlife the centre of faith: they are not.
What matters is our transformation and, in turn, the
transformation of the world around us.
Jesus never asked His followers to believe in a creed or His
divinity. Instead, He called them to ‘faith’. In Greek, the word is
pistis, which means ‘trust, loyalty, engagement, commitment.’ He
called them to live in a way which was and is different from the
world. Of course, we are of the world and must meet our
obligations in the world but, at the same time, we are to detach
ourselves from its values, its idols, its seductive gifts of power,
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status and wealth, and attach ourselves to the Holy. Jesus called
His followers to live a life of holiness. He told them that pistis, a
life of faith, a life centred on God, could move mountains.
It is perfectly legitimate for theology to evolve and reform. Within
the Jewish tradition, in the years after the destruction of the
Temple, in the first century AD, there is a story told of a rabbi,
Rabbi Akiva. Akiva was said to have great insight; he was skilled
at re-interpreting Scripture. The original intentions of the authors
did not concern him. Moses decided to come down from heaven
to hear the rabbi for himself. He entered one of Akiva’s classes
and sat at the back, in the eighth row behind the other students.
Moses could not understand anything of what Akiva taught about
the Jewish Torah which had been revealed to Moses on Mount
Sinai. Moses said, ‘My sons have surpassed me’ and he made his
way back to heaven. Evolution is there within Judaism;
Christianity needs to let go of its crazy search for the original
meaning, and let the Spirit speak now.
Jesus called His followers to a living faith. In the Early Church,
the sacraments of Baptism and Communion were said to be
mysteries: they were experiences to be entered into which,
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through reflection and meditation, would lead the followers to a
‘change of mind.’ Followers were to look beneath the literal
meaning of the words, look beneath the symbols, and let
themselves imaginatively encounter the Sacred, the Divine Spirit,
to which they point.
The late Marcus Borg said that there are three ways of seeing
religion. The first is the absolutist way, in which one believes that
one’s own religion is the truth, and no other. The second is the
reductionist way, in which one reduces religion to a human
invention, a human projection or construct, and nothing more.
The third is the sacramental way, in which religions are not
absolute and the human construct we call religion is a response to
experiences of the sacred. In understanding religion as
sacrament, we use words and finite means to mediate the Holy.
Borg said, “Each of the enduring religions is a mediator of ‘the
absolute’, but [none of the religions are themselves absolute].”
Using the metaphor of paths up a mountain, each world religion
starts at a different point, emerging from different cultures and
language, but the nearer we get to the top, the more the religions
converge. The more we leave behind the particularity of doctrine,
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culture and language, the more we see that, at their core, each
world faith is about inner transformation. In the writing of St
Paul, dying and rising with Christ are metaphors for personal and
communal transformation. Paul said, ‘I have been crucified with
Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in
me.’ This is the whole point of faith: the worldly Paul is dead and
the new Paul, united with God in Christ, is born.
Let me close with this. In fourth century Jerusalem, those who
came forward for baptism were initiated into the mystery of faith
and God. At the beginning of the ceremony, the candidates for
baptism lined up outside the church facing westward, in the
direction of Egypt, the realm of death. The candidates renounced
evil and were then turned around in a ‘conversion’ to face east, to
the dawn, new life, and to Eden, to the Garden of God. Processing
into the church, they discarded their clothes, symbolically
shedding their old selves and they stood naked, like Adam and Eve
in the garden before the ‘Fall’. Each mystes, each one entering the
Mystery, was plunged three times into the water. Each time they
came up out of the water, the bishop asked, ‘Do you have pistis in
the Father, in the Son and in the Holy Spirit?’ The mystes replied,
‘Pisteuo!’ (‘I give him my heart, my loyalty and my commitment.’)
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All reference to covenant, ransom, and the example of Abraham
are rooted in the very human desire to be in intimate relationship
with the Divine. We must discard outdated theology, though some
of the hymns are fun to sing. Religion is faith; faith is pistis; pistis
is inner and communal transformation. ‘I give my heart, my
loyalty, my commitment.’
Amen.
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