AT ONE MENT
November 18, 2012, the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time
Hebrews 10: 11-18
Michael L. Lindvall, The Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York
Theme: The meaning of Christ’s death eludes tidy theories.
Cut to the quick with your word, O God, a word sharper than any two-edged
sword. By your Spirit, bridge the power of Scripture across the ages so that it
might carve us more and more into the men and women you call us to be. And now
may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your
sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Amen.
Most every Christian church in the world has a cross somewhere in the front. It’s
there because Christians have always insisted that the death of Jesus Christ is
profoundly meaningful. But, here’s the nexus and summary of this sermon: there
has never been one single way to say exactly how the cross is meaningful.
Christian author C. S. Lewis understood that the meaning of Jesus’ death lies
beyond any one tidy explanation. Lewis wrote, “The central Christian belief is that
Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start.
Theories as to how it did this are another matter. A good many different theories
have been held as to how it works; what all Christians are agreed on is that it does
work.” 1
“Somehow” it works. The different ideas about the “somehow” are called
“theories of the atonement.” By the way, that word, “atonement,” was not
invented until the 16th Century. As the sermon title is meant to show, it’s a
compression of two English words “at” and “one,” and the Latin suffix “-ment.” It
originally meant simply “agreement” or “reconciliation.” Anyway, heads up – the
preacher’s going to get theological on you this morning. Buckle your seat belts;
I’m going to ask you to think hard for about 18 minutes – simply because this
really matters.
-1* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
Generally, Christians understand the “how” in the “somehow” power of Jesus’
death in three ways. The first way is that his death leads to our forgiveness. Jesus
himself speaks this way. On the night before his death, gathered with his disciples
for the meal that Christians will later celebrate as Holy Communion, he says, “this
is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for the forgiveness of sins.”
The Book of Hebrews, from which Peter read a passage a moment ago, introduces
some very jarring images of Christ’s death and our forgiveness when introduces
the vocabulary of cleansing and sacrifice. Hebrews, you must remember, was
written by an anonymous Jewish Christian to other Jewish Christians. As FirstCentury Jewish followers of Jesus, they simply assumed that sins were forgiven by
the shedding of blood – like that of animals sacrificed in the Temple. So it was
natural that they’d understand Jesus’ death in such terms. It made perfect sense if
you were a Jewish Christian in the First Century. But as powerful as this
vocabulary was to them, images of blood sacrifice have become very foreign –
even revolting – to a lot of modern Christians.
Later theologians would formalize the cross as forgiveness into systematic – even
rigid – theories. Let me give you an example, a very important example. At the
end of the 11th Century, a theologian named Anselm developed a theory of the
atonement that still influences the way many Christians understand the death of
Jesus. To Anselm, the essential dilemma that the death of Christ addressed was the
offence that human sinfulness caused to the honor of God. Anselm’s world-view
was shaped by his medieval context. Remote as it is to us, the honor of a medieval
feudal lord was very relevant in the 11th Century. A feudal serf’s wrongdoing was
actually seen as an offence to the honor of the lord of the manor. In the same way,
Anselm said, the sinful behavior of human beings is an insult to God, the capital
“L” Lord of the big manor. If honor was offended, there had to be rectification,
and rectification implied punishment. But, Anselm reasoned – follow his logic,
medieval as it is – on the one hand, God cannot overlook the offence of human
behavior and remain God; but on the other, God’s love and mercy just can’t stand
to punish the very people God loves – even if they deserve it. Finally, Anselm
reasoned, only Jesus, who was both God and man, can satisfy justice and set things
right.
-2* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
So, he said, Jesus’ death saves humanity from the punishment that the Divine
justice demands. Anselm said that Jesus takes our place; he is “substituted” for us,
hence the name of Anselm’s theory: the “substitutionary atonement.” Anselm’s
theory was perfectly sensible to a medieval mind imbued with feudal concepts of
honor and satisfaction. The substitutionary atonement is still powerful for a lot of
Christians today. To others of us, however, it’s distant, curious, even off-putting.
The fact is that no theory – not the book of Hebrews, not Anselm’s tidy medieval
package – can box up the forgiveness the cross implies. The simple truth is that
Jesus’ death somehow bears the radical forgiveness of God. Somehow, through
Jesus’ death, forgiveness becomes real.
So, if “forgiveness” is the first understanding of Jesus’ death, the second is
“inspiration.” When Anselm was formalizing his substitutionary atonement idea, a
younger 11th Century contemporary was thinking through the meaning of Jesus’
death in a very different way. His name was Abelard. He was a popular priest and
teacher at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Abelard found Anselm’s reasoning
totally outrageous. He thought it “cruel and wicked” that the justice of God would
demand shedding the blood of an innocent person – Jesus – to bring forgiveness.
Abelard worked out a very different understanding of the Jesus’ death. He said
Christ’s death was an enactment of a divine love so powerful that, in Abelard’s
words, “our hearts should be enkindled by such a gift of divine grace,” and
inspired to “true charity” that “should not now shrink from doing anything for
him.” 2
Abelard’s thinking about the atonement and similar ideas have been called “moral
influence theories” – “inspiration” in other words. Jesus spoke this way when he
challenged his followers to “take up their cross” and “follow him.” To take up your
cross is a blunt image for our making sacrifices inspired by Jesus’ sacrifice.
In this same vein, Christians also understand the cross as the inevitable result of
Jesus’ conflict with an oppressive power structure. In the deadly showdown with
the powers-that-be that last week in Jerusalem, the choice before Jesus was either
cross or compromise – one or the other. So his death becomes a sign of his
-3* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
integrity, his refusal to compromise his essential being, and an inspiration to his
followers to live lives of like integrity and courage.
So, if the first way to understand Jesus’ death is “forgiveness,” and the second is
“inspiration,” the third is to understand it as “revelation.” In this understanding,
the cross is a disclosure, a “revelation” of deep truth about God. The death of
Jesus, like his life, shows us truth about God. Jesus’ death discloses deep truth
about the very heart of the Divine – in traditional theological language; it’s a
“revelation” of God’s nature.
The cross reveals at least two deeply true things about God. First, it portrays in
starkest terms a Divine love so deep as to descend to any depth for the sake of the
world God loves. Second, the cross shows us that God has passed through the very
suffering that’s part of our human condition. The death of Jesus is both an
enactment of God’s love for us and a sign that God is with us even in the most
anguished depths of our experience. In the death of Jesus, God articulates without
words, “There is no pain that you might bear that I have not borne, no darkness
that can overshadow you that I have not seen, no fear that might grip you that I
have not known. I have been there, and I am with you in it.”
I’ve shared this memory with you once before, but I want to tell the story again.
More than 20 years ago, a friend named John and I were moving furniture from the
apartment of another church member, an elderly widow named Helen who had just
made a wrenching decision to move into a nursing home. Helen had given our
daughter the old bedroom set John and I were lugging out of her apartment; the rest
was off the Salvation Army. Helen had slept surrounded by this veneered
department store bedroom suite all her life. She had no children to leave it to. It
was a very grim moving day, emptying rooms stuffed with memory into my
friend’s borrowed truck.
Each trip from the apartment to the curb set me and John to thinking about the
melancholy of it all – an old woman despondent about her move, a life of
memories given away or sold cheap. We were carrying the old bedstead out to the
truck, John on one end and I on the other, when he suddenly said something that
startled me. John was a junior high shop teacher, a Long Island Italian – blunt,
-4* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
anything but loquacious, and not given to self-disclosure. Nevertheless, in a few
lean and carefully chosen words, he told me about the death of his child more than
a decade earlier, long before I knew him. I knew about it, but we’d never
discussed it. John talked about the anguish that he and his wife had passed
through. I knew them both as upbeat and dogged church members who taught the
junior high class and showed up for every church clean-up day. They had a son
and daughter, born on either side of that child who had died. I asked the first
question that came to my mind. “How did you get through it?” John was silent for
a moment. He set down his end of the bedstead and looked at me. I’ll never forget
his answer. He nodded upward, to the heavens, and said, “He’s been there; that’s
all there is to say. God’s been there.” Then he picked up his end of Helen’s bed
and we carried it to the truck.
Somehow, the cross brings forgiveness.
Somehow, the cross inspires us.
Somehow, the cross reveals the boundless love of God and promises that we’re
never alone, not even in the darkest hour.
Somehow by the cross, Divine love reaches across the great chasm between God
and humanity and pulls us across, pulls us across into eternally outstretched arms.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
1
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.57.
2
Peter Abelard, Exposition of the Epistle to the Romans, in Fairweather’s, A Scholastic
Miscellany, p.283.
-5* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.