16 From
now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view;*
even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view,*
we know him no longer in that way. 17So if anyone is in Christ,
there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has
become new! 18All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself
through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; 19that
is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself,*
not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of
reconciliation to us. 20So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God
is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be
reconciled to God. 21For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no
sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. ~ 2 Cor. 5:16-21
The story is powerful and old - the story of a people who
have offended and dishonored God. And so restitution had to be made and could
not be ignored – God’s honor and justice were at stake. These people, however,
couldn’t pay the debt or satisfy the offense. How could they? They had offended
God – a being of infinite greatness – and since no human could pay such a breach
but God himself and no one should pay it but a human being - Christ had to come and die. Behind this is the
idea that the measure of the offense is determined by the status of the
offended party; if I offend a beggar, the consequences are not the same as they
would be if I offended a head of state. So Jesus was sent by God as a human
being, who did not sin, to take up our dishonor of God and then die on behalf
of people. He satisfied God’s infinite wrath and restored God’s honor by taking
upon himself the terrible punishment that sinners deserved and suffered in
their place, allowing God the Father to vent his righteous anger on him rather
than on them and us.
Let’s have a show of hands. Have you heard this version?
Have you heard someone tell you that Jesus took your place on the cross? Have
you ever heard the idea that Jesus’ death paid your debt to God or satisfied
God’s wrath? That God held a raised hammer to your life. Or maybe it’s more
personal, that you love Jesus but secretly fear God – who rumbles around in the
shadowy recesses of heaven like an abusive father.
Have you heard that this is wrong?
This theory of salvation was first constructed by Anselm of
Canterbury (c. 1033 – 21 April 1109) and is probably one of the most
successful theological visions of the atonement in the history of Christianity.
But it’s wrong. It is not the theology of Paul, nor the witness of Jesus in the
gospels, nor even the vision of salvation offered by God in the Old Testament
and yet it maintains a remarkable hold over the imagination of many Christians.
Jesus’ death on the cross is one of the more critical
features of our faith. And we need to acknowledge up front that there is no “theory
of atonement” clearly presented in the New Testament but mostly compelling yet
diverse images, a series of “likes” which seek to explain what God has done – it’s
like being released from debt, like liberation from slavery, like welcoming a
wayward child, like being healed. And we need to take all of them seriously if we hope to do justice to the Biblical account of what Jesus accomplished. N.T.
Wright says, when Jesus was preparing for his death he didn't give the
disciples a theory, he gave them a meal and I would add many meals of
table-fellowship with sinners. In the Spirit of that and those meals, I would
like to engage us in a conversation about salvation. But we must always pay
careful attention to the Bible itself. So I would like, this morning, to bring
Anselm into conversation with Paul. I can’t cover everything today but I
believe this text is an important step in helping us understand this message
that God has entrusted to us.
1.
God
has never hated you.
The first question raised for us by Anselm is, “Who needs to
be reconciled?” According to Anselm – it’s God who needs to be reconciled. But
is that true? “To reconcile” means to restore someone into a right relationship
– it acknowledges that there has been a breach. But the Bible never says
“reconcile God to sinners” but “sinners to God.” Sin did not change God – it
changed us ~ illus. one of the first effects of sin is Adam and Eve fleeing God
in terror. The belief that God had changed.
God does not hate you because of sin; rather God loves you
and seeks to save you from it. How do we know this? Because of Jesus’
teachings and actions with sinners but also because Jesus is God and God is in
Jesus, Paul tells us. So you can’t say that Christ needed to appease God, because
as Paul states, “all this is from God” vs. 18-19. And God is not schizophrenic!
Not Jeckyll and Hyde.
So what is required of us is good Trinitarian thinking –
this is why the Trinity is vital to understanding who God is. God was “in
Christ,” Paul says, which means that who
God shows himself to be in Jesus is simply who he always is – always was –
always will be. There is a phrase associated with two great theologians of
the twentieth century which states it this way: “God is Christlike and in him
there is no unChristlikeness at all.” In other words, who God is then is the
outpouring of selfless love revealed by Jesus on the cross.
Some of you are saying, “This is all fine and good but what
do we do with the biblical discussion of God’s wrath? It’s a good question and
I don’t have time to deal with it as fully as I would like but whatever we would wish to say about “wrath”
we have to say with Jesus in mind. It simply won’t do to speak of “wrath”
as something that exists with God the Father but remains foreign to Jesus. And
believe me, Jesus could be angry. – Illus. Angry Jesus in the Gospel of Mark: Mark
1:40 – “Moved with anger, Jesus
stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, “I do choose. Be made
clean.”; Mark 3:1-6 – a man
with a withered hand comes to be healed on the Sabbath and Jesus asks, “Is it
lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save a life or to kill?” But
they were silent. He looked around at them with anger, he was grieved at their
hardness of heart . . .”; Mark 10:14 speaks of Jesus being “indignant” at the
disciples who wish to keep children away from Jesus.
Jesus rightly points us to what angers God
– sin which keeps people away from God, keeps them wounded, keeps them bound,
keeps them afraid – child abuse, racism, exploitation, disease. The object of
wrath is sin NOT people. And this wrath should never be appeased or changed.
If so, that would mean God no longer
hated sin. Why would we want God to NOT hate that which kills and steals
our life – injustice, disease, wickedness?
Listen. If Jesus is God and God is in Christ, then God needs
no reparation, it’s we who have to be extracted from sin’s prison of fear and
hate if we are to be able to accept God’s free gift of love. It is we who must be changed so that sin is
destroyed. It is not God who must be reconciled, but we who must be delivered
from our sin, our hatred and fear of God and one another.
2.
God
doesn’t count sin and doesn’t accept American Express
So, what does God demand? According to Anselm’s theory, we
owe God a debt that we cannot pay, that God demands recompense for lost honor.
Paul tells us, however, that what God was up to in Christ
was “not counting their trespasses against them . . .” So why do so many of us
believe that Jesus’ death was necessary to pay a debt to God that we could not pay. Well, some of
you might be asking, “Isn’t that in the Bible? Doesn’t Jesus equate sinfulness
with debt?” And the simple answer is yes (Luke 7). But the Covenant theologian
Paul Waldenstrom rightly points out that in “those Bible passages, where the
forgiveness of sins is likened to a release from debt, not a word is said about
payment, but only about remission.” You
can’t have it both ways. Either the debt is forgiven or it’s paid – it can’t be
both. A paid forgiveness is no forgiveness. Jesus didn’t pay your debt – it
was forgiven.
3.
It
wasn’t supposed to be you.
In Anselm’s argument death is a punishment for sin and it
was you who should have been punished on the cross and Jesus took your place.
Now, the truth is that something must be done about sin because sin exacts a costs from us – it is in
many respects its own judgment – its own destruction – illus. Dante’s Inferno where people continue to sin in
hell incapable of stopping. Paul says, “the wages of sin is death.” Simply put,
God is the subject not the object of our salvation. We are not saved from God
but by God through Jesus on the cross. Sin is like what cancer is to
Oncologists. The cancer exists as a problem that needs to be dealt with and
doesn’t exists solely in the mind of the doctor or even under the control of
the patient. In Anselm’s thinking, however, sin exists as a problem within God
– he has been offended and someone must pay for the offense. But the Bible primarily
speaks of sin not as God’s problem, per
se, but ours. It warps us, keeps us from God and one another, it is our
destruction and something must be done about it. It needs to be healed, in other words, not satisfied
so that relationship can be restored. God is not some petulant person who demands
an apology – He is the One who knows fully what sin does to people and bore the
full brunt of that sin in Jesus so that in him we might be made righteous. So
Jesus doesn’t die to placate God but to make us a new creation, to heal us –
not of offense but of the disease that threatens our lives. That’s why Paul does
not say that Jesus became a sinner on the cross but sin. By taking up our sin,
Jesus offers us healing – righteousness – so that we might be reconciled to
God. The mechanics are never truly
explained by the NT but the intentions and results are – love, relationship,
reconciliation and not condemnation. Read John 3:17.
Why does all this matter? Why is this more than an obtuse
theological discussion?
Because nothing less than who God is and what God has done
is at stake and he has entrusted this message to us. Can you imagine an
ambassador of the United States being asked to represent the President and
misrepresenting him – who he is, what he wants. That would be devastating in
any sort of international relations – treatise could break down, enmity
created, even war could begin. Can you imagine doing that God – it has happened
before in the church. We need another Reformation in the church when such a
wrong theology is rampant, to go and proclaim loudly the gospel of God’s
unfailing love, and God who doesn’t count sins but wants to heal them, the God
who revealed himself in Jesus Christ.
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