The Bible talks of the human predicament in terms of several metaphors: Infirmity - We are blind, deaf, lame. Illness - "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” (Luke 5:31) Alienation – We are wayward and lost in darkness.
It’s the theme of alienation or separation that the classical doctrine of the Atonement picks up on, but it seeks to address it in legal terms, the interplay of justice and mercy. This is not completely without biblical foundation; the Bible does talk of redemption and ransom, two legal or quasi-legal terms related to deliverance from bondage. Jesus, however, employs a much simpler and more enlightening metaphor in his three parables: the Good Shepherd, the Good Woman, the Good Father. (Luke 15:3-32)
In the first, a shepherd has a hundred sheep and finds that one has gone astray. He could, of course, write off the stray as part of the cost of doing business and, like Bo Peep, just wait and see if it will find its way home. But, because he is a good shepherd, he sets out to find the sheep. He goes wherever he must go, and suffers whatever danger, privation or discomfort he must suffer, to recover the sheep. It is the shepherd who must bridge the gap if the sheep, who is at two with the shepherd, is to be saved, i.e., come to be at one again. This is at-one-ment.
In the second story, a woman who had ten coins has lost one. The coin is not suffering of course, but it is being wasted, and the woman is suffering a loss. The coin is obviously impotent in this situation, so it falls to woman to do all that must be done. She sweeps the house and searches until she finds the coin. She, like the shepherd, must go all the way to where the coin has gone. She does this because she is a good woman, and what was at two with her is, in the end, at one again.
The story of the good father is more subtle and complex, but the pattern is essentially the same. "There was a man who had two sons”, and in the course of the story both become estranged from him. The younger takes his inheritance and journeys to a distant country where he squanders it. But, as every loving parent knows, children are not sheep or coins. They cannot simply be pursued. So the father waits until his son has had a change of heart.
The son returns to the geographical location of his home, but with no hope of being a son. He declares to his father, “I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son”. He has no means with which to span the gulf that lies between them, and aspires only to be a hired servant. "But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.”
It is the Father who must span the gulf. And, in doing so, he enters into the shame and rejection of his child. But surely we imagine this. Who would shame and reject such a father? Who indeed?
"The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him. But he answered his father, 'Look! All these years I've been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!'
"'My son,' the father said, 'you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.'"
The doctrine of the Incarnation teaches that, at a particular point in history, God entered into human life in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Like a good shepherd, good woman, good father, he spanned the gulf, at great cost to himself, to become one with his lost children again. He enters into all the suffering and shame, lives and struggles and dies, because that’s who his lost children are, it’s where we have gotten to.
Jesus was not crucified to pay some debt of suffering owed to God, or balance off some absolute standard of justice. But, as with the shepherd, woman, father in the stories Jesus told, at-one-ment is a costly thing. He died in the place of two thieves, not in substitute for them, but with them. And we suffer and die with him. The Incarnation is the Atonement.
Don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. Romans 6:3-4
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