It’s all about the Incarnation.

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

AT-ONE-MENT

I’m part of a house church in North Bay where we watch a podcast by Bruxy Cavey (that’s him to the left) each Sunday morning. His church, The Meeting Place, is in Oakville, with Internet house church connections all over the world. They’re Brethren, a conservative Evangelical denomination, but not highly denominational, so it works for me. He’s an engaging preacher, and even when I disagree with him (generally a little, sometimes a lot) he stimulates my thinking.

Since Easter he’s been doing a series called “Why Did Jesus Die?” and a few Sundays back he spoke about the doctrine of the Atonement. Check it out. If you can persist through the irritating, breathy voice-over at the beginning I think you might enjoy this guy.

The Atonement is one of the central teachings of the Christian faith. It states that the great human problem is that we are “at two” with God and one another, separated because of sin, which is not just the bad things we do but the broken condition of human society and the human heart. According to this doctrine God brings about “at-one-ment” (reconciliation) through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Over the centuries Christians have come up with many theories of how it all works. Some have suggested that Jesus is simply the divine example; if we live the way he lived we’ll be fine. This sets a high standard and can encourage some pretty good living, but the downside is discouragement. Who lives the ideal life we imagine Jesus lived?

Another idea is that Jesus’ death and resurrection was a divine con job in which God gave Satan his Son in exchange for humanity, then, after three days, Satan discovered he couldn’t hold him. There’s a delicious irony in seeing the great swindler swindled, but it’s a bit unsettling to imagine the God of Righteousness stooping quite so low, even if his purpose is to save us. This is, however, the theory of atonement at the heart of The Narnia Chronicles by C. S. Lewis, so it does have some formidable champions.

The most popular Evangelical theory for a while now (a few centuries) has been one called Substitution. This theory says that, because of our sin, all human beings are condemned to die and roast in blue flame for eternity. Since this is divine justice, the sentence can’t simply be ignored, so God, in his mercy, substitutes Jesus for us. Jesus dies a terrible death and descends into hell taking God’s “wrath” upon himself and satisfying the demands of “justice”. And we go free, satisfying God’s desire for mercy.

This approach is neat, tidy and, in a way, fiercely logical. It is also, however, morally outrageous, neither just nor merciful. It’s as though some father were to decide that his five year old daughter deserves to be punished for something she has done, but since the appropriate beating might kill a child so young, he beats his fifteen year old son instead. Of course, the suffering that the Father experiences in all of this is often noted as a justification; the old “This hurts me as much as it hurts you”, line. But, in the end, I believe this view is scandalous. One of my seminary profs used to say, “Why would I say something about God that I’d sue you for if you said it about me?” Why indeed?

If you read the New Atheists (Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, etc.) you will find that this teaching is a prime motivator for them. They are scandalized, as they should be, and insist that a God like this is not to be believed in, and certainly not to be worshipped. Amen, I say, and again amen and amen!!!

As a pastor and preacher I never taught this view of the Atonement. I condemned it in one-on-one teaching, and taught a different approach in larger settings, but my failure to condemn it from the pulpit as specifically and forcefully as I should have is one of my great regrets. I thank God that preachers like Bruxy Cavey have the courage to openly challenge this view. I only wish I’d led more forcefully and faithfully myself.

Then again, I wasn’t all bad. Next post I’ll tell you what I did teach.

ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI?

On Good Friday Christians gathered in churches all over the world and reviewed the story of the Crucifixion of Christ. If it were not for the fact that we know the story and have heard it so many times, we would certainly be horrified at the violence and injustice of it all. But it’s a harmless pageant now, a formula like the lyrics of an anthem. “We stand on guard” doesn’t make us think of real danger, killing and dying; “bombs bursting in air” conjures up no real bombs with flesh and blood casualties, and “they crucified him” is simply the next and obvious line in the story. And then we hear, or read, those few lines that there’s just no getting used to.

At the sixth hour darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?"-which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Mark 15:33-34

What on earth is this about? Did God really abandon his own son at the time of his deepest need? Is this really the act of child abuse the New Atheist accuse us of delighting in? Is the God we worship really the heartless monster they say he is?

There are preachers who passionately insist that Jesus really was abandoned by God on the cross. They proclaim that God, being utterly holy, cannot look upon sin. So, when “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us,...” Corinthians 5:21, he withdrew from Jesus because, in his holiness, he could not associate with sin.

There are only two things I can say in favour of such an interpretation. First, it is a clever bit of theological gymnastics if all you want to do is explain away a difficult passage, and don’t care what you end up saying about God. And second, it should be outrageous enough to awaken even the most inattentive churchgoer from his repetition induced stupor.

The notion that God is unwilling or unable to look upon, touch, handle, or wade through an ocean of sin and filth for the sake of any of his children, let alone his only Son, is an appalling slander. And, what is more, it does violence to the entire story of the incarnation. The Good Shepherd is a good shepherd precisely because he is willing and able to go to when the sheep has gone in order to rescue it. The father of the prodigal son is a godly father precisely because he runs to his son and embraces him pig-stained clothes and all. And the incarnation is “God with us” sin-sick and wretched though we are.

So, what am I saying? Was Jesus just depressed, confused or mistaken when he cried out in this way?

"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" is not a simple cry of pain – though it is certainly that – but the first line, and title of Psalm 22 in the Hebrew Bible. I believe Mathew and Mark may actually be saying that, with his final breaths, Jesus recited the whole psalm. But even if not, he was surely making reference to the psalm in it’s entirety. Now, if we consider the psalm, we find that it begins with the agonizing cry of one who feels utterly abandoned by God, but continues with the declaration:

For he has not despised or disdained

the suffering of the afflicted one;

he has not hidden his face from him

but has listened to his cry for help. Psalm 22:24

A few weeks ago I watched a wonderful and inspiring interview with an American poet named Christian Wiman. (Click on the link and then on the Christian Wiman video. It is profoundly worth watching.) At one point he talks about his cancer and the suffering he has experienced through it. He talks of how excruciating pain “islands” you from everyone and everything. But though he is driven to faithlessness and utter despair by the event of suffering, reflection upon the experience, he says, has become for him an experience of the presence of God.

I believe it is this “islanding” and finding, in reflection, an experience of God, that Psalm 22, and Christ's reference to it, are about. The incarnation is God entering into all that is human and earthly, including the island (abandonment, forsakenness, and faithlessness) of suffering.

God did not abandon, forsake or break faith with Jesus on the cross, he entered into these experiences of suffering with all of us. Indeed, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself,... 2 Corinthians 5:19

Journey to the Centre of the Earth

It’s hard to imagine that I’ve been back from Israel for almost two weeks now. It was an amazing time that will require a good deal of pondering to get my head around.

We left North Bay March 11 and flew to Toronto, arriving about noon. We had a few hours before our travelling companions from Calgary were to arrive, so we just wandered around the airport, read, had lunch, and generally relaxed.

Suzanne and I are fortunate in that neither of us have any particular flying anxieties. Strapping ourselves into a metal tube and hurtled through the sky at 2 kilometres a second (two thirds the speed of sound) doesn’t bother us a bit. This is the miracle of modern flight; not that a 250 ton plane can fly through the sky eight miles high, but that 200 otherwise normal human beings can be convinced to get into it. But clinging to the preposterous modern superstition that flying is somehow safer than walking, and to our seat cushions as flotation devices, we cheated death twice in two weeks.

As our friends arrived from Calgary, along with a few from other places in Western Canada (a group of about a dozen), someone in the group asked a young woman waiting to board our flight, if she would take our picture. She happily obliged, and in a few minutes we discovered she was on her way to Jerusalem University College to take part in the same two week program we were bound for. She had watched us approaching and had been wishing she was travelling as part of a group. Well, there you go. God answers prayers we haven’t even prayed yet. When you wish upon a star and all that.

I always thought that the ancient notion that Jerusalem is the centre of the world was just silly medieval piety, but when you’re in the place, reflecting on the geography of the place, you realize that it’s an historical, geopolitical fact. This tiny land of Israel is situated at the crossroads of Africa, Europe and Asia, which is to say: Egypt, Persia, Babylonia, Assyria, Greece, Rome. As a result, it has been run over countless times by the great empires of the earth. This territory, if unfortunate, is certainly not obscure. Judaism, Christianity and Islam grew up in a cultural vortex of three continents amid the almost constant turmoil of war, travel and trade.

Landing in Tel Aviv was like landing in Toronto. It’s a beautiful, modern city. But the hour long bus ride to Jerusalem reminded us that this is an ancient place. There were ruins and camels and ruined camels here and there, but it was the names on highway signs: Shiloh, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jericho, Mount Carmel, etc., that kept turning my head. It was a bit like my first trip to Disneyland. How strange to see these places I’d heard about all my life. These are book and movie places, yet here they are as big as life.

We were very tired when we arrived and Suzanne was sick. Our hotel, the Gloria, in the Old City of Jerusalem, had no running water, and didn’t get it working until the next day. But these little problems in Jerusalem are different than the same problems would be in North Bay. When you have these problems in Jerusalem, you’re in Jerusalem!!!

How cool is that?

Two weeks in the Promised Land

Way back in 1991Suzanne and I celebrated ten years of ministry at Bonavista Baptist Church in Calgary. It was a wonderful congregation, very loving and appreciative of the work we did there, and they went all out to make the celebration very special. Our parents were invited to come down from Edmonton and some of the pastors in the Denomination attended. They also decided to give us a gift, but wanting to be sure it was exactly the right gift, they asked a few committee members to check out how we would feel about a trip to Israel.

Obviously, we were overwhelmed. But when they asked if there was anything at all that might be better, and insisted they really wanted to know, I plucked up my courage and said, “As wonderful as ministry is, it has a great impact on family life. Our kids have been a huge part of our work here, so, rather than sending Suzanne and me away on a trip, might it be possible to do something that would include the children?”

If I hurt their feeling in suggesting an alternative they certainly didn’t show it. They seemed delighted, and in the brief discussion that followed it was determined that our entire family would receive a trip of a different sort. Thus, we became known in Calgary as the pastoral couple who traded a trip to the Holy Land for a trip to Disneyland.

I share this story now because a few months ago some friends from Calgary, friends who were an important part of that tenth anniversary celebration, called us to ask if we would come as their guests on a trip to Israel. This time the kids were not a factor, so tomorrow morning, thanks to Katie and Henry’s amazing generosity, Suzanne and I will be at the North Bay airport preparing to board a plane for Toronto where, tomorrow afternoon, we’ll board another for the land where three of the worlds great religions were born.

I won’t be blogging for a while, but I will be gathering material for future posts. We’re looking forward to spending a couple of weeks with this wonderful couple, another dear friend from Calgary, and others we will meet on the trip. And, of course, we’re very excited about seeing the places we’ve spent our lives teaching about. And it all comes at just the right time for us.

As Job’s not so good friend, Eliphaz, said, “We are born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward”, so even we who have little to complain about can find ourselves in need of renewal from time to time. The last few years, as we’ve been stumbling into retirement, have been personally discouraging; several friends are struggling with what Shakespeare called “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”; and this past week a fellow pastor, a man we’ve known since before we were married, lost his wife of 52 years in the most heartbreaking, tragic accident you could ever imagine. We are aching for him and his family, and working through our own struggles. Yes, we need to be renewed.

The Bible, far from being a repository of Sunday School lessons for children, is an odyssey of the most heartbreaking tragedy, and an awful lot of stumbling and discouragement. And yet it remains a story of triumph. So it stands to reason, I suppose, that the land where it all happened might be the place to go to sort life out. We'll see. Looking forward to sharing what we’ve learned when we get back.