"Just as many were astonished at you, so His visage was marred more than any man, and His form more than the sons of men; so shall He startle many nations. Kings shall shut their mouths at Him; for what had not been told them, they shall see, and what they had not heard, they shall consider." -- Isaiah 52:14-15
I'm not alone in realizing that I'm pretty obsessed with my own body. I work out religiously, sometimes with more faithfulness and discipline than I apply to studying God's Word, and not for the purpose of helping to serve others or doing my job well, but to be good at sports and to appear impressive without a shirt. And sometimes I watch The Biggest Loser to marvel at the spectacle of the fat kids trying desperately to lose weight and regain a physical normality. I'm always impressed with the amount of effort and attention they put into their on-camera project, and no matter who wins, everyone seems elated and gratified at the end of the show and swears that come hell or high water, they will never let themselves regress to the throes of obesity. Would anything, any cause, compel them to sacrifice their new-found health, appearance, confidence, and approval? Because they seem pretty attached to their healthy bodies. Physical health is something most people prioritize and invest in significantly and constantly.
Consider the following hypothetical examples:
If given the choice, would you accept severe facial acne and a lazy eye for the rest of your life if it meant that your father would never face unemployment?
Would you stick your arm into a wood chipper if it meant that a child in Africa would never go hungry again?
Would you allow your eyes to be put out if it meant that you could have your pick of a mission field to be sent to?
Would you make all three physical sacrifices if it meant that all three resultant goods would come to pass?
Two observations stand extant from pondering those questions. One is that the questions are completely unreasonable because the sacrifice and the resultant good are seemingly unrelated: there is no foreseeable cause and effect. And the other is that they seem completely unreasonable because the resultant good might seem small or cheap compared to the thought of spending the rest of your life with facial acne, an amputated arm, and two detached eyes, both presumably made lazy through the process of removal. But if the resultant good of your sacrifice were high enough, worth enough, valuable enough, then the hesitation and regret about the physical sacrifice would pale in the face of the good consequences, and the questions would not seem so far-fetched.
I say these things because Jesus's face was "marred more than any man." Isaiah 53 predicted that in the midst of His crucifixion, He was the sort of man that people hid their faces from: either from shame and shock at the depth of His unmerited suffering or horror at His physical grotesqueness. It only takes a passing glance at the details of a Roman crucifixion or a viewing of The Passion of the Christ to imagine what Jesus gave up physically for us: a horrible, painful death so terrifying that He sweat blood in anticipation of the event in the Garden of Gethsemane. And He gave up so much more than His body: He gave up the rest of His human life and relationships that we treasure so highly. Time with His earthly family, His beloved disciples, His created and chosen people. Time spent with Mary and Martha and Lazarus. And before all that, He gave up His exalted status in heaven to dwell in abject humility as a homeless earthbound man.
My hypothetical scenarios were ridiculous and irrelevant because there was seemingly no connection between the sacrifice and the resultant good and because the resultant good may have seemed too petty for the accompanying sacrifice. And a lot of people might consider the story of Good Friday and Easter in the same way. What is the connection between a good man dying slowly and an eternal reconciliation with God? And what did He come to die for so horrifically: a chance to go to heaven for harp-playing and cloud-sitting tranquility?
The story of Jesus's death and resurrection becomes relevant and powerful when we address and dispel the two roadblocks. In today's Easter sermon in church, the pastor pointed to "substitution" as the ultimate distilled principle of Christianity: that if we understood nothing else, that if we never had the chance to absorb all the nuances and wisdom from the volumes of a Christian bookstore, we should definitely understand that Jesus Christ came to die in our place, that He substituted His fate for ours, and ours for His. It seems very simple, but with all the buzzwords and dogmas out there, I think a lot of people that we pass in life have only a vague notion of what specifically was accomplished by Jesus's death and resurrection.
The other half is thinking about what Jesus died to accomplish. It's decidedly silly to think about sacrifice your life, your hopes, your future for something small. It's silly to think that you would die if you could only see the Hannah Montana movie on opening night. It's more noble to think about sacrificing your life for the cause of your nation, but that's still an earthly cause, and governments are ultimately temporary. If you're going to give your life for something, let it be epic, let it be of ultimate importance. Let it be for the long-awaited restoration of a perfected, glorious relationship between a perfect Father and His beloved children, for the return of peace, love, and joy for all eternity, for the vanquishing of death and fear and loneliness, for a triumph that resounds throughout a vast created universe. And if that's what you're dying for, then even the ghastliness of a crucifixion seems like a worthwhile sacrifice, something not ridiculous, but perfectly obvious in its necessity.
"Let us not be deceived on this point nor misled by those who, when they announce Christ as the deliverer, think they have preached the gospel. If I throw a rope to a drowning man, I am a deliverer. But is Christ no more than that? If I cast myself into the sea and risk myself to save another, I am a deliverer. But is Christ no more? Did He risk His life? The very essence of Christ's deliverance is the substitution of himself for us--his life for ours! He did not come to risk his life; he came to die!" -- Horatius Bonar
These things to recall and rejoice in about the body of Christ, broken for you.
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About Me
Why?
Some people keep prayer journals, to archive their thoughts and experiences with God and with life. I think I'd lose an actual journal if I kept one, but it's a lot harder to misplace the Internet. So here are my thoughts about God and about life. I am not always right, but I am always honest. I put them online because I think real community begins when we open doors that we normally keep shut.
6 comments:
While I think that it's pretty obvious that the resultant good of Jesus' crucifixion, taken as the salvation of a whole bunch of people, makes his sacrifice 'worth it', I don't like simple (meta-) physical substitution as the mechanism connecting the sacrifice to the good.
First, I don't think it works very well as an explanation in itself. One could as easily say that the children in Africa won't go hungry because you've substituted your own pain (from losing your arm) for theirs - it's still not clear exactly how that's supposed to work. We don't ordinarily understand things like pain and guilt as being governed by conservation laws, and we certainly don't let convicted murderers go free when extremely charitable altruists offer to take the lethal injection for them.
Second, it's not enough that Jesus' sacrifice be sensibly related to a great good. All trade-offs like this take place in the context of a larger system that demands sacrifices for goods. We often have to sacrifice in order to make the world a better place, but that's because we weren't consulted in the world's design. Losing an arm to save millions of children seems like a noble thing to do, but it's a lot less admirable if you could have saved the millions of children merely by hitting a button. In that case, losing the arm was just stupid (and even a bit conceited, in a sense). To say that Jesus needed to take our sin onto himself in that way in order to cleanse us of it suggests that we're accountable for our sin to something other than and higher than God. If it's God that has to do the judging and the forgiving, then his sacrifice is the same as that of the man who loses his arm when he could have pressed a button, and it's still unclear why a just system would allow the forgiveness of imperfect beings to require the suffering of a perfectly good being (one that by definition doesn't deserve it).
I think that something like a free will theodicy can be used to better explain Jesus' sacrifice. God could have simply forgiven everyone's sins without incarnating, but doing so would have removed people's ability to freely become saved. Instead he came to -show- mankind what they would have to do to become saved, but not to force them into it. His sacrifice speaks to many people precisely because of how great a sacrifice it was - it was God demonstrating his love in an obvious and costly way and showing us how he would like us to live. In short, Jesus was an evangelist, and his mission was to convince as many people as possible to do good and to love God of their own free will. There was no button that he could have pressed instead - Jesus seems to have done everything short of mind control (which would have prevented the exercise of free will) - and there's no sense in which he zeroed our moral balance sheets or some such, but it remains true that he died because we were sinful and so that we could be (freely) saved.
I suppose this runs more to works than to faith, but I don't think that one has to strain oneself overmuch in order to read substitution out of the NT. I also assume throughout that, if Jesus and God aren't the same person, they at least share the same understanding of justice.
I've also been thinking a bit about pronouns lately. 'God' is obviously a proper noun, but 'He' seems to me to communicate belief and worship. I have a slight preference for the lower-case as the more honest, but I don't really have a handle on whether or not it's offensive for me not to use 'He' (or, alternatively, whether it'd be offensive for me to use 'He' without really meaning it). For future reference, what's preferred? I've also decided to use 'she' more as a genderless pronoun, but that's not as relevant here.
oh good, i was wondering if you just naturally looked like a superhero. glad to see even superman needs to work out.
I think Mithun had mentioned this before as well. At least, someone drew a comparison to monks and to their literal "wasting away" as they practiced fasting, and it was a challenging thing to hear since I had started working out and obsessing a bit over image.
An interesting thought though. I doubt we'll ever make a decision like you described, but we make small decisions to sacrifice a bit of our health every single day. Do I stay up later to build a relationship or go to sleep so I can keep my rigid schedule? Do I forego working out to help someone in need? Do I get rid of a strict dietary plan to fast for a day to remember Christ?
In every single case, there's a sense that our bodies are being broken for something greater.
Billys, some excellent points. I hope my responses make some sense.
To your first point, I agree that we don't ordinarily understand things like pain and guilt as being governed by conservation laws. The substituted sacrifice of Jesus would have been better understood in the context of Torah-based sacrifices, where people learned for centuries that their sins were covered and their restitution was achieved through the sacrifice of innocent lambs, calves, and other animals. We don't do that nowadays, but a lot of people do use the monetary metaphor of Jesus paying our debt of sin that stood immovably between us and God: you could see how a generous, altruistic man could sacrifice some of his own money to pay your debt and get you out of trouble. It's not a watertight analogy, but a flawless analogy would be the real thing, not an analogy.
To your second point, I guess conceptually, God could've just re-zeroed the sin spreadsheet or just re-defined morality, or tweaked the system externally in a way that didn't necessitate His sacrifice and death. My answer isn't watertight, but I would say that God really believes in the goodness and redeemability of the world He created. Pressing reset is a statement of screwing up and starting over again, like an experiment with bad data. But throughout the Bible, God is heavily personally invested in people because He very deeply loves them. He groans when they rebel, He rejoices when they rejoice in Him, and sin is not an unexpected error, but a personal wronging with consequences against a God with real feelings. If God didn't love the world, He could let it go, reset things, and start again (like He sort of did in Noah's flood). But in that oft-quoted John 3:16, it is because God so loved the world that He gave Jesus as a sacrifice for us.
It is true that Jesus spent a lot of time teaching how to do good and how to love God. But His main purpose was to be a sacrificial Savior, not a teacher. He constantly referred to His impending crucifixion as "My hour." If Jesus's mission were to be an evangelist for God, He didn't seem to be doing very well. He spent a lot of time alone, He only took on 12 disciples, most of whom were bums, He spent His time with the homeless and the whores, as opposed to writers and people of influence, and He died a common criminal's death surrounded by a mob who hated Him. I don't know much, but if Jesus's mission was to be a teacher and evangelist, I think He could've used His time more effectively. Jesus willingly came to die for us, and His teaching was secondary and supplementary to that function.
At the very least, Jesus was convinced that His death was the only way. He says many times that He (not a system of morality) is the only way to salvation, and right before His death, He begs God, "Father, all things are possible for you; Take this [hour] away from Me. Nevertheless, not My will, but Yours be done." Jesus is basically asking for any other option for the salvation of the world because He knows it's going to hurt badly, but He accepts that His sacrificial death is the only way.
If we believe that Jesus and God are on the same page, then Jesus's death is the only way. The other possibility is that He was tragically mistaken, and we might or might not be in serious trouble.
I capitalize the pronouns out of convention because I'm used to seeing them that way in the Bible. You won't offend me if you don't capitalize; like you said, it's honest.
On sacrifices: I think it's telling that the only way to make sense of substitution is to analogize sin to properties without moral (dis)value. And while I'd understand using such analogies if they were all we could think of, there are clearly more similar cases out there (such as the one I mentioned, where someone is trying to take a punishment and not merely a penalty for someone else). But substitution falls apart for these cases.
I'm sure this would have made more sense to people immersed in OT attitudes towards sacrifices, but I would argue that these attitudes are relics of more primitive god-beliefs. You make a sacrifice to Poseidon so that he will grant you calm seas, and you have to do this because your interests and his don't line up – he demands payment in return for services rendered. It's pretty clear that many early Jews didn't understand God as being all-loving, and a lot of their attitudes towards sacrifice reflect that – the idea is to appease and bargain with him in the same way that one would appease Poseidon if you had somehow pissed him off. That is, this more primitive notion of sin is in some sense pre-moral – if you make God mad, he needs to be paid, but it doesn't matter particularly much whether or not it's you that pays him. Now, though, Christians conceive of their relationship with God as a personal and moral one, and they don't generally believe that God can be 'bought off'. At least, I don't think we believe this anymore, and it remains unsatisfactory with respect to Jesus because in that case God isn't 'making a profit' – Poseidon doesn't need to sacrifice anything to get calm seas when he wants them.
Moving on, I don't see how God forgiving everyone's sin would 'reset' creation any more than Jesus' sacrifice actually did. Absent a power higher than God that determines forgiveness and grace, Jesus was sacrificed and then God freely decided to accept that as 'payment' for human sin. Why can't God set a different price? Why not decide to forgive human sin pro bono? Either way, human sin is forgiven by a compassionate decision to forgive and not by an obligation to do so.
To the rest, I'm curious as to whether you'd agree with (or at least grant the plausibility of) the counter-factual “had Jesus not been crucified and had he not then risen, Christianity would not have become a major religion.” If that's true, then it can be true that Jesus' sacrifice was necessary for salvation, and (if Jesus is also taken as a powerful symbol, which he is) even that that salvation is through Jesus. It can even still be true that belief in Christianity is necessary for salvation, though I'm not fond of making that move. It may be that only a story as powerful as Jesus' can show people God's love for them, etc, etc. As I said, it leans more to works than to faith, but it's perfectly compatible with a salvation through faith view. And, to be clear, when I say that Jesus was an evangelist I don't mean that his primary purpose was to provide a moral teaching, just that his primary purpose was to evangelize. A good martyring can be very effective evangelism.
To try for another analogy: Jesus' sacrifice is like buying an incredibly expensive wedding ring (only more so). The ring is a gesture, and it functions as a proof of one's love. The reaction (which Jesus' sacrifice does engender) is something along the lines of “aww, you did this for me?” The whole point of the thing is for God to sacrifice something, thereby getting people to reflect on how important humans are to him. But the sacrifice itself doesn't do much - what's important is what that sacrifice says to us. There's a sense in which a proposal is the only way to a wedding, but not in a metaphysical sense - it's the only way to a wedding because it's the only way to show someone that you're serious.
Jesus's sacrifice being a very realized symbolic act of love, rather than a substitutive one, is an idea that I hadn't thought of explicitly before. There's a lot of Christian rhetoric that dwells on the symbolism: I know at least one worship song that hails Jesus as "God's love song to the world," and Jesus Himself explains, "Greater love hath no man than this, that He lay down His life for his friends." It's a very cool idea, and I'd grant its plausibility but for two immediate questions:
1) I wonder how salvation would be achieved if that were the case. Scripture tells that the wages of sin is death: that is to say, sin merits a punishment of death. In the OT, rather than a transactional exchange of desires like appeasing Poseidon if you want calm seas, it was accepted that you would offer a blameless animal to die in your stead: a scapegoat, if it were Yom Kippur. In the NT, death is defined less literally, as "eternal separation from God," but the punishment for sin is still death. If Jesus did not die in our steads, but instead died as a message of love, then would it simply be our repentance and subsequent good works that would achieve our salvation or reconciliation with God? Would our sin be simply overlooked by the virtue of our own repentance, or would it be some other mechanism of grace? How would salvation work without Jesus accepting the punishment for our sin?
(I realize it's confusing to think about Jesus dying physically to substitute for our dying in an "eternal separation from God" sense, but a lot of scholars consider "eternal" in an "infinite" sense, rather than a "forever" sense, so the idea that Jesus could be infinitely far from God could be an eternal separation, as He clearly is not spending the rest of time apart from God. Hence, His outcry of "Why have You forsaken Me?" I can buy that distinction, but I could see that many people wouldn't.)
(Also, I realize there seems to be a discrepancy because OT sacrifices carry such a transactional connotation of you-sin-therefore-something-must-die and the NT conception of God seems to be more about building a personal relationship. In looking more closely at Scripture, there's a lot that makes God more consistent, but I acknowledge that it's a tough dichotomy that raises a lot of questions.)
2) The other thing is that Jesus's death as anything but a substitutive sacrifice contradicts a large portion of Old Testament prophesies and New Testament commentary: in Isaiah, Jesus is predicted to be "wounded for our transgressions" like a "lamb led to slaughter," in Romans and 2 Corinthians in particular, Paul talks at length about Jesus becoming sin and dying in our stead; in his first letter, John calls Jesus an "atoning sacrifice" in the style of the OT sacrifices. I put a lot of stock in OT and NT writers, so I'd have a hard time forgoing what they say about Jesus's death.
I'm glad you're raising these points because you point out a lot of different angles that I don't see very often. I hope my responses make sense and aren't automatic dogmatic reflexes. I would guess that the nature of questioning is a little different from your end and mine: for me, not that I won't consider different ideas and perspectives, but the truth is I'm more or less convinced of the existence and goodness of God and the truth of the gospel of Jesus, so this is more of an exercise in getting to know Someone better and deeper, rather than pondering how a hypothetical deity might or might not design things. So far, it's been very valuable for me, and I appreciate that.
Starting with (2): I'll certainly grant that what I'm suggesting hinges on a willingness to bend the OT a bit. From where I'm sitting, it looks like you've already got to pass it through some pretty heavy “product of its time and place” and “metaphor” filters if you want to maintain that it's true (I guess we never spoke about this, but I assume you at least generally agree re: Genesis, for example). So I don't regard it as a tremendous stretch to read a lot of the stuff that supports substitution as the closest thing to a personal/moral relationship with God that the early Jews would have understood.
At bottom, I just don't find it at all plausible that God ever really cared about the scapegoats – why would he choose to let a goat stand in for a people? I'd suggest that the scapegoats were a way of teaching a largely pre-moral people how to honor and sacrifice to God – they were training wheels for repentance. It seems to me that the goats were more for the benefit of the Jews, who perhaps needed something concrete to seize on as symbolic of God's forgiveness of them, than for any reason of God's. But I can certainly understand why that would be a more liberal reading of the Bible than is acceptable – that's me interpreting so as to get something that seems as just to me as possible instead of to get as close to the author's meaning as I can.
To build on that last thought, maybe Jesus as a substitute is like my explanation of scapegoating. There are still many people (who might, perhaps rudely, be termed pre-moral in their thinking) who have difficulty understanding what it would mean to have a personal relationship with God without having something concrete that they can grasp as a symbol of that relationship and God's forgiveness. Again, though, my model has the sacrifice not being necessary for forgiveness in God's eyes, but only in the minds of some Christians (as a useful conceptual tool).
So, quick answer to (1): I just don't see what obliges God to demand payment for sin, or what would motivate/require him to accept the sacrifice of third parties. Would a modern Christian deserve forgiveness any more or less if Jesus as substitute were not true? Why not overlook sin by virtue of repentance, grace, or what have you – what good reason would God have for doing differently than he does now?
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