Talk given by the Rector on Good Friday, 6 April 2007The death of Jesus hit the news headlines earlier this week. The Dean of St Albans, Jeffrey John, was quoted as saying that the traditional teaching about the crucifixion of Jesus is both "repulsive" and "insane". For him, the idea that Jesus was sent to earth to die in atonement for the sins of mankind makes God "sound like a psychopath". It's quite a charge, isn't it?
Especially as it's a central theme of the New Testament that, as the apostle Peter puts it, Jesus 'bore our sins in his body on the tree...' (1 Peter 2:24). So what does it mean for someone to 'bear sin'? Are we really to understand the cross of Christ as the slaughter of an innocent victim so that the guilty can be forgiven? Was Jesus being punished on the cross? And was an angry God punishing him?
The teaching which sums all this up is known as the doctrine of 'penal substitution' - 'penal' meaning penalty or punishment and 'substitution' indicating that Jesus took our place. As Jeffrey John's comments show, it raises some serious questions. How can it be just to transfer guilt from one person to another like this? Is it really fair? And what sort of picture of God does it present as he is seen as grimly punishing his Son?
How do we set about answering a question like this? Well, I have found it helpful to see what is actually taught in the Bible. And, so that you know where I'm heading right from the start, it seems to me that, despite initial appearances, penal substitution is in fact the best way of making sense of what the Bible says.
We begin by focusing for a moment on what is for the church the most important chapter in the Old Testament. We heard it read earlier: Isaiah 53. The New Testament quotes 8 of its 12 verses as having been fulfilled by Jesus. Verse 1 ('who has believed our message?') is applied to Jesus in John's Gospel (12:38). Verse 4 ('he took up our infirmities and carried our diseases') is applied by Matthew to Jesus' healing ministry (8:17). Peter echoes verse 6 ('we have all gone astray like sheep'), verse 5 ('by his wounds we have been healed'), verse 9 ('nor was any deceit in his mouth') and verse 11 ('he will bear their iniquities') in 1 Peter 2:22-25. Verses 7 and 8, about the suffering servant being led like a sheep to the slaughter and being deprived of justice and life are what prompt Philip to share 'the good news about Jesus' with the Ethiopian official in Acts 8:30-35.
There are many other references to this chapter in the Gospels as well, with Jesus saying that he would be 'rejected' (Mark 9:12, cf. verse 3), that he would be 'numbered with the transgressors' (Luke 22:37, cf. verse 12) and that he would lay down his life for others (John 10:11, cf. verse 10).
One Bible scholar, J S Whale, makes this comment: '[Isaiah 53] makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the servant suffers the penalty of other men's sins: not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth, fifth and sixth verses'.
Not only that. There are two other important sayings by Jesus himself which shed light on the significance of what he thought he had come to do. The first is Mark 10:45: 'For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many'.
And then there is what Jesus said at the Last Supper recorded in Mark 14:23-24: 'Then he took the cup, gave thanks and offered it to them, and they all drank from it. "This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many," he said to them.' 'Poured out for many' comes, once again, as an echo of Isaiah 53:12: '...he poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors. For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.'
The point of all these verses is that in his suffering on the cross, Jesus was, very specifically, bearing the *penalty* of our sins. This is what we mean when we say that 'Christ died for us'.
With this background in place, we turn to one of the most outspoken and shocking verses in the New Testament on this subject. It comes from the pen of the apostle Paul.
2 Corinthians 5:21: 'God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.' In Paul's mind, the cross of Christ is a place of transfer. We begin with Christ and his completely clean slate on the one side and humanity with its sackloads of guilt on the other. What happens at the cross is an exchange. He receives the consequences of our sin. We receive the consequences of his righteousness. He is treated as though he were sinful. It isn't that he actually is sinful, of course. But that he voluntarily accepts the liability as if he were. With the result that we can be treated as those who are completely blameless. True, we may not yet be completely as we should be from a moral perspective. But, as far as God's law is concerned, we are in the clear. Our slate is clean. We are treated as if we were perfectly righteous and so are spared the consequences of our sin. This is the good news at the heart of Good Friday. This is what makes Good Friday good.
But what about the angry God who needs to be placated and so takes it out on his innocent Son? Is this an accurate way of understanding what's going on? This is where we need to be very clear about exactly Jesus is.
Is he, as many suggest, simply a very good man? What does that do to the way we see the cross? The answer is very clear. If Jesus is merely a human being - even the very best human being who has ever lived - then he is, as far as God and the rest of humanity are concerned, an independent third party. And this is what leads to the difficulties. This is what leads to the caricature of the cross which makes penal substitution so off-putting. The cross either becomes the place where an innocent third party is trying to persuade an unwilling God to forgive by suicidally putting himself in the firing line instead. Or it becomes the place where an angry God is punishing an innocent third party for someone else's sins. Either way, if Jesus is just a man, then penal substitution does indeed present the cross as a ghastly nightmare and a gross slur on the character of God the Father.
Here's how the writer and preacher John Stott puts it: 'What is characteristic of both presentations is that they denigrate the Father. Reluctant to suffer himself, he victimizes Christ instead. Reluctant to forgive, he is prevailed upon by Christ to do so. He is seen as a pitiless ogre whose wrath has to be assuaged, whose disinclination to act has to be overcome, by the loving self-sacrifice of Jesus.'
What, then, are we to do? Is Jeffrey John right? Should we cast aside penal substitution and try and find some other explanation? But to do that would be to ignore the clear weight of what the Bible tells us. Whereas in fact, what we need to take account of is the truth that both God the Father and God the Son took the initiative in the events of the cross. To speak of God punishing Jesus or Jesus having to persuade God is to set them against each other as acting independently of one another. But they do not act independently. For Jesus is not merely a man. He is the Son of God his Father. There is a deep unity between them, a love which means that each feels the pain of the other as his own pain. On the cross they were both active. Yes, the Father gave the Son. But the Son also gave himself. The Father did not lay on the Son an ordeal which the Son was not fully willing to bear but bore it with him. The Son did not extract from the Father a salvation which he was not already fully willing to give.
It's true that there are Bible passages which suggest that Jesus died in order to turn away God's anger and that he pleads with him in order to persuade him to forgive us. But this is only one half of the story. For within God the Father himself there is already the burning desire to turn away his anger. He doesn't need to be persuaded to forgive us. He is himself more than willing to do so and has taken the initiative do so by sending himself, in the person of his Son, to make it possible.
And so, yes, there are verses which say that God sent his Son to death on a cross and there laid the sins of the world upon him. But there is no suggestion that, in so doing, God the Father did anything more than what the Son was fully willing to do. The cross sees the Father and the Son, out of love for sinners, working together in perfect harmony.
There is, you see, this indissoluble link between the Father and the Son in what was happening on the cross. It wasn't just the Son. It wasn't just the Father. Both were fully involved. Both gave. The Father gave the Son. The Son gave himself. Both suffered. The Father the agony of bereavement. The Son the agony of crucifixion.
Early in the last century, a minister called George Buttrick wrote a book called 'Jesus Came Preaching' in which he describes a picture he once saw in an Italian church. It is a picture of the crucifixion of Christ. As you look at it closely you notice a large and shadowy figure behind the figure of Jesus. The shadowy figure is God, so that the nail that pierces the hand of Christ also pierces the hand of God, and the spear that pierces the side of Christ also pierces the side of God.
In other words, as another preacher, R W Dale, put it, 'the mysterious unity of the Father and the Son rendered it possible for God at once to endure and to inflict penal suffering'.
This is why, when we think about the meaning and significance of the cross of Christ, we have to be very clear about exactly who Jesus is. At the root of every caricature of the cross lies a distorted view of the identity of Jesus. It's only through being the fully human and fully divine Son of God that he was able to achieve what lies at the heart of what we're here for today - remembering with thanksgiving and awe and worship out Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, who 'bore our sins in his body on the tree.'
© 2007 David Stone |
