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 |