“JESUS PAID FOR MY SINS”
This
phrase seems to capture what most forms of Christianity , especially
in America, accentuate and that resonates most with believers as a
motivation for life and well being. This is what many value most they have received from the Christian religion. And is what they consider
central to the message and inspiration of the 'gospel.'
This
essay to not to deride this expression. I do not want it to go away
and I wish to also claim it as important and potentially
transformative. However all statements that come from religion have
to be interpreted and interpretations of the meaning can be quite
different. I observe this phrase is generally, in most churches,
taken quite literally and personally. And it triggers strong emotion
which can help one experience a sense of gratitude and relief.
By
interpreting it differently I am not questioning that the way it is
generally taken does not inspire something sincere and good. Yet I am
questioning if it, as usually taken, is as transformative and
redemptive as the story of Jesus might still inspire in us for a
better more loving humanity.
I fear however it subtly works against that. For it unintentionally promotes, spotlights, glamorizes and divinely authorizes the place of violence in human encounters. This is the last thing needed in today's personal and social world situation.
I
surely once preached this message... that Jesus , totally innocent
himself, died so that my personal sins can be forgiven and I can
have real relationship with the Deity. Something that
interpretation claims is otherwise impossible because God's holiness
prevents God from accepting me without the 'price of my sins' being
'paid for' by some sinless person. That person , Jesus, was willing
and God was willing for him to be violently murdered for the cost of
my, and all others', sins to be paid. This is theologically usually
called, ' Substitution Atonement.'
That transactional kind of interpretation can
generate a sense of great emotional appreciation and relief to the
extent we are convinced of our serious guilt(this interpretation
purposely stirs up that sense of personal guilt) and that God could
not approach us with forgiveness and acceptance , even if we
regretted our specific transgressions and are genuinely moved in
heart to accept responsibility for wrong doing.
I know
scriptures can be pieced together to give strong support of that way
of looking at Jesus' death as human redemption and salvation. I find
most scriptures used in this tranactional way are how it has been
interpreted, even by some Bible authors, rather than being grounded
in the more direct teaching, behaviors and sayings of Jesus the best we
can determine them. I will not, in this essay, compile my scripture
defense of a different point of view.
I present an interpretation here which I think can be an improved way to grasp our benefit from the
Jesus story and how it can today contribute to a genuinely better
world for humanity or as Jesus emphasized be a 'greater love of the
whole world.' For this is what is needed in our time like never
before. The traditional interpretation, so much taken for granted as
the best, has surely had hundreds of years to transform humanity
into a more loving species. Is there evidence of that even in so
called 'Christian nations?'
I'm
contending here that ' God is love' is still the most excellent
message. But not, what I now consider, the altered message that God is unable to love us
unless God approves the violent unjust death of our claimed very
best human specimen. And that this in order to protect God's holiness from being
stained by the common failures and imperfections of ones God created
in “God's own image.”
I'm
thinking the central error, which my view most breaks from the
traditional view of God and Humans, is our insisting that God is
perfect in every way, that God is all knowing, all powerful and
morally perfect. Most believers feel they would be giving up
their whole notion of God to even consider that view. I don't think
that's so or that our experience or the Biblical narrative supports
that 'perfection' assumption about God in our day.
C.G. Jung once, somewhat humorously, said that, ' if
the ultimate God is omniscient He must have forgotten it for the
behaviors of the God image in the Bible do not obscure how that God
breaks his own law and forgets what he has formerly decreed.' The
Bible does not hide at all the transgressions of the God image
described there.
I'll
not make such a long list here. The thoughtful Bible student knows
the Old Testament stories where often times a human has to remind the
God figure of not complying to his own high standards. Or that Jesus
describes himself as being 'forsaken by the Father God' and said to
pray that God 'will not lead them into temptation or deliver them to
evil.' That and far more imperfections and shadow of the Sacred mind are clearly embedded in the Sacred text.
I'm
suggesting that in all genuine love in the universe, even love for God were we to
have it, must involve accepting the imperfection in the one loved,
not 'paying a way' out of that delimma. We understand that to accept and
mutually respect another is not to condone his/her serious wrongs
but to discern when those wrongs are not denied and taken
responsibility for. Without accepting imperfections nothing or no one
is lovable, even God.
So
we can imagine that who or what we call God may still be
waiting for us to love God the way God loves us, ie. accepting
Gods imperfections, omissions to do good, destructive behaviors
and dispositions just as God accepts those in us.
John Prine captures
this serious loving union of God and Human in a light hearted way
when he sings: “Father forgive us for what we must do, you forgive
us and we'll forgive you. We'll forgive each other till be both turn
blue, and we'll whistle and go fishin in heaven.” He explained
these words came to him from watching too many Andy Griffith Mayberry
shows, shows that so many of Americans find as expressions of
down-to-earth practical care and love.
I
find the gospels saying that the goal of human living and the
central goal of God is never perfect performance of any collective
moral code (however important such guidelines are.)
So I'm convinced
from the Sacred story that God never has to have someone 'pay for our
sins'. Sin needs to be owned , taken personal responsibility
for but not paid for by more violence to someone else. This is not
the way of Jesus. We could instead be knowing that God's love
is never unable to forgive without a quid quo pro (ie, You do this
and I'll do that. Jesus will be murdered then I'll forgive humans.)
This, it strongly seems to me, is not the emphasis of the teaching received from Jesus through the gospels. Forgiving without
payment is a key capacity of God at God's very best. It is
transformative when received.
Love
does not depend on any payment for wrongs. Though loving another
eventually carries a different kind of suffering cost, whether its Gods love
or our love. That is the legitimate cost of love. Love does
mysteriously require that we all suffer as bearers of it but not as
payment for anything, including human personal moral failures. That
is not how love makes humans truly better persons, transforms them.
What
I've said above may sound very radical from the more traditional view
of God's love as shown in Jesus' willingness to die at the hands of
Roman soldiers. But to me it is more consistent with the overall
story and emphasis of Jesus' teaching and his behaviors. I am surely
by far not the only Christian who sees the Christ story in this way. These things remain dangerous to speak of until one is old enough to not be fired from anything. I hope the situation is improving for younger believers.
I also wish to present two ways that the more
traditional view of “Jesus Paid for my sins' could be less
radically tweaked than I have and would still give results that are
likely more inspiring and transformative for humans and the world.
One might strengthen the traditional literal interpretation
by emphasizing more that God itself and Jesus are
willing to endure violence against themselves and keep on loving even
those harming them. The traditional Trinity doctrine lets us say that
'Jesus and God are one' so when Jesus suffered being tortured and
murdered God also experienced through him the very same thing to the same extent.
So it is not that God put the suffering on Jesus while God stood away
from the holiness of it but that God suffered exactly the same trauma and injustice
that Jesus did and continued to love humanity in spite of that
suffering.
This at least gets us away from the idea that God OK's
Jesus being murdered in order that God can be clean of it and retain His perfection that
otherwise would be tarnished by God's accepting imperfect humans into His circle of friends; that God and Human become 'at one ment.' This view better leads to God's circle of friends being seen as all humans for
God's love breaks down all barriers and separations of his love for
his creatures.
A
second less ' radical' (than I described first) of viewing how God and Humans
can be united, and which I think is in strong harmony with the gospels'
depiction of Jesus' interactions with others; is if more attention is
given to what any of us thinks about what our 'sin' actually is. What
is so terrible about us that the traditional interpretation says
Jesus had to be murdered in order for God to put God's loving arm
around even the worst of us?
Most
modern sermons I've heard do not help the listener identify his own
horrible sin but just assumes we all are well acquainted with how we
bring hurt, discouragement and suffering into the world ourselves.
So
before we are so quick to accept that 'Jesus has paid for our sins' ,
don't we owe it to ourselves to know quite clearly what our sin is ?
My guess the typical believer may begin to circle around their
personal sin something like this. “Well , first I am most sinful by
what I don't do. I fail to do all the good I could and should do.”
That of course catches everyone of us, probably including the real
man Jesus. Whoever is human could never boast, “ I always do the
good I could do. I never miss an opportunity for doing the good and
loving thing.” This makes us laugh to even think about such
presumptuousness. This is not to make light for there are many very
serious 'passing by' doing good that leave much hurt in our circle of
life.
Next we would probably begin to list the ways we have
broken the accepted collective rules of living. Ones developed over
the ages as guidelines for civil human conduct. Examples are the 'ten
commandments' the the 'beatitudes of Jesus'. Other major religions
have very similar codes of conduct. Some of the most common
violations are stealing, drunkenness, envy, adultery, fornication,
gossiping, smoking, cursing, jealousy, physical violence, lying,
unlawful divorce, conspiring against the innocent, coercing sexual
compliance.... etc etc. Maybe these are always wrong and harmful?
But most of us have observed that sometimes more than others these
can cause horrible suffering for others and ourselves. Their actual
objective damage is relative to the situation in which we did them.
We
also, to be honest, should keep in mind that most of us have
concluded that sometimes, with just cause, we would not pass judgment
on these things depending on the situation. In fact most of the
greatest heroes in the Bible and in America' story are ones who did
these very things but we think the victims of the hero's 'sin' had
it coming. Right or wrong this, when not defending a doctrine, is just how humans generally and
intuitively think about such things.
So it is
not easily clear just what these personal sins that need to be
'paid for' are. We can do our best at an honest survey and find many
sins in any human life including our own. Most of us find gray areas
where we have to admit that some sins are much worse than others. And
not a few of us end up thinking , 'my sins tend to be much less
serious than many other person's sins that easily come to my mind.'
I suspect most of us do not have an easy time accurately and consciously defining our own
personal sin or seeing that ours is really serious enough that Jesus
had to be murdered in order for us to have a sense that God would desire and be able to call us God's accepted friend. The popular traditional interpretation may have forced us into a corner that does not match our real experience very well or the gospel's pictrue of Jesus.
I
have come to think, that as seriously as I might understand how my sins
have hurt others and myself, they are not what really causes the most
suffering, despair, hopelessness and premature death in the world.
No, these personal sins, violations of the collective moral code,
we are guilty of usually have a very limited horrendous effect
except on the people that are closest to us and who depend on us,
especially children, elderly and the otherwise powerless.
Do these
personal sins deserve the attention that someone else should need to
be unjustly tortured and murdered in order that God could forgive us
without damaging some assumed Divine self image? Do we really think
that? If we still do could it reflect a degree of narcissism? We
can possibly make too much drama of our personal sin and neglect the kind of sin which I think is significantly more serious and harmful.
There
is much scriptural example of another kind of sinning, a truly
'missing the mark of life' which causes far more physical and
emotional pain and death in the human family worldwide than the personal sins
examined above. I'm referring to our collective sin or 'group sin'. In the not too
distant past we humans began to organize ourselves, to lump our
personal powers and strengths together to better protect ourselves
against the threatening powers of nature or of other humans who were
doing the same. This was the beginning of our 'systems' of
organizing possessions and power. As a result the world is more
organized by these systems now than ever before. They become the rules we are expected to live by to receive the collective benefits promised from them.
Had
these systems been able to be for the good and protection of all
humans they would be wonderful examples of humans loving and caring
for each other. But we know our systems to grant economic and social
powers and protections and privileges to humans quickly became
organized to benefit mostly those with more initial power and wealth
than others.
Carl Jung correctly observed that ordinary citizens, when grouped as one mind for a common goal, will commmit far more horrendous deeds than any one of them would have alone.. This of course is the phenomenon of the 'lynch mob.'
Our
grand example of economic collective system in the Western world is called Capitalism
and it has proven to have the horrible downside of creating
protections against economic poverty for the most privileged and
'fortunate' ones and not for many others. The disparity in our economic
system has grown progressively worse for more persons over time in
the West and even more pronounced in recent decades in America.
The
same is true for our systems which seek to give assurances to
citizens of adequate nutritious food, water, air, living space, education and in modern times our advanced medical
care. These are the basic things in today's world that determine ones
basic quality of life. They all come from the Earth and collective
knowledge, not by individual human merit, so should be viewed the
possession or right of any human as much as any other. These are
proven proportional to ones emotional health, physical well being
and longevity.
I
wish to suggest that believers might simply change what they hear as 'ours sins' that need to be 'paid for' being our supporting these
systems as long as they work personally for us, even when not others. And when we have done
little to insist that they work for all citizens.
We can consider it 'our sins' if we have
benefited by being part of the 'privileged' and have helped the
systems to create terrible suffering for so many others for whom the
system does not work. It, for no fault of their own, in fact works
harshly against them daily.
Yes, I'm suggesting the most
redeeming and practical application of the Christian love, death and resurrection story today is
that humans become responsible for our 'collective systemic sins'
committed against a large portion of our brothers and sisters.
To see the Christian call as only a personal matter between us and God is to ignore that Jesus' whole approach to life was to culminate in a 'love of the whole world' and all its diverse people.
Jesus
was unjustly murdered two thousand years ago and later persons
experienced a miraculous 'resurrection' of the dignity and value of
humanity as a whole. This was the spiritual meaning and effect of the first Easter. This 'new awareness' was rooted the way Jesus had been seen to care for and love others
before his death. And his love and caring for the 'rejected others' was the
reason he was tortured and murdered by the organized social/ religious systems of his day.
Such a noble death does not 'pay for' our
failure to try to change these organized systems that sin so
mightily against the value and dignity of billions of humans
worldwide every day. This is 'our most seriously damaging sin' which humans need
to acknowledge and genuinely repent of.
Yes the love we have seen in
the image of God and Jesus handed down to us can, when properly interpreted for our day, prompt us to
organize and actualize that same love 'for the whole world' and for
the uplifting of every part of humanity.
This
same line of reasoning applies to our loving the Earth itself for it is our
only human home and should be considered a sacred sanctuary to be
conserved.
The
interpretation I've tried to describe of 'the price that must to be
paid for our sins' leads to a very different emphasis of priorities and activities than the more common view that our 'personal sins' are
what we most need to be 'saved from'.
Rather in reality it is the
'collective sin' we daily commit with like minded associates toward
others 'outside our chosen circle' that needs our urgent attention. We commit this sin by upholding, supporting and not speaking up in any ways we
can to challenge the unjust systems we were born into and of which we now have become conscious.
