“JESUS PAID FOR MY SINS”.... Easter April 12, 2020

“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.