By his wounds we are healed.–Isaiah 53:5
Then lay your rose on the fire, The fire give up to the sun, The sun give over to splendor In the arms of the high holy one.
For the holy one dreams of a letter, Dreams of a letter’s death.
Oh bless the continuous stutter, Of the word being made into flesh. –Leonard Cohen
I came to faith in Jesus Christ when I was 22 years old through an experience of God’s love. It was several years before I became aware of my own “sinfulness.” My guess is that this experience is common. It was certainly true of many new believers during the Christian renewal movement of the 1970s. We came to faith because we experienced a loving God’s astounding presence and power, not because we understood that we were sinners.
Perhaps this was our relative youth. I’ve known believers whose faith in Christ brought an immediate freedom from terrible guilt and shame. But I think it’s often a mistake for us to share our faith by emphasizing sin. The language of sin is simply incomprehensible to many people and can needlessly push people away. And it’s artificial for someone who has no real feeling for their sinfulness to be asked to intellectually assent to that belief. New believers come to faith in Jesus in many ways.
As we age, however, we come to understand the depth of our wrongdoing. We experience what it means that our worst mistakes are forgiven in Christ. We know Jesus’ presence as healing and restoration. We understand the meaning of Jesus’ death on the cross in our heart, not just in our mind.
Our paradoxical humanity
According to the Scriptures humankind is created “in the image of God” (Gen. 1:27). We are made to experience God’s love in its fullness and to express that love back to God, to others and to all creation in joy. We have been entrusted with the responsibility in love to shape the world with creativity and justice. We each carry in ourselves the imprint of the Divine. We are even better than we think we are – wonderfully so!
Yet something is clearly wrong. That’s easiest to see when we look at the world as a whole. In spite of the existence of tremendous good, we can’t help but recognize that something is terribly amiss. We too often turn away from our truest identity and destiny. G.K. Chesterton, known for his Father Brown stories, quipped that humanity’s innate corruption was “the one Christian doctrine that is empirically verifiable.” Wars, injustice, oppression, racism, and terrible crimes have dominated history. These horrors and our own misdeeds make it evident that are not what we should be — sometimes far from it.
At the root of humanity’s wrongdoing is idolatry. Idols aren’t just stone images. Idolatry is the allegiance above all else to self-interest, wealth, power, status, security, pleasure, nation, party, ideology, or “tribe.” Idols are distorted views of God that are cruel and life-destroying. When we give our highest allegiance to any of these falsehoods, we become its prisoner. We become enslaved by what we worship. Inhuman actions (“sins”) follow. We are unable to fully live out our purpose as human beings reflecting God’s self-giving love.
The Good News is that God loves us so much that he has acted in Jesus to free us from idolatry, absolve our wrongdoing, and heal our brokenness. God is restoring our best identity and purpose. No matter how bad our behavior or disastrous our mistakes, our captivity can be ended, our guilt erased. We can experience union with God and his immeasurable love. We can start growing – albeit in fits and starts — in the likeness of Jesus’ loving faithfulness to God and self-giving love for others. We can become God’s co-workers repairing a damaged world.
But why Jesus’ death?
The question arising for many is, if God wants to forgive and repair our lives, why wouldn’t he just do that? Why Jesus’ death on a cross? The answer is that genuine love is costly. God is absolute love and readily forgives and heals. But forgiveness and healing costs God. Jesus’ death on the cross is the cost God paid.
Isaiah 53 talks about a “Servant of God” — an innocent victim, mistakenly thought punished by God. He suffers the full repercussions of the people’s idolatry and wrongdoing as a substitute for them. Those consequences, as Moses prophesied, were destruction by the malevolent material and spiritual powers.
According to the New Testament this passage was fulfilled in the crucifixion of Jesus by Rome and the spiritual powers animating it. Jesus “bore our sickness and carried our sorrows.” Scripture tells us that idolatry and sin bring their own intrinsic punishment. Yet there’s Good News. God himself in and as Jesus, took on the harmful consequences of our sinful actions. On the cross God “condemned sin” (Rom. 8:3) – not Jesus and not us.
We sometimes voluntarily take on the costs of wrongs done by those we love. We do this to save our loved ones from consequences too heavy for them to bear. This sin-bearing love requires a kind of death – a voluntary acceptance of pain, a self-sacrifice for others. Shamefully, we also sometimes make others bear the costs of our own wrongdoing.
In this way we understand that someone always pays for wrongdoing, and that forgiveness and healing are costly. We can relate to the idea that in Jesus’ death God takes the cost and consequences of our wrongdoing on himself in love. As Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov, “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.” God loves us, and acts to make things right, but at a cost to himself.
Some Christians mistakenly think that on the cross God was punishing Jesus, albeit for our sins, not his own. That Jesus’ death was needed to propitiate God’s wrath or satisfy God’s justice. But Scripture nowhere says that. This view badly distorts who God is. God is absolute love and readily forgives us. But that love is costly. Loving us and healing us costs God.
I sometimes wonder if Christians who dismiss Jesus’ death for our sins simply haven’t sinned badly enough to understand its meaning. Or perhaps it’s their awareness that’s lacking. But many of us are acutely aware of the harm we’ve done to others, and of our wrongs against love and justice. For us, Jesus’ death as the basis of our forgiveness and healing isn’t a bizarre and incomprehensible doctrine. We feel deeply that Jesus’ death is enough – as nothing else could be.
We may ask how God can forgive us for our harms to others, who may continue to bear the injuries that we have caused. It seems unjust and self-serving. But the answer is that we forfeit ourselves and the right to live for our own self-interests. We no longer belong to ourselves, but to Christ. We can no longer live as an ego-centered self with its desires and goals (Gal. 5:24).
This is deeper than a moral commitment to atone for our wrongdoing. As the Apostle Paul writes, “I have died with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). We can accept forgiveness for our worst misdeeds because we have died in Christ and are putting self-centeredness to death in our everyday lives. Having been forgiven for the damage we’ve done to others and to God, we can only live for God and others.
God’s love
In Jesus’ crucifixion God made himself one with each of us in our most desperate circumstances and conditions. The cross was a brutal method of execution for the despised: criminals, rebels, and outcasts. In Jesus God himself was a victim of injustice and violence. He has identified with and united himself to the most marginalized and rejected among us, and to all of us in our deepest pain and sorrow. This is the measure of his immeasurable love. Jesus’ crucifixion tells us that no one – not us, and not “the least of us” — is beyond the pale of God’s love, or ours. Who could not love such a God in return?
We cannot fully understand how Jesus’ death frees us and set in motion the world’s transformation. But in Jesus death on the cross we can catch a glimpse of the incredible wonder of the selfless love of the Creator for his creation. We can understand the lengths that God has gone to unite us to himself and to repair our world. This is the Gospel — the Good News in Jesus of God’s immeasurable, unconditional, sin-bearing, violence-ending, liberating, world-repairing, creation-healing, unstoppable love. That love is all we really know, and all we need to know.