Atonement: Jesus as fully human and fully divine

2 Lent 2013

Isaiah 49:5-6; 1 John 1:5-2:2; John 7:53-8:12*

Father Adam Trambley

February 24, 2013, St. John’s Sharon

“I am the Light of the World”

I am the light of the world.

Today we continue our Lenten focus on “Who is Jesus?”  This week we look at Jesus as fully human and fully divine, and why these two natures are so important for his work of reconciling us back to God and making us like him.  When Jesus says, “I am the light of the world,” we can see the human and divine in him. God is light in whom there is no darkness, and the world is the created order where too often darkness is found.  

One of the places Jesus says “I am the light of the world” is in John’s Gospel after this powerful story of Jesus, the Pharisees and the woman caught in adultery.   While Mosaic law requires both parties in an adulterous affair to be stoned together, the scribes and Pharisees bring only this guilty woman to Jesus.  They are testing him to see if he will tell them to stone her, which was as harsh and inappropriate in Jesus’ time as it is in ours, or if he will contradict the law.  Jesus does neither, instead biding his time while writing in the dust.  When they push him farther, he stands up and says, quite simply, “Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone.”  Since they aren’t seeking judgment with a heart for God’s law, they slink away, one-by-one.  They don’t want to be responsible for killing someone; they don’t even really care if the law is upheld.  They are just using this woman as a pawn, and wouldn’t care if Jesus decided to kill her so they could use it against him later.  They leave the woman with Jesus.

Jesus writes some more on the ground, then addresses the woman who is still standing in the middle of a circle of accusers who have all left.  No one else condemns the woman, and Jesus says he won’t either.  Then he tells her to go and sin no more.  An important Lenten message for us is this: Jesus doesn’t condemn us, yet he tells us not to sin anymore either.  We aren’t supposed to hurt ourselves or others by sinning, yet whatever is past does not need to be held against us.  We are always able to start over, as far as Jesus is concerned.  We are never defined by our past sins and failings.  No one else on earth really has standing to condemn us, and Jesus is too busy loving us and helping us to be the people we were made to be in the future to condemn us himself.

I am the light of the world.

Jesus came to be one of us because he loves us.  He was made man so that we might be made God.  The gap between God and humanity caused by sin could only be bridged by a person that was both God and a human being.  That bridging act of Jesus Christ that reconciled us to God is often called the atonement.  Neither the universal church as a whole nor the Episcopal Church in particular have never given a definitive explanation of how that atonement was achieved in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  We can’t fully and completely understand Jesus’ saving act.

All understandings of the atonement have in common a requirement that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man.  The light needs all the radiance of God and must come fully into the world.  At the most basic level, whatever humanity has lost because of human sinfulness can only be obtained again by God, and Jesus therefore must be fully God.  However, humanity can only actually benefit from that divine gift if Jesus is able to receive it as fully human. 

In the 300’s, writers like Athanasius of Alexandria and Gregory of Nyssa were writing about how Jesus Christ, fully human and fully God overcame the corruption and death caused by sin.  For Athanasius, much of Christ’s work could be summed up by Paul’s statement in First Corinthians that the corruptible has put on incorruption.  Jesus comes as the incorruptible God into the corrupted human bodily condition.  He teaches and heals and casts out demons, and everything he does on earth helps restore human beings to what they were meant to be.  He dies so that he can transform the corrupted body in death into the uncorrupted body that is resurrection.  The crucifixion is not a punishment, but Jesus’ death could not be secret and it needed to be caused by others in a way that was troubling enough to let everyone know that any death could be brought to resurrection.  A quiet philosopher’s death at home wouldn’t allow the necessary witness, and the incorruptible Son of God wouldn’t have died naturally. But by going through human life and death, Jesus brought God’s life back to us so that our own deaths are the same experience as Jesus' – a short death that is almost a seed-planting followed by resurrection.  By being part of our human life, Jesus allows all of us to access God’s life in the fullness of our human lives. 

Gregory of Nyssa’s understanding is that through sin, human beings put themselves in bondage to death and the devil.  Only God is stronger than death and the devil and only God is able to break those bonds.  Unfortunately humanity, and not God, was trapped in them.  The devil was smart enough not to trap God, until one came who was fully God and fully human.  Jesus as human died and went down to death’s dungeon.  But he could not be trapped because he was sinless and hadn’t put himself in death’s power.  And since he was God, he broke out and took all of us with him.  Sort of a Trojan Horse understanding of salvation.

Eight hundred years later, in the eleven hundreds, Saint Anselm writes about substitutionary atonement.  He is a monk, and understands how communities work.  He says that in sin, we have impugned the dignity of God.  The offence isn’t about God’s pride or about punishment, but more about a damaged relationship that needs to be repaired so that we are able to live comfortably in God’s community without guilt hanging over us all the time.  It is like we broke God’s favorite vase and need to replace it or else we feel bad every time we walk into the room.  The problem comes in because we have nothing we can pay our debt to God with, because everything we have is actually his already.  On our own, we have no way to restore the relationship.  Jesus comes as fully God with stuff that is actually his own, and as fully human he is able to give it to God in a way that makes it from all of us.  Jesus, fully divine, has another vase to replace the broken one, and his being fully human means that the attached card has all our names on it. 

More recently, Anselm’s substitutionary atonement has been taken by some extreme evangelical and fundamentalist churches to a further step of what is called penal substitutionary atonement.  In this understanding, which we have all heard preached in modern America, we sinned and broke God’s law.  The punishment for sin is death and so we all have to die.  God’s dignity requires that the punishment is carried out or else he wouldn’t be a just God.  So God’s Son comes and takes the punishment for us, which appeases God and his justice, and we are now freed for eternal life.  I personally do not find this the most helpful understanding of how Christ’s atonement works.  While scripture in some places speaks in ways that support such a very strict judicial model of our salvation, in other places scripture uses different models.  Churches that require their members to subscribe to this or any particular sense of atonement seem to me to miss the depth of Christ’s redeeming work that cannot be captured by one human metaphor for it.  Certainly Christ does take any punishment for sin that is there, but I do not think that God is the kind of being who wants or demands punishment.  To me, understandings of atonement that focus on changing us back into the full image of God we were made to be are more helpful than ones that see Jesus’ as necessary in order to placate God.

Amid all the things we can’t fully know about the atonement, however, we do know a few things.  First and foremost, we know that Jesus loves us, and through the work of his life, death and resurrection, our sins are forgiven.  We also know that because of what the fully human and fully divine savior has done, we can go forward no longer in darkness, but walking in his light, becoming more and more like him. 

I am the light of the world.

*Note: with permission of bishop we are using alternative readings this Lent to focus on “Who is Jesus?”