What If Jesus DIDN'T Die for our Sins?? What if...?

        A Talk Inspired by Richard Rohr and Delivered to the Living Vision

                                            Community on 7/14/15

For the last 3-4 Tuesday nights, we’ve been getting together in this beautiful riverside spot to celebrate life, to enjoy music, and to reimagine spirituality – to dream a little bit about other possibilities for spiritual community than the institutionalized ones most of us were brought up with. I’ve been asking a different “What if?” question every Tuesday, and you folks who have come have been kind and open-minded enough to entertain these questions with me.

Before I ask tonight’s “What if” question, let me ask how many of us have heard that “Jesus came to die for our sins”… ? It’s virtually impossible to live in America and to have spent any length of time in a Christian church and NOT to have had this little theological nugget hammered into our heads again and again and again. We’ve heard it; we were taught it; and, if we were Christians, we were expected to accept and believe it. The result is that now most of us assume it to be absolute “gospel” truth and that to question that sacred doctrine is tantamount to not being a Christian at all.

Well, I would like to challenge this notion today. And I hope you will come along with me as I do. So here’s tonight’s what if question…What if Jesus didn’t come to die for our sins? What if Jesus didn’t suffer and die to pay some price in blood so that we could all somehow be forgiven? What if?

One big reason I think we need to engage this question is the fact that so many post-Modern people – now numbering in the hundreds of millions - have given up on the Christian church, and this blood atonement business is one of the primary theological reasons they cite for totally bailing on Christianity. One church outsider put it this way: “Serious questions must be asked about a God who would have to have ANYONE, much less His own son, die a gruesome death to accomplish anything. One contemporary theologian called this “cosmic child abuse.” Brian McLaren, another incredibly influential contemporary theologian, has wondered how a God who would require such a punishment to truly accomplish forgiveness, could then expect us to do the very thing that He, himself, couldn’t do – forgive withOUT hurting or punishing someone. McLaren said, “It would be like your wife sins against you and you say, “I forgive you,” and then go and kick the dog because someone has to be punished in order for the forgiveness to really work.

So how did we ever get into this blood atonement business in the first place? A little history might help. Remember that Jesus was a Jew. Remember that he grew up Jewish, in a Jewish family, in a Jewish community and a Jewish synagogue. His context was the context of sacrifice. Jews were big on sacrifice, but they didn’t invent it. The idea of sacrificing innocent animals to appease an angry God pre-dates Judaism by a couple thousand years. So by the time Judaism was in full swing and long before Jesus came on the scene, every single temple and synagogue was built with an entire altar area set up specifically to sacrifice young animals in attempt to appease an angry, Old Testament God. So it’s no wonder that when Jesus’ blood was spilled by the Romans on that cross, early Christians and later theologians – most of whom were either Jews or heavily influenced by Judaism - could only interpret Jesus’ death in light of what they’d always known – that spilled, innocent blood must somehow make God happy. So Jesus became the “perfect sacrifice,” the final payment.

But just because the Jews had been big on sacrifice doesn’t mean Jesus was. In fact, you may remember, he said, “I desire mercy, NOT sacrifice.” (Matthew 9:13) Jesus LOVED his Jewish faith and heritage. But he also came to reform it. And near the top of his list of what to reform was this notion that God wanted innocent blood in exchange for forgiveness. Any serious and comprehensive study of the gospels reveals a Jesus who both spoke and lived in an attempt to end all such sacrifice and score keeping.

Philosopher and theologian Richard Rohr writes that “the common Christian reading of the Bible is that Jesus "died for our sins"… to pay a debt to God the Father.” This ‘theory’ was “proposed by Anselm of Canterbury sometime between 1033-1109 AD. Anselm's infamous Cur Deus Homo has been called "the most unfortunately successful piece of theology ever written."  (That’s a backhanded compliment if I ever heard one!)

So here’s the deal, folks, this one man, Anselm, who lived a thousand years after Jesus, reflected as best he could on the meaning of Jesus’ life and death, and he, relying almost exclusively on Paul’s letters – not upon Jesus or the gospels - came up with what theologians ever since called the "substitutionary atonement theory"--the strange idea that before God could fully love and forgive us, God needed and demanded Jesus to be a blood sacrifice to atone for our sin-drenched humanity. As if God could need payment – in the form of a very violent transaction - to be able to love and accept "his" own children?

There’s nothing wrong with Anselm struggling and doing his best to make sense of Jesus’ life and death. And, like I said, it’s understandable that Anselm would go to a sacrifice-based understanding to make meaning of Jesus’ death. But does that mean Anselm’s has to be the ONLY understanding of what Jesus’ death was about? And in case you haven’t noticed, there are an awful lot of people who just aren’t buying it. If fact, there are hundreds of millions of people who don’t want anything to do with Christianity precisely because of Anselm’s substitutionary atonement theory. I mean, who wants to worship a God who somehow wants or requires human blood - innocent blood - in order to love and forgive?

(At this point in the talk, I interviewed Billy Crawford, a church outsider who shared his views on the notion of Jesus dying for our sins.)

I think it’s time to at least consider some other possibilities for making meaning of Jesus’ life and death, don’t you? We could start with Franciscan philosopher and theologian John Duns Scotus, who lived from 1266-1308, only a century or two after Anselm. Scotus was not guided by the temple language of debt, atonement, or blood sacrifice.

Richard Rohr writes, “For Scotus, the incarnation of God and the redemption of the world could never be a mere mop-up exercise in response to human sinfulness, but the proactive work of God, who, from the very beginning, loved us. Our sin,” Rohr continues, “could not possibly be the motive for the divine incarnation, but only perfect love and divine self-revelation!”

Rohr continues: “The best way I can summarize how Scotus tried to change the old Anselmian notion of retributive justice is this: Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity (for that did not need changing!) Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God. In Jesus, God sought to move people beyond the counting, weighing, and punishing model, that the ego prefers, pointing us instead toward an utterly new world, a world where God's abundance has made any economy of merit, sacrifice, reparation, or atonement both unhelpful and unnecessary.” Rohr concludes, “Jesus undid "once and for all all notions of human and animal sacrifice and replaced them with his new economy of grace, which is the very heart of the gospel revolution. Jesus was meant to be a game changer for the human psyche and for religion itself. When we begin negatively, or focused on the problem, we never get off of the hamster’s wheel. To this day – thanks to Anselm - Christians begin with and continue to focus on sin, when the crucified one was pointing us toward a primal solidarity with the very suffering of God and all of creation.”

(Here Craig Cottrill played and sang George Harrison's "While my guitar gently weeps")

Sometimes when I look at Christian theology and its hyper focus on sin, I wonder if we may have forgotten about Genesis 1 and 2. You remember how the Bible, the whole story starts? It starts with the beautiful creation narrative, right? It starts…well…just listen to how it starts… (live reading of Gen 1:1-31a by Melissa Ludwa and LJ Greer)

The story starts with a loving, creative God, making everything and then declaring everything that God made “good.” GOOD! “And God saw that it was good.” Matthew Fox, Quaker theologian, calls this “original blessing.” Original blessing – THAT is what we are all born with, folks! THAT is what we are born into – NOT original sin, but original blessing.

Any of us who are parents, who’ve had the privilege of being present at the birth of our children, know exactly what I’m talking about, right? I came face to face with the deep truth of original blessing on January 7, 2008 at 12:20 am, when that midwife at Northern Michigan Hospital put Eloise Anna Jones into my trembling, new father hands. I knew right then that I could never believe in original sin again. I knew that the God of this amazing universe loved my daughter even more than I did, and that He or She certainly did not require blood or to have his son crucified for the sake of my good, blessed daughter.

So where does that leave Jesus? If he didn’t come here to “die for our sins,” then why did he come? Well, for starters, just as Rohr said, Jesus came precisely to change our minds about God, to show us that God wasn’t keeping score and isn’t interested in our rule-keeping or our sacrifice, and certainly not our blood! He wanted us to know we were forgiven and to be forgiving. If there is one thing we followers of Christ are supposed to be known for, it is to be our capacity for forgiveness, for mercy, and for love. Every time we turn around in the gospels, Jesus is forgiving somebody who probably doesn’t deserve it. The woman caught in adultery, Zacchaeus the corrupt tax collector, the prodigal son, Peter the thrice denier, the woman at the well. Jesus did everything he possibly could to show us that the way of forgiveness and mercy IS the way of Jesus. Never once did he or God require some sort of payment or sacrifice to forgive these people!

So how else might we understand Jesus’ death? Well, his death isn’t that unique when you think about it. The Romans crucified thousands of men and women in the very same way that they did it to Jesus. In one sense, Jesus' torturous death is just one more example of what this world does to its prophets, to those who speak truth to power, to those like Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and all those who threaten the established order of things. In other words, I don’t think that Jesus “had to die” for my sins or anybody else’s. I don’t think that Jesus’ blood that the Romans shed accomplished anything, other than a) to show us just how familiar God is with human suffering and b) to show us – particularly through the subsequent resurrection - just how futile and ineffective violence is as a means to an end. The Romans thought that the violence they perpetrated upon Jesus of Nazareth would squelch his revolution forever. It did no such thing; in fact it did the opposite. The violent, bloody death of Jesus was an utterly ineffective and impotent act on the part of the Romans. It should remind us of the absolute futility of violence as a solution to anything. (For more evidence of the futility of violence, go to youtube and watch Gandhi's march on the salt mine and listen to Martin Sheen's lines as he watches it.)

Friends, Jesus came here to change our minds about who God is and what God is like. Jesus came here to get us to throw away our score cards and our tally sheets of sin, because God threw His out a long, long time ago. Jesus came here to remind us of our original blessing, our original, created goodness. Jesus came here to show us how to live – with joy and celebration, with forgiveness and mercy, with passion and compassion, with service to and in loving community with one another. But he also suffered and died to show us how to handle the suffering that comes our way AND to remind us that violence is never an effective means to a godly end.

So what if Anselm’s interpretation of Jesus’ death isn’t the only way to understand it? What if Jesus didn’t die for our sins? What if God doesn’t need innocent blood to forgive and love us? What if…? What if….?

(* Please leave your thoughtful comments below!!)