October 3rd, 2024
Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s video
In our journey through the Apostles Creed we come this week to the central aspect of Jesus’ ministry that has baffled people ever since the early Christians pointed to its significance. “He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried”. Of the history of this event there can actually be little doubt, despite the best efforts of conspiracy theorists to claim otherwise. But the fact that it actually happened doesn’t ascribe significance. Why is this innocent death so much more earth shattering than the deaths of countless other innocent victims under repressive regimes?
Christians have always believed that the death of Jesus atones for our sins. It seems to me that the idea that Christ’s death in some way takes punishment for the sins of others – for you and me, is a clear theme throughout the Bible, as Rowan Williams himself has pointed out. It is so much more than that of course, and there are a number of different theologies to try to get our minds around it. I don’t have the time to explore those in five and a half minutes. But it boils down to this. Our spiritual state is probably much worse than we think it is if it required the death of God’s son to redeem it, and that God’s love must be beyond our imagination if he went to those lengths to achieve that sort of rescue. As Paul said in Romans, “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” The sinners he had in mind here were not nice middle-class people who said a word out of turn which they regret. There were people in the Roman church who had committed the most vile acts in their service of the Emperor, and had discovered forgiveness was available even for them.
“We worship at your feet, where wrath and mercy meet,” as the old chorus goes. We Christians have a habit of oscillating between the two rather than holding both together. We either major on a form of Victorian moralism that condemns those who have sinned – where sin is defined as socially unacceptable practices which we don’t commit, or alternatively collude with destructive patterns of behaviour for fear of appearing judgemental. You see it played out in the media too. Celebrities with the moral compass of Guinea pigs are lauded to the rafters, while others are subject to public destruction. The cross holds together the grim reality of the human condition and its need and confronts it with a relentless love that will not turn away even in the face of the worst that can emerge from human nature. It was this relentless love of Jesus that so offended the complacent moralists of Jesus day. Adulterers, thieves, Roman quislings, the socially unacceptable were welcomed to eat as his table. This itself was a sacramental act in the culture. Those who denied there was anything wrong with them found themselves outside.
I liked the introductory verse to confession in the Alternative Service book from 1 John, that sadly has disappeared from Common Worship. “If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us, but if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” The paradox of the Gospel is that being told you are a sinner is a gateway to liberation not condemnation. The news is followed swiftly by the experience of grace. Sin is revealed to be forgiven not condemned. Such a grace needs to be modelled by church communities. God’s love puts no barriers to entry.
A few years ago I had the privilege of attending a retreat led by Peter Atkinson the former Dean of Worcester. He put it far better than me.
“As we know, a measure of healing is usually possible if our hurt memories are exposed, confronted, laid out in order, talked through, seen in some sort of perspective; and the skills of psychiatry are designed to enable this to happen (and thank God for that). But the Christian language of healing takes us further that these undoubtedly beneficial processes. The Christian faith bids us confront the question of right and wrong, of moral responsibility, of innocence and guilt. The Christian faith bids us confront our own past, not only in terms of pain, but also in terms of wrong. And sins, wrongs, are not healed simply by bringing them to light, exposing them to view, and talking them over; sins, wrongs, are healed when we are forgiven.”
We stand before a God whose love does not turn away from even the greatest falling short or the most extreme spiritual alienation. It is love that gives the uttermost to forgive and redeem.
This is why Jesus ‘suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried’. Its that broken human beings like you and me can find acceptance and life.
+Richard