What the death of Jesus means for me

I have never been able to understand the idea that Jesus was a sacrifice demanded by God in order to reconcile humanity with the Triune God. What I have come to affirm and see in my study in history and in the Bible is what is traditionally known as "Ransom theory".

Ransom is the most ancient of theories to understand the atoning death of Jesus. The idea that humanity is held captive by Satan and Jesus exchanges his life for ours as a "ransom" to Satan is something that I once thought ridiculous because I do not believe in a traditional Satan. In fact for years I did not think Satan existed at all. But much has changed for me.

By my readings of Scripture, Wink, Girard, Lewis, evolutionary psychologists, sociology, and how crowds function, I have come to affirm that humanity, while good, is easily and quickly wrapped up in forces beyond our awareness and control. We are constantly manipulated by marketers all the time to convince us that we need a product or service. As I look out into the world, I acknowledge that we are also susceptible to another manipulation - finding victims to blame for our problems or troubles in society.

Don't like the government - blame the president (whoever it is).

Don't think the oil spill is your problem - blame BP, or the government or American's dependence on fossil fuels.

Don't like Health Care - blame doctors, insurance companies, overweight people, government, etc.

Don't like a religion - then demonize the founder or the adherents

In the infamous song by the creators of South Park the movie:

"Times have changed, our kids are geting worse. They won't obey their parents, they just wanna fart and curse!

Should we blame the government, or blame society? Or should we blame the images on TV?

NO!

Blame Canada, Blame Canada!"

Call it a universal truth if you like - we all blame something/someone for the problems of the world. And the thing is, when we participate in this blaming activity, we always believe that we are correct and in the right to do so. We blame those people and things which we believe to be a fault. And these things must be at fault because we are blaming them.

It is a vicious cycle. A cycle of blaming and accusing that the Biblical authors first described in the OT as Satan and upheld in the NT with the additional title of Principalities.

We all do this. And this force we are caught up in, this cycle of blaming is so dominate that we believe this is the way the world works and the way the world should work. We are held captive by this cycle. We believe this ability to blame others for problems is the best and most efficient way (even ordained by God at times) to deal with problems. We are held captive by this satanic cycle.

As we are held captive by this cycle of Satan (again, the cycle is that of tension, blame/scapegoat, peace) we need someone/thing to break us out – someone/thing to free us. This is where the death and resurrection of Jesus come into play.

Jesus willingly submitted to this cycle in order to expose it. He became the scourge of the crowd and united the crowd in shouts of “crucify”. During his trial, Jesus did not try to save himself or defend himself – he remained silent through most of the trial. He was not trying to save his life, but rather expose the cycle of Satan in order that humanity might see it. When he hung on the cross, Jesus looked like any other victim at that point - the unanimous crowd identified him as the “root” of the problem/scandal/tension.

But something happened that was different. Unlike other scapegoats in history, Jesus was completely without any guilt at all. He was innocent in the most compete sense. As such, when Jesus did die, he did not unify the crowd like other victims. There was a small minority of people (the Disciples) who knew Jesus was innocent and they became a vocal dissenting voice in the midst of the crowd.

The dissenting voice of the Disciple did not come until something else happened – Resurrection. When they experienced the resurrected Christ – the innocent One – their eyes were opened and began to preach to the people about the one whom was unjustly crucified.

At that moment, with the resurrection and the arrival of the Holy Spirit, humanity began to see this cycle of violence and stand up for the innocent victims of the world. At this point humanity was freed from the firm captivity of Satan – we had an alternate way to deal with tension in society. Rather than blaming and finding scapegoats, God through Jesus by the Spirit showed us the truly lasting way to peace is not through violence and scapegoating, but through forgiveness and mercy.

It is for these reasons that I do not think Jesus could have been a sacrifice ordained by God. If God ordained the sacrifice of Jesus in order to resolve the tension between God and humanity then God would be no other than duped by the cycle of violence of Satan. Rather, God through Jesus willingly enters into the cycle of violence in order to expose and eradicate the domination of Satan’s hold on humanity. If you want some scripture, I invite you to read the Gospels, especially John.

John 20:19-31 thoughts

As I continued to ask people what they think of "know" or "hear" in John 20:19-31 I found myself drawn to a different place from what I glean from the conversations.

Perhaps it is the way I am asking the question but everyone when I ask them about this story I keep hearing about Thomas and his "doubt" (which by the way is a Greek work apistos which is always mistranslated as "doubt" but it is much better to translate it as "unbelief" which I think is a great deal of difference). For some reason, perhaps I am more of a Thomas myself, I am really drawn to what Jesus has to say.

For starters, I think it is weird that Thomas gets a bad wrap even today when the gnostic disputes of day of the Gospel writer are over. It is argued that Thomas represents many gnostic thoughts of the day of John and so Thomas is used in the Gospel to argue against the Gnostic tradition. Thomas is not usually in a positive light in the Gospel of John. Secondly, I think it is weird that Thomas gets a bad wrap when he asks for the exact same things the other disciples got to see - the wounds of Jesus. All of the disciples did not believe what they had heard from Mary Magdalene about the risen Christ and all the male disciples required the 'proof' of the wounds. If there is anyone who is 'doubting' in this story it is everyone but Mary and "the Disciple whom Jesus loved".

Beside all this who is doubting and who believes, the thing that strikes me is the amount of play in books and conversation that goes on about the disciples and not about Jesus in this story. I mean we have the risen Christ here and we focus on the disciples and specifically on Thomas. Why?

Some might claim that we do not know what to do about a Risen Jesus Christ. We do not know how to talk about or relate to Resurrection for whatever reason (and boy howdy have I heard many reasons). It might be that we are such a society that is so ego centric that we put ourselves in the middle of the story and glean from it a moral lesson about how to live our faith or our life. I don't know. All I know is there is a lot of talk about the Disciples in a story that, from what I can see, is about the resurrected Christ.

What I plan to share tonight at church is not original to me at all, in fact few of my thoughts are unique to me. What I plan on doing is juxtaposing this of Jesus with the story of Cain and Abel, specifically Genesis 4:9-10.

So I am curious to know, what do you think about juxtaposing those two stories? What do you 'hear' what do you 'see'? What connections can you make? Perhaps just in juxtaposing those two stories you can see where I was pulled this week.

Thoughts...

Preaching on John 20

Preaching the Friday on John 20:19-31 which is often known as the story of doubting Thomas.

I wanted to post this scripture and get your feedback on what you have always heard about this text. What do you know about this text? What do you hear in this text? What stands out to you and why?

In case you are new to this, I generally share with the community I am preaching at what I "hear" on line in regards to these posts. So if you are hesitate to share please know three things:

1) I do not share the names of anyone who posts anything.

2) I deeply value and need feedback and input from the community in order to craft sermon so I am really asking.

3) If you do not share then I have little to share with the community and the sermon is way shorter.