‘For the Son of Man came to give his life a ransom for many.’
I don’t know about you but this is a sentence that is guaranteed to set my theological teeth on edge. For if Jesus gave his life as a ransom it implies that someone required this ransom. Someone was extracting payment- who was this someone and for what did they require a ransom?
Well the Christian community has understood this sentence and its implications very differently throughout its history. Many people are most familiar with the idea that the person exacting this payment was in fact God the Father, and he required his Son to make this payment on behalf of humanity for its sins.
This interpretation was foundational to the theology of the Protestant Reformation. It’s an idea that still persists in some churches today and it is what many people associate with the Christian faith. Mel Gibson’s film The Passion’ certainly took this as read; that Jesus Christ is a hero because he innocently suffered a horrific death and that that is what God required of him.
The obvious problem with this is that it imagines that there is a violence within the very nature of the Godhead. If God the Father is prepared to ensure the death of his Son we are seeing a God who will wreak violence upon his very self. This is not easy to square with the God who is love, compassion and mercy.
There has been much work in recent years to, in a sense undo’ this theology of atonement whereby we are faced with an angry God who requires that his Son die in a payment for our sinfulness.
In any case this was not an interpretation that had much place in the theology of the Early Church. Whilst Jesus’ death is clearly a sacrifice it was seen as a sacrifice demanded by the Roman imperial power, by the mob who called for his death, and by the Temple authorities. It was not a form of sacrifice required by God. The ransom was not paid to God but to the Devil and “the powers through which the Devil had usurped the reign of God on earth since” (Northcott) the beginning of time.
So early depictions of Jesus focused not on the Cross but used the symbol of a fish or a shepherd.
Interestingly we see the sign of the Cross becoming more prominent at a time when Christianity began to occupy a different place within society. In the Fourth Century Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire. As the power and status of the church grew so did the emphasis on the Christ’s suffering and sacrifice on the cross. His crucifixion began to seem more important and his resurrection less. The imagery seemed to say that it was in his death that the real work was done.
By the middle ages the death of Christ was seen in terms of a transaction between God the Father and God the Son in which the obedience of the Son “unto death was the only way in which God’s righteousness could be satisfied and the wrongs of sin righted.” (Northcott p. 92)
This idea of a transaction gained ground at the time of the Reformation when Calvin wrote that Christ received God’s vengeance’ on the cross, in order to appease his wrath and satisfy his just judgment.”
What does any of this mean to us today?
Well firstly we live within a Christian tradition and a Christian culture which is partly formed by this doctrinement of atonement.
Today’s reading from Isaiah might lend weight to this idea of sacrificial atonement. Here we have a graphic portrayal of an unnamed servant who suffered for the transgressions of others. If this is a foreshadow of the redemptive sufferings of Jesus Christ then the picture of God that goes with it is someone “who has laid on him the iniquity of us all”.
Whilst we as Christians may read Isaiah through the lens of Jesus’ sufferings the prophet Isaiah was here suggesting a different way for Israel to respond to her enemies. God’s goals were not to be achieved through military action. Instead Isaiah himself as a prophet has to suffer silently the rejection of his people whilst he proclaims a message where God is not the military leader more powerful than any other.
Of course it is what and how we understand power that is really the issue in today’s gospel reading. Power, I believe, is also pivotal in a doctrine of God in which God requires the death of his own son.
James and John want power. We witness them making a bid for glory which we might think of as very unchristian’. But isn’t the bible full of images of a powerful God- the almighty King and father? If God is so powerful is it surprising that we seek power too?
Of course how God’s power operates is not always clear. Whilst our God (or gods) affects our values our values can also create our gods. The human concept of what it means to be powerful can be imposed on God. Jesus is not simply saying to James and John that they should not want or seek power; nor does he not deny the reality of power. Instead he asserts that the power of God is not how they have conceived it. They are guilty of imagining God’s power in human terms- something the disciples are guilty of again and again in Mark’s gospel.
So Jesus in his response subverts the very idea and basis of human power. Power is not something that we laud over others or claim as a way of promoting ourselves. Greatness, and God’s greatness- which means both that of Father and the Son, comes in serving others.
We cannot say that God the Fr is exempt from the service which Jesus embodies. The images of God as Fr and king become in Jesus’ hands images of compassion and caring rather than might and power. We are always at risk of trying to rescue God from the vulnerability that his compassion might indicate- and it is as we are on the cusp of the Christ the King’ season, before Advent, that we are perhaps in greatest danger of reinterpreting biblical imagery in triumphalist terms.
It is when we are least comfortable with the vulnerability of God that we are most likely to fall for a doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement; this allows God the Fr to be mighty and God the Son to carry the burden of vulnerability. Of course, it is only by coming to terms with the vulnerability of God that we are able to come to terms with our own.
At the moment British society is struggling to accommodate the many different ethnic and religious groups that make up its tapestry. There is an enormous amount of fear around connected with the relationship between a largely secular West and the international Muslim community.
Interestingly it is in places in the West where Christians believe that God demanded a ransom be paid for human sin that hostility is at its greatest. In parts of America 40% of the population attend Church weekly. These also happen to be areas of most violence. A violence which is directed not only towards outsiders but towards itself. Gun crime and capital punishment is extremely high in some of the Southern states of America for example where Church going is also high.
If Christians imagines a Godhead which is intrinsically violent the corollary will be that Christians perceive the world aggressively and believe that wrongs must be righted through might rather than through dialogue or by example. The language of a war on terror’, or a crusade against evil doers’ leads straight out of a vision of a mighty God achieving victory through violent means.
Ironically this God seems closer to the God that James and John imagine; someone who reserves the places next to him for those who display initiative in seeking glory for themselves.
In fact the only people we find who are positioned on Jesus’ right and left in the gospels, are the criminals alongside whom He is crucified. Once again we find a subversion of human notions of where glory might be found.
As bids for power between nations and cultures are escalating and when violence seems the only way to gain power we are called, as Christians, to fundamentally re-imagine what it means to be powerful. As an American theologian writes
“In the upside down world of Jesus,
only the strongest sense of self,
a self that neither grovels nor grasps,
can resist chasing counterfeit notions of greatness.
In imitating Jesus, as far as that is humanly possible,
we serve others for their good rather than our own glory.”
Sarah Eynstone