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Posts Tagged ‘Atonement’

Why Did Jesus Suffer and Die?

Posted in Lent, Reflections from Other Writers and Speakers, Reflections on Scripture, Who Am I in God, Who is God, tagged , , , , , , , on March 24, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Photo by Grant Whitty on Unsplash

This week’s readings:

  1. Mark 11:1–10 John 12:12–16
  2. Isaiah 50:4–7
  3. Psalm 22:8–9, 17–18, 19–20, 23–24
  4. Philippians 2:6–11
  5. Mark 14:1—15:47

What this week’s readings say to me:

As I sit with these passages again this year, I find myself paraphrasing something my pastor said. It was in 2021, I think. He said that at various moments in our lives, we are every character in the passion story. I’ve been many of them. I’ve been open about my faith when I was in a crowd who made it easy to be open because they were being just as open. I’ve been silent about my faith when being open felt threatening — even just socially. I’ve asked God to get me out of a difficult situation, and God didn’t. I’ve said, “Thy will be done,” though I doubt I’ve ever been able to mean it without reservation as Jesus did.

Simon of Cyrene was “pressed into service” to help Jesus carry the cross (Mark 15:21). At most, I’ve been volunteered for some tasks I wouldn’t have chosen to do on my own. They were a lot less strenuous and my circumstances a lot less dangerous, yet I doubt I allow myself to be changed for the better as much as Simon must have allowed himself to be for his name to be remembered in accounts of Jesus’ passion (Matt.27:32; Mark 15:21; Luke 23:26). I’ve betrayed people in my life and been betrayed by them. I’ve thought that if God is real and cares about His children and His creation, why doesn’t He save them from harm in easily recognizable ways all the time? Why would he allow them to suffer? I’ve also been asked the same questions when I’ve undertaken something or accepted a circumstance, and someone else didn’t understand why. I’ve asked now and then why God has abandoned me.

I’ve never been accused and/or sentenced unjustly by anyone charged with enforcing laws, but too many people have been. So many others have stood by someone unjustly sentenced and/or condemned, just as the people at the foot of the cross did for Jesus.

In this week’s readings shows the power of knowing who we are and what our purpose is in pursuing a purpose, regardless of the cost of doing so. The path of learning who we are, of fulfilling that purpose, of sacrificing for it looks different for everyone.

For Jesus, this path meant giving of Himself again and again in prayer, teaching, feeding, and healing. The darkest part of his journey brought him every kind of suffering brought him death. Why did He surrender to suffering and death? Not because God required His suffering and death to save us, but because we required his suffering and death to bring us back into union with God. We walk away from that relationship. God doesn’t. In fact, He never stops pursuing a relationship with us. The cross was the ultimate example of that pursuit, of going after us as we are — in all our fears, doubts, greed, fickleness, cruelty, violence, and even in our mortality.

What someone else is sharing about this week’s readings:

Sheila Leocádia Pires reflects on Palm Sunday and the holy days that follow it.

Beyond this week’s readings:

Another reflection, “Jesus Did Not Die to Appease an Angry God,” even though it was published as a reflection on earlier Lenten readings, helps me make sense of this week’s readings in light of one core belief that’s been handed on to me — that God is love.

In the last few years, I’ve made my own the prospective on atonement and on the crucifixion that Fr. Terrance Klein expresses in the previous paragraph’s link. It’s been more than a week now since I first read his reflection, but I may have used some of his words in my reflection without realizing it. He explains so well, in my opinion, what I’ve wanted to communicate on this blog, but I never thought my way of communicating it made as much sense.

I hope you can access Fr. Klein’s reflection. I came across it on the website of America Magazine. I think viewing a certain number of articles on that website is free each month before the website invites visitors to subscribe to read more. I’ve tried to put this perspective into my own words at the end of the first section in case you are unable to read Fr. Klein’s words, but I hope you’ll be able to. If you are able to, I encourage you to do so. Fr Klein isn’t the only person I’ve encountered who offers this perspective or a similar one on atonement and the crucifixion, but his article is the one I have most recently encountered on the subject.

This perspective is important because it has the potential to recast who we say God is, what God does, and how God sees us. This perspective helps me see God as a rescuer and a healer, someone who wants to save us from what our own distorted vision, weaknesses and injustices do to us, rather than someone who punishes out of anger, jealousy, or a desire to exact revenge upon us for our lack of obedience. It’s a perspective on the relationship between God and humanity that has taken humanity time to develop. By using the word “develop,” I don’t tend to suggest that humans came up with it, but that each of us is on an ongoing journey to understand reality more fully and thus to know God better.

I also don’t mean to suggest that sins don’t matter to God. I think they matter to God precisely because God understands better than we do how sin hurts the sinner and others affected by the sin. It’s precisely because of this supreme understanding that God goes to battle with all of sin’s damage in the generations before Christ and during Christ’s conception, hidden life, ministry, and passion. God wills restorative justice.

Thank you, Lord for coming to rescue us by living a human life so You could be an example for us and could heal us through Your Divinity, Your human relationships with others, Your ministry, Your intercession, Your suffering, and Your death. Amen.

Work cited (but not linked to)

The New American Bible Revised Edition, Kindle edition, Fairbrother, 2011.

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Good Words Need the Cross to Do Their Work

Posted in Reflections on a Verse, Reflections on Scripture, Social Justice, Verses to Meditate On, tagged , , , , on January 26, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Photo by Kane Reinholdtsen on Unsplash

For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with the wisdom of human eloquence, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its meaning.

1 Corinthians 1:17

This verse from the readings for this past weekend is the one that grabbed my attention. It did so because it left me with questions.

What does Paul have to say to me with the words “Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel” (1 Cor. 1:17)?

He did baptize people, didn’t he? Verses 14 through 16 say he did. So why does he say Christ didn’t send him to baptize? It seems to me that he provides the answer in verse 13. One question in that verse reminds the flock in Corinth it isn’t in his name that they come together. It isn’t in his name that they share what they have with those who have less. It isn’t in his name that they forgive one another and love and pray for those who persecute them. It isn’t in his name that they share their spiritual gifts. Rather, it’s in Christ’s name that they do all these things, as it was in Christ’s name that they were baptized, not in Paul’s. Christ worked through earthly leaders of the Church in Corinth to baptize people. None of those leaders were acting on their own behalf.

This first part of the verse also reminds me that while different members of Christ serve different functions within his mystical body, (for example, some regularly baptize new members, while others normally don’t) all members are called to preach the gospel — and not just with words. Conveying the limitations of language seems part of the message of the verse’s second half: “and not with the wisdom of human eloquence, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its meaning”[italics mine] (1 Cor.1:17).

Even Christ’s words, by themselves, didn’t keep sin and the suffering that resulted from having the final say. The words themselves didn’t unite to himself and to one another anyone who wanted to be united. His death on the cross and the resurrection that followed made that possible. He carried our wounds and our weaknesses to the fullest extent he could — to the point of death. He was victorious after he offered his life on the cross. But in the final hours of that pre-resurrection life, when he spoke at all, he didn’t tell parables or give sermons as he once had. He spoke in short phrases.

Jesus’ words prepared hearers to receive the union with the Divine that he would offer through his body on the cross and through His Spirit on Pentecost.

The words themselves didn’t complete the adoption, yet they paved the way for the proceedings. Nevertheless, despite the important role words sometimes play in bringing us closer together as members of Christ’s family, and of the human family Paul writes that “human eloquence” can empty the cross “of its meaning (1 Cor. 1:17).

How can this happen?

One answer is that words themselves are a means of dividing the people, ideas, and objects they represent into categories that separate one thing from another. Language distinguishes between an apple and an orange, between people from one tribe or place and another. Language defines an “us” and a “them.” It names God and the elements of God’s creation. Such differentiation has its place because recognizing our differences can help us learn from each other and grow in humility. Certainly recognizing that we are not God can help with the latter.

But problems arise when we let ourselves believe that the ways we are different from other people make us better than them. This belief won’t let us celebrate others as the unique reflections of God that they are. Problems also arise when we get so focused on the challenges that our differences present that we don’t recognize what we have in common. Third, problems arise when we focus so much on our separateness from God that we don’t grow in our relationship with God. These problems are some forms sin can take.

The effects of sin are the opposite of the effect of the cross of Christ, which has the power to close the painful gaps we create between ourselves and others and between ourselves and God. Is this closure complete? No, because each of us has to receive healing (the reception of which sometimes means carrying crosses of our own) so that we can share it again and again. Also, this healing is not complete because we haven’t yet reached the end of time as we know it.

And there’s another reason besides the frequent divisiveness of “human eloquence” that can empty the cross “of its meaning” (1 Cor. 17). Human eloquence can have this effect when it isn’t supported by action — which is not to say that words cannot be actions in and of themselves. Sometimes words can help us comprehend the full meaning of actions. Yet they can also be attractive but devoid of meaning. Presenting an eloquent argument in favor of one solution to a problem doesn’t, in fact, solve the problem. For that to happen, someone has to put the solution into action. Talking about giving someone a meal or a drink of clean water is not the same as actually providing it. Eloquent prayers and reflections by themselves are empty unless they are accompanied by actions. And yet, it can feel so much easier to talk about doing something and to tell someone else to do something than to participate in doing it myself

Lord, help me to recognize how I can be an answer to prayers today. Amen.

The Bible. The New American Bible Revised Edition, Kindle edition, Fairbrother, 2011.

Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Inc. “Sunday July, 2 2023: Readings at Mass.” The New American Bible, 2001. Universalis for Windows, Version 2.179, Universalis Publishing Ltd., 26 Feb. 2023, https://universalis.com/n-app-windows.htm

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