Simply put, I cannot imagine a world where God demands blood to atone for the very shortcomings he created us to have.
Palm Sunday I was absent from our Sunday service to visit family. Yet my reason for absence was twofold. At the end of the Palm Sunday service comes the veneration of the cross. A cross is brought into the nave and it is venerated. That's fine and all for those who see that cross as a symbol of salvation, but for me all I see is a representation of the device used to murder.
As we end Maunday Thursday and head into "Good" Friday, I found myself wondering why I feel the significance of it? The agony in the garden, the crucification, etc. if I don't ascribe to atonement theology? As I stood through the reading of Christ in Gethsemane in a darkened nave underneath this huge, crude wooden cross, I chewed on what ineffible thing it was that gave this story importance.
Throughout my life I have dreamed of something better. You could say it's the optimist in me, but I'm sure I'm not the only one with that trait. Ideal job, ideal home, ideal partner, ideal church, ideal club, ideal blah blah blah. But they are just ideas, not reality. We humans aspire to make our dreams real. To form that little utopia. Sometimes we even stumble upon something that seems close enough to ideal. A club, a partner, a church. Yet what we see happen over and over again is our attempt to make our dreams real ran afoul. As Yeats wrote, "things fall apart". Nothing we make is permanent. Eventually this 'good thing' we've found will end. We will ourselves change and lose interest in what we once treasured, our vision of utopia will be hijacked and ran aground by others with different visions, our treasures are ransacked by greed and envy, and eventually all we have of our great big plans are dust.
Jesus had a great vision of the Kingdom of God. A new society, a new way to relate to one another, a new set of values based in spirit rather than material. And what happened when he worked to make it a reality?
They washed their hands of him. They betrayed him. They denied him. They stole from him. They conspired against him.
And then they killed him.
As a Gen X'er, I find this to be in tune with the notion that our generation doesn't trust anything. It's not quite true, we trust very few things, butwe just have given up on institutions and we are a bit fatalistic that nothing good ever lasts. How many X'ers come from broken homes, or a one driven nearly into poverty by Reaganomics, or attended a deteriorating public school? How many of us have emerged from our youthful innocence to face a world where our parents' generation is borrowing away our future, housing prices so high we may never own a home, and to be the first American generation not to do better than our parents?
Of course, the problem here is that He wouldn't stay dead. That kinda makes your message hard to kill...
I wish I was more articulate than a 2am rambling, but I've found a rather eloquent paragraph from Sarah Hinlicky's article Talking to Generation X over at First Things. I wish I had found the link earlier (have I mentioned how much I love google?)
Mostly, though, turn us towards God hanging on the cross. That is what the world does to the holy. Where the cities of God and Man intersect, there is a crucifixion. The best–laid plans are swept aside; the blueprints for the perfect society are divided among the spoilers. We recognize this world: ripped from the start by our parents' divorces, spoiled by our own bad choices, threatened by war and poverty, pain and meaninglessness. Ours is a world where inconvenient lives are aborted and inconvenient loves are abandoned. We know all too well that we, too, would betray the only one who could save us.
Read the whole article. It's really good, and almost makes the same points I'm making, if not more articulately.
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4 comments:
I will admit I'm not terribly happy about atonement language, either; and I'm no Gen X'er (probably old enough to be your father). Still, that language is there in Scripture. I may not like it, and I may not take it literally; but I can't simply disregard it.
I had my own reflections today on Good Friday. If you're interested, link through to my blog.
I also reject the notion of vicarious atonement. But Good Friday, with all its rituals, is important to me. I see the crucifixion as God meeting head-on the worst that earthly life can offer, his becoming-present in the extremities of human suffering. At easter, he passes out of them, and invites us to follow. I see the cross not as an instrument where God killed his son to appease his wrath at humanity, but the point at which God enters our suffering, our brokenness. So I have no problem with the veneration of the cross. This may be close to what the FT author said---I had a little trouble following her.
I don't know if you've ever seen this article: http://www.sharktacos.com/God/cross_intro.shtml
It deals with different doctrines of attonement, and argues against the vicarious attonement (satisfaction doctrine) theory, examining its origins along with earlier notions of attonement which have fallen away over the years. The author is talented amatuer theologian. His piece has been circulating on the net for a long time, and while it's a bit long, I think it's worth the read.
Alleluia, Christ is risen.
Wow, some deep shit going on back there in the choir room! I knew I liked you people for a reason. Atonement theology gives me great pause as well, not the least for the reason that Marshall alludes to above. The crucifixion is there, in our scriptures. What are we to make of it? Well, I'm not making that my God need a blood sacrifice so I could go to heaven, but in a more mystical sense, that the world will always shed the blood of those who are prophetic voices speaking truth. Scary stuff that. It begs the question, what are we up for, if we say we're following the Way?
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