WHAT DOES “JESUS DIED FOR US” MEAN?

Note: With Lent coming up soon, I decided to post a sermon that I gave to some lay pastors.  It covers points found in some previous devotions, but communicates them differently.

Opening:
Text: Romans 5:6-8.

First, let me offer a disclaimer about my false advertising.  I could never cover the full meaning of the statement, “Jesus died for us.”  What I want to do is address one model of understanding that statement that is popular, but, I believe is non-biblical; and then I want to point us in the right direction for understanding the language about his death.
    I have always warned ALPS students that I am a teacher and not a preacher, so this time will be no different.  But, I think it is OK, because thinking more deeply about Jesus is also worshipful and encouraging.
    I have a difficult topic tonight, but one that is important to me.  I help my wife teach a 1^st-2^nd grade SS class.  (She is the expert.)  It caught my attention that a couple of the children would say that Jesus died for their sins, when they had no clue what that meant.  I got to thinking about how many adults also probably could not give a good explanation.
    As an OT scholar, I try to look at the words of Jesus or of someone like Paul from a Jewish perspective.  I am always pursuing the issue of what the text meant to the original audiences.  But, as I finite and fallible person, my conclusions may be wrong.  So, please, bear with me, think about it, and particularly seek God about it.

Prayer: “O God, you are aware of my foolish sins; my guilt is not hidden from you.  Let none who rely on you be disgraced because of me, O sovereign LORD and king!  Let none who seek you be ashamed because of me, O God of Israel! (Ps. 69:5-6, NET)

Overview
I have been thinking about how people look at the atoning work of Jesus.  Some of the early Church Fathers drew on concepts from their culture.  Anselm in 11th century drew on his model of the feudal system to explain that Jesus was a substitute for us to restore to God the honor he deserves.  In the 16^th cent. Martin Luther viewed Jesus as a substitute who bore our punishment for failure under the Law; and, John Calvin, a lawyer, further defined the atonement in terms of criminal law; Jesus bore our criminal penalties.  These models seem to me to be straying from what a 1^st century Jewish Christian would have thought.
    I want to make two main points.  The first is that the contemporary Church, particularly on a pop-level, focuses too much on the death of Jesus to the exclusion of the broader range of the whole work and ministry of Christ.  The second is that to better understand the meaning of the statement, “Jesus died for my sins,” we need to try to understand what a good Jew like Paul would have thought. 

Focusing on Death to the Exclusion of Jesus' Full Ministry
The first point is simple.  There is too much of a focus on the death of Jesus to the exclusion of his whole work.  Obviously, we talk about the resurrection, because without it Jesus’ death would be meaningless.  I am not minimizing that.  I am expanding.  There is more.  Scripture tells us that through Jesus, the Word of God, all things were created.  But, there is more.  Jesus emptied himself of his divine status, humbled himself, became incarnate and dwelt among us – the Light of the World in our midst.  But, there is more.  Jesus pronounced and taught about the newly inaugurated era of the Kingdom of God, in which you and I now participate.  God’s rule had begun in a new way.  And, Jesus performed signs and wonders that demonstrated that God’s Kingdom was indeed here in his person.  But, there is more.  He showed himself to be the perfect Adam, the perfect Israel, the perfect offering a new covenant, the perfect sin offering, and the perfect High Priest.  But, there is more.  His death was followed by the first fruits of the Resurrection, which proved his words, and which demonstrated his victory over death, sin, and Satan.  But, there is more.  Jesus dwells in believers through the Person of the Holy Spirit, and we dwell in Him as members of His Body.  But, there is more.  Jesus, in his humanity, having been tested and tempted in all ways, identifies with us in our weaknesses and at this very moment and intercedes for you and me before the throne of God.  His goal is that you and I might be made perfect in him and so be prepared for his Second Coming.
    A whole year’s worth of sermons could be preached on each of these points and this is a partial list.  So, I’m sure you get the point: the whole work and ministry of Jesus must be proclaimed to your congregations.

Better Understanding of “Jesus Died for My Sins”
The second point is to address the statement, “Jesus died for my sins.”  Again, we need to look view this wholistically.  Through the combined work of Jesus incarnation, his life and ministry, his death and resurrection, etc. Jesus receives a wide variety of titles that use the figurative language of the OT to capture who he is.  Jesus is savior, redeemer, one who pays a ransom, one who pronounces forgiveness, the seat of atonement, a sin offering, Passover lamb, perfect sacrifice, high priest, the new Man, the victor over death, victor over this world, victor over Satan and the principalities, etc.
    One issue that I repeatedly find in NT studies is that people tend to group most of those titles under the category of “atonement,” but atonement is used in a narrower sense in the OT.  The second issue is after having called most of that “atonement” some people try to settle on the mechanism of atonement in a very narrow way, and one that I do not find to be biblical. 

Penal Substitution
I want to address this model: Jesus is the penal substitute for my sins.  As I mentioned, this model, which has some antecedents that go back to Anselm, was mainly promoted by some leaders in the Reformation.  They held a legal notion of atonement that is foreign to the Temple language of atonement.  For them, God is a Judge, for whom every infraction against his holiness demands a legal penalty, which, because God is so holy, is the legal penalty of death.  In this view, our sins demanded our deaths; they were transferred over to the Son of God; and then God executed justice on Jesus by killing him.  As a result, this model holds, we can have a right relationship with God.  I understand that this model is supposed to show the grace of God: God is both the executioner and the victim.  However, as a scholar who reads the NT through the lens of the OT, my point that is that the NT writers, and particularly Paul, would not have thought about atonement in terms of penal substitution.

Covenant Language Vs. Atonement Language
The first point is that in the OT there is a difference between the language of God offering a covenant relationship and God providing a means of atonement for sin.  We must not overlook the language of covenant.  We need to separate the two.  When God offers a relationship to Abraham, God does not first cleanse him of sin.  There is no judicial punishment for his sinfulness.  God meets Abraham on his level and offers relationship.  It is all about grace.  God “cuts a covenant” with him.  In Gen. 15, the sacrificial animals are cut in half and placed opposite each other; and God, represented by a smoking fire-pot, passing through the bloody pieces to seal his covenant with Abraham.  Jesus, in the Eucharist refers to his blood as the blood of a new covenant.  This is not atonement language.  Then to keep his promises to Abraham, God later saves/rescues/ransoms/delivers Abraham’s descendants from slavery in Egypt.  This is not atonement language.  Then, later God offers a covenant relationship to the rescued Hebrew slaves without any punishment of sin, or sacrifices, or cleansing.  God lowers himself to their level to offer a relationship with him without precondition.  It is all about grace.
    This is important: What then made Abraham righteous in God’s sight?  It was not some substitutionary sacrifice.  We are told clearly in Gen. 15:6 that when Abraham believed God – or better, entrusted himself to God, God counted that as righteousness.  This becomes a key point in Paul’s argument about how the Gentiles, the nations, are included.  In Romans 3 and Galatians 3, Paul argues that those who are of the faith of Abraham, who entrust themselves to the God who raised Jesus from the dead, are children of Abraham, recipients of the promises.  The main point to remember is that God’s offer of relationship is purely by grace and not based on first punishing sins or cleansing someone.

Atonement Language
The second point is that atonement language follows covenant language.  Atonement language deals with our failure to be faithful to our relationship with God.  It is about restoring our covenant relationship with God when it is damage by our sin.  The atonement language of the Temple system was symbolic.  Sin is real, but it is not tangible.  Sin breaks our rapport with God, but again, it is not material.  The symbol system of the Temple was heuristic, educational; it graphically demonstrated the reality of sin.  The Temple represented God dwelling in the midst of his people, but God did not literally dwell there.  Sin symbolically polluted God’s dwelling place and threatened their relationship with God.  So, that pollution, or rot, symbolically had to be cleansed, and that was done through blood because it is the strongest tangible symbol of life.  Blood cleanses pollution.  The person providing the animal did so as a gesture of wanting to be forgiven and restored.  However, the killing of the animal is not the main part.  The main part was that first the sinner through public confession repented, having a heart-felt desire for a restored relationship with God.  Such repentance was greeted with God’s forgiveness, an act of grace.  Still, the Temple had to be cleansed from the pollution of sin to symbolize restored access by the individual or community to the Presence of God.  That is where the blood of the sacrifice comes in.  The animal was not a substitute being punished by death for the sinner.  Rather the pure, lifeblood of an unblemished animal provided the “cleansing agent” that was manipulated on the altar to cleanse away the pollution symbolically.  The whole process of forgiveness and a ritual offering communicated publicly and symbolically God’s mercy and grace.
    Let me give an example of another important ritual, that of the scapegoat on the Day of Atonement, a ritual which is mistakenly taken as a ritual of penal substitution.  Apparently, the Israelites borrowed this ritual from someone like the Hittites and changed it.  The Hittites believed that a person could magically transfer the sins of a person onto a goat, drive that goat into the desert, and fool the offended god or goddess who went chasing after that goat.  But, the Israelites did not believe that.  They did not believe that sins were somehow material and could be transferred by magic onto another person.  God is against such notions of magic.  God cannot not be fooled like demonic “gods.”  The Israelites adopted this ritual symbolically but adapted it to communicate the grace of God.  Again, repentance expressed by fasting and communal confession of sin was main part of the Day of Atonement.  Driving the scapegoat into the wilderness symbolized the removal of those sins to the realm where they belong, a place of chaos and death.  And, application of blood to the cover of the Ark of the Covenant (the mercy seat) symbolized the cleansing of the impediment of pollution between God and the people.
    In this sermon/teaching, I cannot go into all of the NT passages that speak about the death of Jesus and show how they are based on OT language and concepts, but I want to emphasize the symbolic nature of the language.  I am not minimizing sin.  Sin is real.  Sin has consequences.  But, God does not literally forget sins.  God does not literally move our sins as far as the east is from the west.  God does not literally cast our sins into the sea.  God does not literally cover over our sins.  God does not literally blot our sins out of the ledger.  God does not literally wash away sins.  God is not fooled by a goat carrying sins away into the wilderness.  This language was meant to help people realize the reality and seriousness of sin, and, most of all, to illustrate the unfathomable grace of God.
    In Isaiah 43, God is mad at Israel for not understanding this, and God say, “I, I myself, am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake; your sins I do not remember.” (Isa. 43:25 Duke).  God forgives for God’s sake; God’s character is merciful and graceful.
    But, again, sin is seriously burdensome.  The main term in the OT that gets translated by the verb “forgive” is nasa.  It means to lift, to bear.  Our sins weigh us down and God lifts them; God bears them.  When Peter states in 1 Pet. 2:24 that Jesus bore our sins on the cross, he is not thinking some kind of magical manipulation of sins for penal substitution.  He is using good OT language.  [This also takes us into language that is borrowed from the Suffering Servant passages in Isaiah.  That is another concept.  Israel could see how the generation of those who suffered the Babylonian Exile bore the sins and punishment of many generations.  Paul picks up on that language as well in 1 Cor. 15:3-4 and Rom. 5.  But, I can cover the main concept but not every text.
    I want to come back to some atonement language in the NT and point out how rich the language is that Paul borrows from the Temple system.  For instance, in Rom. 3: 25, Paul calls Jesus the hilastarion.  Some translators have “expiation” or “propitiation,” but I am convinced that Paul knew the Jewish sacrificial system.  He is thinking of the Day of Atonement.  The hilastarion in the Greek version of the OT was the lid of the ark of the covenant, call the mercy seat.  It was the closest point symbolically connecting God to God’s people.  It was where the lifeblood of the sin offering was applied on the Day of Atonement to rid the pollution of the Israelites’ deliberate sin.  Paul is calling that hilastarion (mercy seat) Jesus.  However, later in Rom 8:3, Paul shifts his metaphorical language and refers to Jesus as the sin offering (hamartia) itself that provided the cleansing blood that was put on the mercy seat on the Day of Atonement.  [Depending on the context, hamartia can be translated generically as “sin” in many places, but in sacrificial contexts it was also the technical term for the “sin offering,” which is clearly what Paul means here.]  To blend language from John and Paul: Jesus, who is the Life, both provides the perfect, pure, cleansing lifeblood of the sin offering and is the point of mediation between God and humanity, the mercy seat.  That is wonderful language of grace. 

Summary
Let me summarize the main points.  The first simple point is that we need to preach the fullness of the work and ministry of Jesus, the fullness of his identity and roles.  Second, when we distinguish between the language of covenant relationship and that of atonement, we see the biblical model that God offers relationship with himself as pure grace.  He does not cleanse the person first.  There is no judicial punishment.  God, in humility condescends to offer himself in communion with us.  When people entrust themselves to God in that relationship, that is considered “righteousness.”  Third, when we do talk about the NT atonement language borrowed from the OT, we must be careful and ask what it meant to a Jew of that time.  When many people outside of the Church hear a pop-cultural, Christian model that everyone’s sins have been transferred to Jesus, who was then executed to exact the price of justice, they do not hear the Good News.  They do not hear a God full of grace.  The bottom line of what I am saying is that the language of the NT that draws on the sacrificial system in the OT was meant to communicate God’s grace and mercy in Jesus.  It is grace from the beginning to the end.

CONFESSION: THE LOST ELEMENT OF CHRISTIAN ATONEMENT

Although rites of confession are in most forms of Christian practice, the heart of confession seems to be lost.  In ancient Israel’s priestly temple of system of atonement (better: “purgation”) for sins, remorse and confession were necessary.  The purgation offering for sin was only provided by God for inadvertent commission of transgressions.  Inadvertent sins were portrayed as symbolically polluting the altar outside the temple building for individual sins and penetrating into the first chamber of the temple for the sins of the community.  When people learned of their inadvertent sin, remorse was expected.  Even for these inadvertencies, reconciliation was not effected by walking through some ritual by rote; it was only efficacious by the gracious response of God.

What about deliberate transgressions?  These sins were portrayed as penetrating into the innermost chamber of the temple, the “Holy of Holies,” which symbolized the immediate Presence of God.  Technically, there was no means provided for cleansing God’s inner sanctuary and restoring a right relationship with God for deliberate transgressions.  The relational covenant with God had deliberately been broken.  However, that is where remorse and confession came in.  Sincere confession of sin was understood to be received by God so that deliberate sins were brought into a state in which their detritus could now be cleansed by the purgation sin offering and symbolically “removed” by the scapegoat ritual.  Confession was necessary as well.  (“And it will be, when an individual feels guilt [remorse] with regard to one of these things, he must confess that which he sinned against it [a command of God], and bring his reparation-offering to the LORD,” Lev. 5:5-6:a).

Interestingly, since the Book of Leviticus is more a guide for what ritual actions to take rather than why, there is no explanation about how confession “reduces” the offense to what is expiable.  But, we do have an older Hittite text that mentions that if a servant confesses guilt to his lord, the lord’s soul might be pacified.*  So, oral, public confession makes sense.  Although “to seek God” is not priestly language, confession involves the same humility and surrender to God as does “seeking God” and entrusting oneself to God.

Moreover, since the NT writers use OT priestly atonement language to describe, in part, the salvific work of Jesus, they would have been well aware of the need for, and significance, of confession for forgiveness and cleansing.

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1John 1:9).

It is presumptuous arrogance on my part – as well as hard-hearted blindness to the gravity of sin – when I take forgiveness for granted.  Or, when in church, I mechanically read a confession of prayer.  Humbly kneeling before God and acknowledging that I have sinned and have no automatic “right” to be forgiven is what confession is about.  The Eucharistic cup of the blood of the new covenant – that is, it is the life of Jesus’ blood as the purgation/sin offering – should remind me how serious my unconfessed state is before God.

Invitation:

Christ our Lord invites to his table all who love him, who earnestly repent of their sin and seek to live in peace with one another. Therefore, let us confess our sin before God and one another.

Prayer:

Most merciful God,
we confess that we have sinned against you
in thought, word, and deed,
by what we have done,
and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved you with our whole heart;
we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.
We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.
For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ,
have mercy on us and forgive us,
that we may delight in your will,
and walk in your ways,
to the glory of your name. Amen.

*Page 302 in Jacob Milgrom’s Leviticus 1 – 16 (Anchor Bible, 1991), who mastered a massive wealth of Hittite and Mesopotamian cultic material as background from which the Israelites adopted and adapted their rituals, and from whom I have drawn much of my understanding of the Israelite purgation/atonement system.

THE HUMAN “DEMONIC” PUTREFICATION OF GOD’S CREATION

In Israelite priestly theology, humans provide the “demonic” and/or corrupting activity that profanes God’s creation and alienates us from God.

General Background: Inspiration as Transformation
An “Ah ha!” moment comes to students of the Bible, when they realize that divine inspiration may occur when God takes what is common and transforms it to a divine perspective.  A simple analogy would be how, as Christianity has moved into different cultures, Christians have adopted cultural elements and adapted them for theological purposes – even down to such trivial examples as evergreen trees, butterflies, and bunnies and eggs.  The people of Israel were “late-comers” in the cultural world of the ancient Near East.  Israelites adopted the technology of building walled cities, the graded-holiness design of temples, the symbol system behind sacrificial systems, music and liturgy, even world-view explanatory stories (mythology).  Somewhat analogous to Christians reinvesting common cultural symbols with new meaning, one aspect of divine inspiration for Israel was that many of the cultural symbols of their day were transformed to communicate divine reality and truth.

Specific Background: Israelite Transformation of Pagan Images
The ancient pagan world was filled with fickle, human-like, nature gods and rampant demonic activity – ironically, not like the idealized “pagan clubs” of college students or today’s covens of “good witches.”  Magical practices manipulated gods and others as well as provided self-protection.  Having built a temple dwelling for a god, various cultic rituals and sacrificial practices were needed to appease the god and to protect the dwelling from demonic “pollution” that would lead to the god’s loss of favor and departure.

Israelites adopted much of these pre-existing rituals and practices, but “demythologized” them from the polytheistic, the demonic, and the magical.  In the transformation of temple, priestly matters, the notion of demonic activity polluting God’s symbolic place of dwelling was eliminated.  What was taught symbolically in its place was the image of the “tangibility” of sin; that is, human disobedience to God broke intimacy with God by “polluting” God’s dwelling.  Human sinfulness replaced demonic activity.

Illustration of the Flood Story
Human sinfulness putrefies God’s creation.  One cannot overstate the seriousness of sin, of disobedience toward and rejection of one’s Creator.  Such, too, is the message of the divine “rewrite” of the very ancient explanatory Mesopotamian Flood story.  The cause of the flood is no longer about depopulating a noisy humanity who were disturbing the chief god’s sleep (Atrahasis Epic).  Rather, God desires humans who are righteous (trusting) and whole (in intention), like Noah (Gen 6:8 – 9), but instead sees that the hearts of all people were set on wickedness (ra = chaos; that is, the opposite of God’s tov -- orderly/good/life producing -- creational work) (Gen 6:5).  God sees that the earth had been putrefied (shachat); it was filled with human violence (chamas here probably includes all forms of societal and personal, physical and psychological violence, injustice, profanation toward others) (Gen 6:11-13).  And, God became sorrowful for making humans and was grieved to his heart (Gen 6:6).

Application:
These Israelite portrayals of sin, are powerful, disturbing images of the consequences of my sin.  My sin putrefies God’s good creation.  My sin is like demonic pollution of God’s home.  My sin, which is rooted in not embracing my Creator, is displayed in the many ways I “violate” others who were created by my God.

Lord, may these powerful images penetrate to my heart so that I never take lightly the nature and consequences of my sin.  And, in doing so may I all the more value the forgiveness and grace by which you “cleanse” my pollution and again restore me to fellowship with you.  Amen.