I have a confession to make. Until last night, I have not understood atonement.
For the last decade of being a Christian, I just could not arrive at understanding. From the initial references in Genesis with Cain and Abel, I could not reconcile WHY the God of the Bible needed and preferred death sacrifice and allowed it to somehow reconcile payment for sin.
As the story evolves, Jesus, of course, becomes the ultimate sacrifice. He gives himself. He is killed terribly, and then the common phrase is offered, "He died for your sins." I just simply could not make sense of it. Some of you might be more familiar with debt and atonement based culture than I. I have no Jewish heritage, and I have a minimal legalistic background. But I understand guilt and judgement and even fee-based punishment. Atonement is not that. What Christ represents is not that.
So why does God want blood? Why does God honor sacrificial death (animal and otherwise)? I have mulled this question for the last 7-8 years, sometimes throughout Easter, other times as I consider the problem of suffering or the reality of faith.
Last night during a Good Friday meditation it finally crystalized. (The meditation was on sin and payment of sin through the cross. I was sitting there listening wondering why I couldn't make it work.) And then it finally came together in my mind. This is not about sin, though it is about sin. This cross is about faith. This very blood desire of God is really all about faith.
Sin in it's purest, most simple reality is preference of this life, this world, these wants and needs of mine over all else... even God. If we look at the Gospels, what Jesus is articulating over and over is that our filter, our perspective on life is incorrectly focused on ourselves, our wants, needs, our world in front of us. Truly, Jesus keeps trying to get us to understand, reality itself, and God's reach, extends much further, much beyond this life.
So you are sick... believe and be healed. Don't believe in the sickness, the state of your body at this moment. Believe in God who extends beyond all that. Your child died? Believe and death will be overcome. You love your money? That's going to be a problem for you. Everything in life - from wealth to death - is a tiny sliver of what is REAL - dwarfed by the God that can change everything... except is waiting for you to decide you believe in it.
See God requires faith in God. That is the absolute in Christianity. THAT is the hard line.
So back to blood. Why does blood matter? Because giving blood and surrendering to death is the clearest statement that this life is not the end. If you cherish this life and this world, and do not understand and believe in faith that God's reality extends beyond it, spilling blood is a horrible cost. BUT if you do believe, than death means little other than a passage to God's true reality. It is not (just) the blood God desires, it is the faith to believe that this world is inconsequential compared to God and God's reality.
Throughout the Bible, sacrifice is present. But sacrifice is only honored as willingness to move through death in trust. And it happens VERY infrequently Biblically until Jesus. What Jesus did on the cross is to give himself over to death, in order to move into the true and greater life, call it heaven, call it God's reality. He paved the way, he forged the path. Death was just a doorway. Suffering was real, but as Easter highlights, it was a sliver of the experience. "Be of good cheer; He overcame the world."
So what was atoned? Atonement is defined as the repair of an offense or injury. Humanity offended God for generations by not believing in what God did. Instead we still focus our power, intellect, and desire purely on this world, our wants and desires, and humanity then belittles God's power and capacity to change this world as well as God's goodness, nature, and very divinity. The entire Bible is a record of the consistency of this offense. God's chosen people could not see Him over their own view of themselves.
Jesus atones for all that by walking straight into suffering, silently allowing shame and torture and death to be afflicted upon him while he kept his power and capacity and desire on God's reality, God's plan, and God's person. It was not easy. He felt betrayed, afraid, and forsaken. But he more so believed in who and what he knew God to be. And in passing through that trial and torture and death, he revealed it to us - all - forever. He revealed God's full reality to the world, and it was His reality as well. Now and forevermore we can't say we don't really know about God. We can't offend God by denying His power and possibility. We can still turn our backs on God, but we can't misunderstand Him as they did throughout the Israelite history. He is revealed through Jesus in full. If we deny Jesus, we deny God. If we choose to live as atheists, we reject God, but he cannot be silenced or ignored ever again.
Which is why Jesus came back a few days later, and showed His wounds, and ate some fish. I have always wondered about the fish. It says he ate so that his Disciples would actually believe. The Disciples had to understand that Jesus was not a ghost, or some kind of spirit creature, but that the very fabric of reality was not what they thought they knew and divided and sequestered comfortably so they could live as Jewish peasants inside a (sometimes threatening) social / religious structure. Jesus destroyed it all. God had always, but Jesus brought it home for dinner. He could come and go in and out of this temporal space AND eat as He desired. He could be as corporate or as incorporeal as he chose. And this impacted them greatly. They became bold. Their fear of the worlds' authority from days prior was overshadowed by God's real power and the true nature of God's universe. They had seen, felt, and eaten, and now they finally understood. This world was not what they had thought. So they spoke out, they challenged, they called people, and they healed people ... and then many of them were killed as well. But they knew death was just the pathway of God's world.
For us, we get to choose. We don't choose who God is. That question is answered by Jesus. The world now holds Jesus in proper place with God - even if they reject Him. Jesus is overcomer of death and world and inheritor of life... God is ruler of all - or each person can choose to reject it all. We can live in disobedience and selfishness. We get that free-will to choose. But whether we believe or not, it simply happened. Our belief is now only ours - we no longer have the power to deny God's being and person as the entire world once did systematically. This is why Christianity took the world by storm. It was never about a Jewish carpenter who taught a little and then died. It was God's grand display of what the world really is, who God really is, and what it all means for humanity.
Within us each is the capacity to see, to sense, that there is more than there appears to be in this life. Superficiality is soul crushing. God burst through that curtain in the person of Jesus and atoned, made right, the offense of our blindness toward Him and our fixation on ourselves and our misunderstanding of how big and strange and supernatural this thing really is.
So what about sin? Do you need to pay a price? Well you, I, we definitely need to change our minds. He commands first and foremost to love God with the fulness of our mind, spirit and strength. We need to choose to see the big God picture. We need to not dwell in the reality of paychecks and denim styles and disease COMPLETELY. We get to choose what sort of resurrection life we lead. Do we have faith to live a God-sized life? He also commands to love one another. Do we have faith to ask forgiveness from others, treat with kindness and mercy? Do we have courage? Can we boldly accept that this world is overcome, our bodies mean little, our blood is but a vapor - but there is so much more - and treat ourselves, God, and others accordingly? That is resurrected living. That is atonement with God.
Love saturated, blood disregarded, world overcome.
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