One thing that bedevils me is how we in the Christian
community can still look at other people and do what Simon the Pharisee did –
judge a person’s character, indeed that person, as rejectable/rejected by God
and in turn label that person with whatever equivalent we have to the word
“sinner”. Simon said, “If this man
really were a prophet, he would have known what sort of woman this is touching
him, a sinner.” We are liars if we say
we don’t do that.
Jesus was known to have a very open heart towards
“sinners”. Simon didn’t. He simply could not see who this woman was
deep inside her broken, hurting self. Hence,
Jesus’ question to him, “Simon, do you see this woman?” Simon needed to take a deeper look and see
someone there who was broken yet very loved by God. God is like Jesus. Simon could only see in her someone whom, in
his belief system, God refused love because her behaviour was out of line with
what he believed to be God’s required way of life…and he had a list of
Scriptures from which to make his case. There
was no way Simon was ever going to see this woman as beloved by God. He inclination was to see her as repulsive to
God.
We in the Christian community can look at this
Pharisee from nearly 2,000 years ago and say that’s just the way Pharisees were. Yet, we still do exactly what he did. If you don’t believe me just consider the
warring that goes on between Conservative and Liberal types of Christians, or
traditional vs. contemporary worshippers.
That’s just inside the church.
Consider how we look at people who have addictions, or are chronically
on welfare, obese people, homosexuals, or immigrants who get government
benefits that we don’t. I hear otherwise
“good” Christian people say very evil things when those topics come up. Sober up.
Get a job. Push away from the
table. Quit being queer. Go back to where you came from. One would hope that by our nature of being
“in Christ” that we would see people, all people, as compassionately as Jesus
saw that woman washing his feet with her tears, but we don’t. We are bonded, Krazy-glued, to Jesus by the
Holy Spirit, but we still look at people with eyes and hearts that are sighted
for the “Law”, for behavioural matters.
I wish to offer an explanation for that. Like the Galatians we have an understanding
of the Gospel that is sin-filled and we need to repent of it. The Greek word for sin, hamartia, is a word
from archery that means to miss the mark.
Humans are inclined to always miss the mark when it comes to being what
God created us to be. We are wilfully
bent in on ourselves and turning away from our source of life in God we die. The Gospel that pervades the Western Church
and Western culture (whether our surrounding culture wants to admit it its
Christian rootedness or not) quite simply misses the mark. It turns us back on ourselves and our own
abilities to save ourselves. The dire
result of this sin-filled gospel that bends us back on ourselves for our own
salvation is that the church dies - hence, the dying of the Church in Western
culture and the increasing paganizing of our culture.
The Gospel is the Good News that God has saved and is
healing his Creation of the disease of sin and death by what he has done in,
through, and as Jesus Christ, the Son of God become human, in the power of the
Holy Spirit to the glory of the Father because he loves us. It is about what the Triune God of Grace has
done for his creation, for humanity, for each of us not what we need to do to
get saved. There is an invitation
inherent in this Gospel to “come and see”, to come and be a apart of this New
Creation because Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit is saving you and will
heal you of the painful brokenness of sin and ultimately of death.
That’s the Gospel in a nutshell. Now let me explain our form of the gospel
that misses the mark. In Western
Christianity we lean heavily on a Medieval understanding of the Gospel known as
“Penal Substitution” and/or the “Satisfactionary Theory” developed by the
theologian Anselm of Canterbury. The
underlying ideas are that God made death the legal penalty, the punishment for
our sin. Anselm taught that God who is
infinitely just is infinitely offended by our sin. There is no way a finite human can make
satisfaction for this offence – satisfaction meaning to restore God’s
honour. So God the Son became human and
by his infinite power as Son of God lived the infinitely perfect life of
obedience expressed most clearly in his dying for us; his bearing for us the
deserved punishment of death. This utter
act of righteousness satisfied the Father’s offended honour. The individual person can appropriate this
salvation from the eternal punishment of death and Hell and live forever in the
eternal bliss of Heaven by imitating Jesus’ suffering way, going to Mass,
giving to the church, and almsgiving.
That’s Anselm in the 1100’s.
Protestantism, starting with Luther in the 1500’s, in
its efforts to correct spiritual abuses by the Medieval Church which used the
fear of Hell to undergird its political authority and to get people to give money
to it added to that gospel a “Transactional” element that says a person receives
the eternal benefits of this external legal transaction between God the Son and
God the Father simply by professing faith in Jesus Christ and accepting him as
Lord and Saviour. We are saved by grace
not by works. This Transactional element
came to the fore in the mid-1600’s with the Westminster Confession as the Protestant
Church took up the mantle of the Medieval Church’s spiritual abusiveness by
using the fear of Hell to further its own political power as opposed to the
Roman Catholic churches political power.
Well, it is a catastrophic misunderstanding to say that death is simply the penalty or punishment for sin. It is what has become because we wilfully
turn from our source of life in God. Sin
is not just a problem of immoral behaviour.
Like addiction, it is a disease affecting every bit of our being that we
cannot cure by our own efforts and which is serious enough that God the Son had
to become a human affected with this disease himself and die because of it to
cure us of it. Sin is a gravely serious matter.
God the Father’s disposition towards us
in our sinfulness is not that of some mafia overlord whose offended honour must
be satisfied. The Father and the Son are
one. God really is like Jesus. Jesus death was not a legal transaction
between the Father and the Son that satisfies things and faith is not the
vehicle by which we gain the benefits of that transaction.
Let’s look at what Paul says here in Galatians for it
shows that Jesus death and resurrection and faith are not an external
transaction to appease God but how by them God has changed our very being,
setting in motion our cure from sin. Let’s
use the King James Version for it predates the Westminster Confession. Paul says: “I am crucified with Christ:
nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life I now
live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave
himself for me.”
Jesus living in us, in humanity is the cure for sin. We cannot simply obey the law and cure
ourselves of sin. Nor does just
believing that Jesus died for me the penalty of my sin make sin go away. Jesus has come to live in humanity. We must simply get on with being the new
humanity in him. Let me give you a
children’s sermon kind of image to explain this.
This glass of water is humanity in all times and all
places. We shall name it Adam because
God made it/us from the earth, which in Hebrew is Adamah. The Bible tells us the Adam being made in the
image of God was naively tricked to try to be God and we did what our dear Creator/friend
God told us not to do or we would die.
We became stained (add food colouring) and by the process of diffusion
the stain affects all humanity. God the Son became human and took upon himself
all our sinfulness. His incarnation,
faithful life, death, and resurrection and the pouring of the Holy Spirit upon
humanity has changed humanity. I am
using a syringe with bleach here to infuse the water – the old humanity, Adam –
with the new humanity that is “in Christ”.
At first, the stain is not completely removed but there is an immediate
change. Humanity is no longer the same
since Jesus.
As time goes on, you will notice a separation in
colours. I had to prepare one ahead of
time because it takes a lot of time.
There is clear water. Not exactly
the same as the original Adam because it is chlorinated. Jesus lives in it. The separation in colours does not mean
“good” people here and “wicked” people there.
Jesus, the bleach, is still working in the stained water. The clear water simply demonstrates that
Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit has obviously been at work and holds
forth the promise that the day will come when everything is transformed.
The clear water represents the awakening of faith. Faith
better translated as faithfulness is not what makes this transformation work in
us. It is as Paul says in Hebrews
11:1: “faith is the substance of things
hoped for; the evidence of things unseen.”
Faith/faithfulness is not something we can come up with on our own but
is rather the result of Jesus working in us in the power of the Holy Spirit to
make us like himself. What we can do is
to get with the program – strive to be faithful. Prayer, Bible Study, Christian fellowship,
compassion – being the people of God is conducive to water clarity.
This is the Gospel of what God is doing in humanity
in, through, and as Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. You are the proof of it. So, get on with it. Amen.
