The End of Incarnation
March 16, 2008
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Matthew 21:1-11; Philippians 2:5-11
The Confirmation Class has been meeting since the beginning of January – they have had twenty hours of class time, three field trips, discussions with mentors, and they cooked brunch for the church last week. They’ve had to turn in notes on sermons. Additionally, they have each been working on their own statement of faith – writing out what they believe about God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the Bible, church, baptism, communion, and anything else I’ve forgotten. This is not an easy exercise. And yet, it is a very rewarding task, because while most of us think about faith issues from time to time, it is difficult to wrestle with our faith enough to put it into words. Defining our own understanding of God and discipleship is challenging – and they have been up to the challenge. The statements that I’ve read thus far are well thought-out, and quite mature. They have become theologians – people who think about God.
All of us should be theologians, and yet, so many traditions don’t encourage thought at all – I remember hearing folks proudly say, “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.” That kind of finality is not typical either of people IN the Bible (who argued with God and with each other about what it means to follow God) or of Presbyterians. Whether on the liberal or the conservative end of the Presbyterian spectrum, our tradition has been one of thinking about our faith. Part one of the Presbyterian constitution is the Book of Confessions, the collection of 9 creeds and confessions that are the result of men and women doing exactly what the confirmation kids have been doing – wrestling with how to understand God in the midst of our world, and how to state that understanding.
While some things about God are unchanging – God’s love, for example– our understanding of God has changed over time. That was true, by the way, throughout the Bible as well. There are some things that were laid down as law in Leviticus, but by the time of Isaiah there were already some changes. So even within the Old Testament, changes happened, not just in the transition from Old Testament to New Testament.
And just as people in the time of Jesus struggled with understanding him, so as time has passed, the church and people both within it and without it have also worked, studied, discussed and prayed to seek understanding.
On this Palm Sunday, we know that the cross is right around the corner – it’s hard for us to hear the reading about Jesus entering Jerusalem amid cheers and not remember that by the end of the week, the cheers will have turned to jeers, because Friday is only a few days away, that Friday we call Good Friday. How many of us have wondered why, or struggled to explain to our children why it is called “Good Friday”? I promised last week that I would talk about theology of the cross – that is, the way we think about the death of Jesus – and you came anyway, so here we go.
Just about 1000 years after the death of Jesus, Anselm of Canterbury was born – and became a hugely influential person in the history of theology. Anselm’s motto was “faith seeking understanding”. I have to confess that when I read that, I was a little struck by that notion – Anselm had a motto? In any event, his was “faith seeking understanding,” and this didn’t mean moving from a position of faith to a position of understanding. It means that the stance of faith is one that is always seeking understanding. I very much like the choice of words, by the way – understanding is different than answers. I may understand someone, but that doesn’t mean I have categorized them neatly into a pigeonhole. Understanding means a kind of deep knowing, something more than knowledge of facts, something more than acquaintance. And faith is better understood as trust than as belief – belief usually means a kind of intellectual assent. Trust is a more relational concept.
Anyway, I’m talking about Anselm because he is the one who developed what is known as the satisfaction theory of atonement, also known as the ‘substitutionary theory of atonement’. In our day, most people probably think of this as the authoritative Christian view, but it is just one understanding of many that have developed over the years. Many of us don’t find it satisfactory, no pun intended, and I suspect that it has kept a number of people away from Christianity over the years.
Satisfaction atonement theory, briefly stated, is that understanding that says human sin had created a separation from God and needed to be punished in order to make a relationship with God possible. So God sent Jesus to die for our sins – because he was perfect and didn’t need to be punished, his death could count as satisfaction for the deaths of others. According to this understanding, because of the blood of Jesus, we can now have a relationship with God. This is what most people mean when they say, “Jesus died for our sins.”
Now I certainly don’t mean to be insulting when I say this theory falls short in a number of ways – I don’t mean to suggest that anyone who has believed this is silly. I think this is the Christianity that most of us were taught, either implicitly or explicitly. I believed it, until I began to try and understand it better when I was in seminary, and then I began to see the problems, and I wrestled with it for the next dozen years or so before I began to flesh out a better understanding. The satisfaction theory has so taken over Christianity, although, as I said, it wasn’t even a part of Christianity until the 11th century, that most people don’t know that there are other ways to understand the cross. But the shortcomings of this theology have kept many people from the church over the years, and kept many people in the church from being able to take our own faith seriously.
The problems with this theology are many – first of all, it begins with the premise that humans can’t have a relationship with God without a blood sacrifice because of the problem of human sin. This premise doesn’t hold water – there isn’t a place in the Bible where God refuses to be in relationship with humans. All through the Bible, before Jesus, God is in relationship with humans. And in more than one place God criticizes sacrifices – this reading from the first chapter of Isaiah says it as well as any: What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more; bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation— I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity. Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.
Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. Come now, let us argue it out, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.
God wants us to be in relationship with him, and apparently, from this passage and many others, we are the ones putting up the obstacle. So problem #1 with satisfaction theory is that it claims to solve a problem that doesn’t exist – the separation from God and God’s desire for a blood sacrifice to cover it.
Problem #2 is that in the satisfaction theory, God doesn’t forgive sin – he merely reassigns it to someone else and then punishes it. This view says that God won’t forgive sin, yet the most pervasive view of God in Scripture is that God is forgiving. As both the confirmation class and Presbyterian Women read in studying Jonah this year, this description of God is all through the Old Testament: a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. Would such a God require a blood sacrifice? How many of you require a blood sacrifice in order to forgive? At a minimum, I’m figuring God is better than us.
Problem #3 is that the satisfaction theory of the cross makes the life and ministry of Jesus almost irrelevant…and ours as well. According to this theory, Jesus came to die. Dying made our relationship with God possible, and our job is to accept him as our Savior. So our life becomes irrelevant, too. Again, this is not scriptural – again and again in the Bible God or Jesus tells us that it matters how we live. This way of viewing Christianity is not much of a religion for adults – if my only role is to accept something someone else has done? And maybe try to get others to accept Jesus?? But as we’ve read over the past few weeks in studying the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus talks about a radically different way of living. And he never demands that people accept him. This does not give us a faith worth living for, and most of us intuitively understand this, even if we’ve never spent the time working it out. Now, I won’t tell you that there are no verses in the Bible that can be used to support this theory – there are plenty of verses that can be pulled out of context to support satisfaction theology. But it is inconsistent with the Bible taken as a whole. There are good historical reasons why it developed, but I don’t have the time to go into those now.
I think though that it remains popular because many people are immature – some people would rather think about religion as getting a free pass to heaven than recognizing that Christianity is all about how we live here and now, and how we develop a relationship with God. That is more complex, that is more demanding, and for many of us, that gives us something worth living for.
So let’s look at an alternative view – one that makes a whole lot more sense to me. The theology of incarnation says that God came among us as one of us in Jesus Christ. God incarnate, God in flesh, is Jesus. This is what the reading in Philippians is about: Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. God coming in human form and showing us what obedience to God looks like. Incarnation is how we experience God-with-us, that we talk about at Christmas.
Douglas John Hall has been writing about the theology of the cross for thirty years, and has been called, “the finest theologian on this continent of this generation.” In his book The Cross in Our Context: Jesus and the Suffering World, he describes a theology of the cross that makes sense, is consistent with the Bible as a whole, and which give us a mission as well. In it, he explains that the cross shows that there are no limits to God’s love. That when God came among us as one of us in Jesus Christ, while he could have found ways to avoid the cross, he did not. His solidarity extends into suffering and death. When he came among us as a human, he overcame any separation between God and man to suffer with us – God has fully embraced humanity. God’s compassion for humans is truly com-passion, feeling-with, for God has indeed experienced all that we can experience. God really knows our condition for God has been present among us as one of us. And when God had a choice of whether to pull back and avoid the cross, God chose to fully engage with us, to live into the limitlessness of God’s love.
Rather than Christianity being a way to avoid the world, then, it is a path of engagement with the world, to follow Jesus into a fuller love for others, to follow Jesus into the radical way of life he showed us, to be willing to suffer with God for the sake of the world, to enter into the very heart of God.
So our Christianity isn’t about each of us securing our own password into the next world, but about all of us deeply engaging in the fate of this world – about being present to one another and present to God. It is a faith of deep intimacy – which can be very frightening to some of us – intimacy with each other, intimacy with God, and intimacy with this planet that God created. The God of the Trinity is a God of deep relationship – within God’s very self – God, Jesus, Holy Spirit – and God calls us into living relationally as well.
The end of incarnation – the goal of incarnation – was to show God’s solidarity with humans, and on the cross, Jesus showed that this solidarity has no limits. God is fully present to us, fully engaged with us, fully loving us, deeply, with no holding back.
A friend of mine shared with me a blessing she heard in a church in State College, Pennsylvania on Palm Sunday – “May you be covered in the dust of your Rabbi.” As we remember the grand parade of Palm Sunday, let us remember that in Jesus, God came close to us, to care for humankind and all of Creation. Let us follow Jesus into the suffering of God for the sake of the world, let us love deeply, and let us be covered in the dust of our Rabbi. Amen.
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Matthew 21:1-11; Philippians 2:5-11
The Confirmation Class has been meeting since the beginning of January – they have had twenty hours of class time, three field trips, discussions with mentors, and they cooked brunch for the church last week. They’ve had to turn in notes on sermons. Additionally, they have each been working on their own statement of faith – writing out what they believe about God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the Bible, church, baptism, communion, and anything else I’ve forgotten. This is not an easy exercise. And yet, it is a very rewarding task, because while most of us think about faith issues from time to time, it is difficult to wrestle with our faith enough to put it into words. Defining our own understanding of God and discipleship is challenging – and they have been up to the challenge. The statements that I’ve read thus far are well thought-out, and quite mature. They have become theologians – people who think about God.
All of us should be theologians, and yet, so many traditions don’t encourage thought at all – I remember hearing folks proudly say, “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.” That kind of finality is not typical either of people IN the Bible (who argued with God and with each other about what it means to follow God) or of Presbyterians. Whether on the liberal or the conservative end of the Presbyterian spectrum, our tradition has been one of thinking about our faith. Part one of the Presbyterian constitution is the Book of Confessions, the collection of 9 creeds and confessions that are the result of men and women doing exactly what the confirmation kids have been doing – wrestling with how to understand God in the midst of our world, and how to state that understanding.
While some things about God are unchanging – God’s love, for example– our understanding of God has changed over time. That was true, by the way, throughout the Bible as well. There are some things that were laid down as law in Leviticus, but by the time of Isaiah there were already some changes. So even within the Old Testament, changes happened, not just in the transition from Old Testament to New Testament.
And just as people in the time of Jesus struggled with understanding him, so as time has passed, the church and people both within it and without it have also worked, studied, discussed and prayed to seek understanding.
On this Palm Sunday, we know that the cross is right around the corner – it’s hard for us to hear the reading about Jesus entering Jerusalem amid cheers and not remember that by the end of the week, the cheers will have turned to jeers, because Friday is only a few days away, that Friday we call Good Friday. How many of us have wondered why, or struggled to explain to our children why it is called “Good Friday”? I promised last week that I would talk about theology of the cross – that is, the way we think about the death of Jesus – and you came anyway, so here we go.
Just about 1000 years after the death of Jesus, Anselm of Canterbury was born – and became a hugely influential person in the history of theology. Anselm’s motto was “faith seeking understanding”. I have to confess that when I read that, I was a little struck by that notion – Anselm had a motto? In any event, his was “faith seeking understanding,” and this didn’t mean moving from a position of faith to a position of understanding. It means that the stance of faith is one that is always seeking understanding. I very much like the choice of words, by the way – understanding is different than answers. I may understand someone, but that doesn’t mean I have categorized them neatly into a pigeonhole. Understanding means a kind of deep knowing, something more than knowledge of facts, something more than acquaintance. And faith is better understood as trust than as belief – belief usually means a kind of intellectual assent. Trust is a more relational concept.
Anyway, I’m talking about Anselm because he is the one who developed what is known as the satisfaction theory of atonement, also known as the ‘substitutionary theory of atonement’. In our day, most people probably think of this as the authoritative Christian view, but it is just one understanding of many that have developed over the years. Many of us don’t find it satisfactory, no pun intended, and I suspect that it has kept a number of people away from Christianity over the years.
Satisfaction atonement theory, briefly stated, is that understanding that says human sin had created a separation from God and needed to be punished in order to make a relationship with God possible. So God sent Jesus to die for our sins – because he was perfect and didn’t need to be punished, his death could count as satisfaction for the deaths of others. According to this understanding, because of the blood of Jesus, we can now have a relationship with God. This is what most people mean when they say, “Jesus died for our sins.”
Now I certainly don’t mean to be insulting when I say this theory falls short in a number of ways – I don’t mean to suggest that anyone who has believed this is silly. I think this is the Christianity that most of us were taught, either implicitly or explicitly. I believed it, until I began to try and understand it better when I was in seminary, and then I began to see the problems, and I wrestled with it for the next dozen years or so before I began to flesh out a better understanding. The satisfaction theory has so taken over Christianity, although, as I said, it wasn’t even a part of Christianity until the 11th century, that most people don’t know that there are other ways to understand the cross. But the shortcomings of this theology have kept many people from the church over the years, and kept many people in the church from being able to take our own faith seriously.
The problems with this theology are many – first of all, it begins with the premise that humans can’t have a relationship with God without a blood sacrifice because of the problem of human sin. This premise doesn’t hold water – there isn’t a place in the Bible where God refuses to be in relationship with humans. All through the Bible, before Jesus, God is in relationship with humans. And in more than one place God criticizes sacrifices – this reading from the first chapter of Isaiah says it as well as any: What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more; bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation— I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity. Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.
Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. Come now, let us argue it out, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.
God wants us to be in relationship with him, and apparently, from this passage and many others, we are the ones putting up the obstacle. So problem #1 with satisfaction theory is that it claims to solve a problem that doesn’t exist – the separation from God and God’s desire for a blood sacrifice to cover it.
Problem #2 is that in the satisfaction theory, God doesn’t forgive sin – he merely reassigns it to someone else and then punishes it. This view says that God won’t forgive sin, yet the most pervasive view of God in Scripture is that God is forgiving. As both the confirmation class and Presbyterian Women read in studying Jonah this year, this description of God is all through the Old Testament: a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. Would such a God require a blood sacrifice? How many of you require a blood sacrifice in order to forgive? At a minimum, I’m figuring God is better than us.
Problem #3 is that the satisfaction theory of the cross makes the life and ministry of Jesus almost irrelevant…and ours as well. According to this theory, Jesus came to die. Dying made our relationship with God possible, and our job is to accept him as our Savior. So our life becomes irrelevant, too. Again, this is not scriptural – again and again in the Bible God or Jesus tells us that it matters how we live. This way of viewing Christianity is not much of a religion for adults – if my only role is to accept something someone else has done? And maybe try to get others to accept Jesus?? But as we’ve read over the past few weeks in studying the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus talks about a radically different way of living. And he never demands that people accept him. This does not give us a faith worth living for, and most of us intuitively understand this, even if we’ve never spent the time working it out. Now, I won’t tell you that there are no verses in the Bible that can be used to support this theory – there are plenty of verses that can be pulled out of context to support satisfaction theology. But it is inconsistent with the Bible taken as a whole. There are good historical reasons why it developed, but I don’t have the time to go into those now.
I think though that it remains popular because many people are immature – some people would rather think about religion as getting a free pass to heaven than recognizing that Christianity is all about how we live here and now, and how we develop a relationship with God. That is more complex, that is more demanding, and for many of us, that gives us something worth living for.
So let’s look at an alternative view – one that makes a whole lot more sense to me. The theology of incarnation says that God came among us as one of us in Jesus Christ. God incarnate, God in flesh, is Jesus. This is what the reading in Philippians is about: Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. God coming in human form and showing us what obedience to God looks like. Incarnation is how we experience God-with-us, that we talk about at Christmas.
Douglas John Hall has been writing about the theology of the cross for thirty years, and has been called, “the finest theologian on this continent of this generation.” In his book The Cross in Our Context: Jesus and the Suffering World, he describes a theology of the cross that makes sense, is consistent with the Bible as a whole, and which give us a mission as well. In it, he explains that the cross shows that there are no limits to God’s love. That when God came among us as one of us in Jesus Christ, while he could have found ways to avoid the cross, he did not. His solidarity extends into suffering and death. When he came among us as a human, he overcame any separation between God and man to suffer with us – God has fully embraced humanity. God’s compassion for humans is truly com-passion, feeling-with, for God has indeed experienced all that we can experience. God really knows our condition for God has been present among us as one of us. And when God had a choice of whether to pull back and avoid the cross, God chose to fully engage with us, to live into the limitlessness of God’s love.
Rather than Christianity being a way to avoid the world, then, it is a path of engagement with the world, to follow Jesus into a fuller love for others, to follow Jesus into the radical way of life he showed us, to be willing to suffer with God for the sake of the world, to enter into the very heart of God.
So our Christianity isn’t about each of us securing our own password into the next world, but about all of us deeply engaging in the fate of this world – about being present to one another and present to God. It is a faith of deep intimacy – which can be very frightening to some of us – intimacy with each other, intimacy with God, and intimacy with this planet that God created. The God of the Trinity is a God of deep relationship – within God’s very self – God, Jesus, Holy Spirit – and God calls us into living relationally as well.
The end of incarnation – the goal of incarnation – was to show God’s solidarity with humans, and on the cross, Jesus showed that this solidarity has no limits. God is fully present to us, fully engaged with us, fully loving us, deeply, with no holding back.
A friend of mine shared with me a blessing she heard in a church in State College, Pennsylvania on Palm Sunday – “May you be covered in the dust of your Rabbi.” As we remember the grand parade of Palm Sunday, let us remember that in Jesus, God came close to us, to care for humankind and all of Creation. Let us follow Jesus into the suffering of God for the sake of the world, let us love deeply, and let us be covered in the dust of our Rabbi. Amen.