In the town where I was raised, on the west coast of Scotland, there stands a "market cross." It is located in the very heart of the community, close to the post office and banks, near to a grocery store, a butcher’s shop and a bakery.
It speaks of a time when the cross of Jesus Christ occupied the center of all human experience, standing where the main streets intersected, where people met to gossip, where justice was often done and in its shadow went on the business of buying and selling.
Like a great piece of architecture, such as a cathedral, the cross is something we are called to contemplate and consider over and over again so that we can discern the "length, breadth, height and depth of the love of Christ … that surpasses human knowledge."
To try and describe the work of Christ in atonement is to attempt the impossible for we will never fully plumb the depth of its meaning. We recognize that in the end, all that we say about the cross cannot do justice to the all-transcending reality of the grace of God that is revealed there.
So, like Paul, we glory in the cross, awe-struck by its wonderful mystery, admitting with Martin Luther that "the wisdom of the cross is hidden in a deep mystery" for we are always aware that the cross is not something that waits for our questioning but something that questions us.
The difficulty is seen in the way in which down through the centuries, the work of atonement has been portrayed in pictures drawn from different contexts such as the temple (sacrifice), the battlefield (victory), the law court (penalty, guilt, substitution), the slave market (ransom), courtly love, family life and medicine. One of the most popular ways of understanding the cross is to speak of it as the means by which Christ paid our penalty, took our sins upon Himself, experienced the judgment of God on our account: the doctrine of penal substitution.
Recently, in a broadcast on British Broadcasting Corp. Radio 4, the current dean of St. Albans Cathedral in England spoke of this viewpoint of the cross as "repulsive" and "insane," accusing those who teach this concept as portraying God as being a "psychopath." The reaction of clerics and theologians in Britain has generally been one of surprise and shock that rather than focusing on the positive lessons that this picture of the cross presents, the dean used the occasion of Easter to attack the message of Christianity.
After all, millions of Christians throughout the world will join in singing the words of Philip Bliss’ hymn:
Bearing shame and scoffing rude
In my place condemned He stood
Sealed my pardon with His blood
Hallelujah! What a Savior!
Sometimes this understanding of the death of Christ has been misunderstood, and some presentations have suggested, wrongly I would argue, that Jesus needed to die in order that God might actually love a sinful world.
For example, in the early church, even such a major figure as John Chrysostom suggested that the death of Christ softened the anger of God against sin and won Him over to us.
The New Testament, although it speaks of Christ as dying in our place and bearing our punishment, appears to suggest that the motivation that caused the Father to send His Son to die on the cross was on account of the lavishness of the love that He already felt toward sinners.
One possible danger of penal substitution is that it implies that something in God must change before He can love a lost world. Western theologies of atonement have tended to be legalistic, often because the theologians themselves were trained as lawyers, making it appear that God is primarily a God of law before He is a God of love, rather than the reverse, and so failing to do justice to the personal and relational aspects of His being.
Indeed Karl Barth, perhaps overreacting against this understanding of Christ’s death, suggested that Christ’s death did not so much satisfy the wrath of God as satisfy the love of God.
The wrath of God is obviously a theme that we find in both the Old and New testaments, and you cannot get away from it. However, the danger is that when we read of God’s anger and wrath, we immediately think of human anger and human concepts of sacrifice.
There is nothing capricious or arbitrary about the holiness of God. He is never spiteful or vindictive. He is never unpredictable.
His wrath is His settled, unremitting antagonism to evil in all its forms and manifestations. What provokes our anger — pride and vanity — never provokes His, and what provokes His anger — evil — seldom touches us.
R.W. Dale, the British Congregational theologian of the 19th century, once said, "It is partly because sin does not provoke our own wrath, that we do not believe that sin provokes the wrath of God."
Furthermore the New Testament does not have any pagan concept that God needs to be cajoled, bribed or persuaded with great difficulty to forgive sinners. He takes the initiative — He provides the sacrifice — He bears the full consequences of human sinfulness. P.T. Forsyth reminds us that "the atonement did not procure grace, it flowed from grace."
God does not love us because Christ died for us — He died for us because He loves us. In our preaching of the cross as a sacrifice for sin, we must be careful never to imply that God finds it difficult to love — He IS love — that is His nature. Judgment is His "strange work." To speak of Jesus dying in our place means that He has completely identified Himself with humankind and has experienced the consequences of human sinfulness. Christ endured the human condition of being under the judgment of God. He reaps the bitter harvest for humankind that it is inevitably sowing for itself.
When speaking of God and sin, the Scriptures often speak of being "torn apart" by conflicting emotions — He is grieved by sin as well as hating it — He is just and holy, and yet He recoils from judging. Hosea 11:8 suggests that He recoils within Himself when He contemplates judging Israel. He is the God of holy love, and in the cross, His justice and love kiss each other and are manifested.
Grace and love, like mighty rivers,
Poured incessant from above,
And heav’n’s peace and perfect justice
Kissed a guilty world in love.
Let me suggest that there are different ways in which we can understand Christ entering into our suffering, bearing our sins on His body to the tree, dying on our behalf, that enables us to reflect with joy and wonder at the way in which God draws alongside us to be our Savior.
First of all, He suffers physically. His body, like our own, was severely limited in its powers of endurance and highly sensitive to pain.
He had known prior to the cross what it was to suffer hunger and thirst, weariness and exhaustion and following the whipping and the scourging, He was suspended, fully conscious, on the cross.
Thus in the person of the crucified Christ, we discover the identification of God with us in our experience of physical suffering, who not only "remembers that we are dust" but who sympathizes with us in our pain and draws near to us as the God of all grace and comfort to be Immanuel in our suffering.
Thus the answer to the cry of Job, in the midst of his pain, "Do you have eyes of flesh? Do you see as a mortal sees?" is a resounding yes for God has come among us as God Incarnate to experience our sufferings as His sufferings.
Our Lord also suffered emotionally. As a real man, He had an ordinary human psychology. He knew hours of joy and contentment, and yet He also knew what it was, not only on the cross but habitually, to be the "man of sorrows." He was distressed by the spiritual hardness of those to whom He ministered, disappointed when the nine lepers didn’t return to offer Him their thanks, grieved by opposition, pained by their misery. He wept in the presence of death, seeing it as an outrage, and wept over Jerusalem as a city doomed to destruction.
Yet the pent up emotions of our Lord erupted in Gethsemane, and we read of how He "began to shiver and to quail … He began to be sorrowful and afraid … He was deeply troubled." Raymond Brown’s translation has it as "He shuddered, moved with the deepest emotion" as He contemplated the horror of the cross.
Thirdly, our Savior also suffered socially. He loved to be in other people’s company, delighting to be at Bethany with Mary, Martha and Lazarus. He chose the Twelve to be "with Him" and took time to relate to Peter, James and John, finding a special affinity with the latter.
It was not easy to be isolated, to be deemed an embarrassment by His family, to discover that one of your close companions was going to betray you and another would deny you and the rest would run away and leave you all alone. As we view the cross, we see one who dies bereft of human comfort and company, knowing that those who were closest to Him thought that He was letting them down.
Alone! Alone! He bore it all alone!
He suffered, bled and died alone … alone!
Finally, our Lord suffered spiritually as He entered into the darkness of Golgotha and cried, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
There is the suggestion that in the midst of Calvary’s crisis He was experiencing a loss of His own identity and so He no longer cried "Abba" for as He "bears our sins to His own body on the tree" even His sense of being the eternal Son is obscured.
Elsewhere in the New Testament, we always hear Him say, "I and the Father are one," but here there is a shattering of this sense of oneness. It was in this darkness that His true passion began: His suffering from God, of which penal substitution speaks.
The one who from all eternity had been face to face with God, who had been with God, was now forsaken by God. Indeed if we use a variant reading of Hebrews 2:9, we discover that on the cross, He was "without" God as He "tastes death for humankind."
The one who was with God came to be without God so that we might be brought into fellowship with God as Father. In the suggestive words of Jurgen Moltmann, "Christ does not only become the brother of the victims … He becomes the one who atones for the guilty too."
"Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and gave His life as an atoning sacrifice for our sins." God’s love at Calvary’s cross is an earnest love, a love that goes to the very depth of suffering for sin. In the words of Rabbi John Duncan, professor of Old Testament in Edinburgh, Scotland, during the 19th century, "it was damnation and He took it lovingly."
He loves us so much that He not only identifies with us in our suffering, physical, emotional and social, but He identifies with us in our spiritual need and stands in solidarity with us and comes to give His life for us so that we will never be outside, never be abandoned, never be forsaken.
Amazing love, how can it be
That Thou, my God, shoulds’t die for me
None of the theories of the atonement can, by themselves, do full justice to the message of Christ crucified that we find so richly portrayed for us in the Scriptures.
However, to speak of Jesus dying on the cross as our substitute is not "repulsive" or "insane" but reveals one aspect of the wonderful message of God’s love for sinful humankind.
In this story of salvation, we begin to plumb the depths of God’s grace and we follow the example of Isaac Watts and "survey the wondrous cross, on which the Prince of Glory died" and declare with confidence and celebration "Hallelujah! What a Savior!"
EDITOR’S NOTE — Ken Roxburgh is the Armstrong Professor and chair of the department of religion at Samford University in Birmingham.
Share with others: