‘How does Jesus save?’ part 1, by Claire Lynch, 17 March 2024

Good news - Jesus’ life, death and resurrection helps us to restore good relationships with God - but how does this work? Claire Lynch looks at different ways of explaining this which emphasise different parts of the Bible and might serve as helpful pictures or analogies. But it’s also possible that too much stress or reliance on one picture will distort our view of God and his character. Can we gain something from these pictures while also keeping our eyes on Jesus to understand what God is really like?

Transcript

Introduction

Have you ever been trying to explain something to someone and they aren’t quite getting it?

Maybe you’re trying to express an experience you have had or you’re trying to explain a tricky concept or an idea.

Often if we are trying to make ourselves understood or we are trying to make it easier for the other person, then we’ll use other language or an analogy or metaphor to get our point across.

So if I was to say, “he ran like a bat out of hell” - you’d know exactly what I mean - that he ran pretty fast! Or if I said she “looked like a rabbit caught in headlights” - straight away you’d get it - that image would tell you that she was pretty scared!

Here’s couple of fun metaphors or analogies I came across:

He was so skinny he had to jump around in the shower to get wet.

She has more excuses than a pregnant nun.

And my favourite, by Elwyn Brooks White, the writer of Charlotte Webb.

Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.

Metaphors and analogies and similes are the most helpful thing that we have when we are trying to describe something that is new or beyond what we’ve previously imagined or maybe beyond describing. If you’ve read even just a bit of the Bible you’ll know it’s full of picture language, imagery and metaphors where the writers have tried to find the best words to describe a God who is beyond our imagination or understanding.

God is described as a Lion, a Lamb, Fire, wind, Creator, Father, dove, eagle, mother hen, shepherd, light, rock, fortress, shield and much more.

Recently we’ve been running a teaching series “What the gospel means to me”. Each person sharing their own perspective on how the good news (the gospel) of Jesus makes a difference in their life.

Each person has shared something different, but perfectly valid and beautiful. God is so much bigger than we realise, we can’t squash him into one box. There are many different ways to express and explain what the gospel, the good news of Jesus.

In the New Testament, there a 4 different gospel accounts of Jesus’ life, 4 different writers all describing the life, death and resurrection of Jesus in their own way, with their take on it, using language and metaphor that is most helpful for the understanding of the people they are trying to communicate to.

HOW Jesus’ incarnation, his life, death, resurrection and ascension brings us into relationship with God, or in short, HOW Jesus saves - is called the doctrine of Atonement. Atonement, meaning to be brought into a state of at-one-ment.

And over the last 2,000 years people have continued to use picture language, metaphors and models to explain the atonement, in ways that made sense to people at that particular time, ideas they could relate to, in their context and cultural settings.

During our Sabbatical two years ago, I had great fun delving in a little deeper into the metaphors and models of atonement that we see in the Bible - different ways the biblical writers used to explain ‘HOW’ we are brought into relationship with God through Jesus, HOW, Jesus saves.

And the reason I enjoyed it so much, is because how we understand this, affects what we think God is like. And as you will have heard me say many times in this series of ‘What is God like?”what we think about God, his character and his nature, affects everything about how we relate to him, to each other, ourselves and our world. How we see God is at the heart of everything.

So, over these next 2 talks, as we are coming up to Easter, I thought it the perfect time to look at the question of “How does Jesus save?”

Dethroning PSA

Now I’ve be part of church all my life, and for most of that time I have been taught and indeed shared myself that there is ultimately one way that we are brought into relationship with God.

And there’s a beautiful analogy in the Alpha course that helped me to grasp this. You may have heard it….

It’s the story of two school friends, who after university, go their separate ways. One goes on to be a lawyer and later a judge. The other goes into a life of crime. One day the criminal appears in court before his old friend the judge. The Judge loved his friend but he had to serve justice on him. So eventually the judge fines his friend the appropriate penalty of £20,000 but moments later, the judge removes his robes, went round to meet his friend on the other side of the courtroom and wrote him a cheque for £20,000.

In this analogy, God the Father is like the judge, and for justice to be done there has to be a consequence — in this case, a price to be paid for human wrongdoing (that we call sin). The consequence for sin, the price to be paid, is death. But because God is not only just but also loving, he sent Jesus the Son to pay the price by dying for us, in our place.

This way of explaining what Jesus did for us is known as Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA for short) - penal meaning punishment, and substitutionary because Jesus became the substitute for us and took the punishment we deserved.

For many years - I believed this was the mechanism by which we are each brought into relationship with God.

It’s only been in more recent years, that I’ve come to discover that, in fact, this is one, out of many ways, of explaining how we are brought into relationship with God.

And that this one way, was only introduced about 500 years ago, in the time of the Reformation by two theologians John Calvin and Martin Luther who were also trained lawyers, and in trying to explain the atonement in ways that people would understand, they took the analogy from the criminal justice system of their day.

In those days, the penalty, the legal sentence for a crime was almost always physical violence, such as torture, bodily mutilation, hanging, burning alive, drowning. And this would be done as a public spectacle to shame the criminal and frighten everyone else.

So for the Reformers all of that shaped their view of the divine justice system - and the theory of penal substitutionary atonement was born.

As I said, I had thought Penal Substitutionary atonement was the mechanism for how we are brought into relationship with God, how Jesus saves, but in fact it’s a metaphor - and actually, not even “the” metaphor for understanding it, but one of many, which we’ll come on to.

But the problem with a metaphor, any metaphor, is that it is helpful to a point, but when taken too far it can become untrue.

For example - Jesus being the lamb of God. Clearly - Jesus is NOT a fluffy lamb sat on God’s lap! That would be taking the metaphor too far! However, he is like a sacrificial lamb in the Jewish Story, to a degree.

And whilst that analogy of the courtroom had helped me to feel God’s love for me and see God as just and believe that he would do ANYTHING for me, however painful that would be for him..

..I came to realise that that analogy is not helpful for everyone and possibly when taken too far, does not reflect the nature of God that we see in Jesus. I’ve talked earlier in this series, that if we want to understand what God is like, then we need to look to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus is God. God is exactly like Jesus.

Penal substitutionary Atonement is built on the premise that God is a Father that physically tortures and kills his own son. For “good” reasons of course. For some people that’s the very reason, they wouldn’t want to know a God like that.

It’s built on the premise that God has to punish first in order to forgive. Out of all the names given to God in the Old Testament - not one of them is God the punisher. We have God who heals, God who provides, God of mercy and grace and forgiveness and love and so on.

If forgiveness only comes, when a punishment is carried out - isn’t that a transaction, is that really forgiveness? Try that with your spouse or your friend one time - next time they do something that hurts you - tell them you’ll only forgive them if they repay you. It won’t lead to the most loving relationship!

And PSA is built on a criminal justice system that we wouldn’t recognise today. Our understanding of what it looks like for justice to be done has changed. We no longer have offences punishable by death, we don’t inflict physical violence on criminals anymore. We think countries that still do that are barbaric.

We think that punishment should be proportionate to the crime. We believe in restorative justice and rehabilitating offenders. It was religious groups, 200 years ago, like the Quakers and Evangelicals who were at the forefront of achieving this Penal Reform - because they believed this was God’s heart.

All of this gives us a real problem trying to explain the good news of the Gospel to people based on an ancient world way of thinking about crime and punishment. The metaphor no longer works the way that it used to, in the days of Luther and Calvin.

Just as importantly, punishment through physical violence doesn’t fit with the nature and character of God that we see in Jesus, who never used physical violence against another human being, and told his disciples not to. And he never demanded there be punishment before telling someone they were forgiven.

Now I’m aware that some of you may be feeling a little unsettled by what I am saying - I know because, that is how I felt when I began to look into this a bit more.

I wondered that if Jesus wasn’t taking my punishment, then am I actually forgiven??

And if he wasn’t doing that, then why did he die?!!

Well first of all, I don’t believe this calls into question our forgiveness. God forgives because he is a forgiving God and we see that clearly in the person of Jesus and how he interacted with people around him.

We’re not questioning whether Jesus died on the cross for us or that through Jesus we are brought into relationship with God.

The only thing we are exploring here is the HOW.

And I’d like to say that if this way, PSA, of understanding God is helpful to you, then great - if it communicates to you something of the character and nature of God that we see revealed in Jesus, - then that’s great - keep that as a metaphor so far as it is helpful to you.

But if it is not helpful to you or to someone you are sharing with, if it doesn’t feel like ‘good news’ or it conjures up an image of God that is not like the Jesus we see in the Bible, then maybe that’s the metaphor gone too far and I would say there are many other wonderful wonderful ways to help us grasp the mystery of what was happening on the cross and how we are brought into relationship with God, that don’t major on punishment, or wrath or an angry God who Jesus had to placate through his suffering and death.

The Kaleidoscopic View

The Kaleidoscopic View is that we have an expansive range of images and metaphors to understand and express the atonement, no single image or metaphor being complete by itself, but each contributing to a fuller and richer understanding of God’s atoning work through Jesus Christ.

Scott McKnight who is a theologian and world-renowned speaker and writer, referring to the analogy of a golf bag, full of many different clubs for the variety of shots you might play on a golf course says this:

“…we have a big bag of images in our Bible and we need to pull each from the bag if we are to play out the fulness of the redemptive work of God. The game of atonement requires that players understand the value of each club as well as the effort needed to carry a bag big enough.”

And quoting Leon Morris, a NT scholar and theologian, “Christ’s atoning work is so complex and our minds so small. We cannot take it all in. We need the positive contributions of all the theories, for each draws attention to some aspect of what Christ has done for us. And though in the end, we cannot understand it all, we can thankfully accept so great [a] salvation.”

And so briefly for the rest of today and next week, I’d like to take look at a few of the main ways that people have explained the atonement over the past 2,000 years. And as we’ll see, they’ve mostly done so through metaphors, or pictures, that made sense to the people at that time. Ideas they were familiar with and could relate to.

For the first thousand years of Christianity, atonement was mostly explained in one of two ways.

One was the slave market and the other the Battlefield.

Slave Market Metaphor/Ransom Theory

In the Slave Market Metaphor, Jesus purchases our freedom. He paid a ransom price to set us free from being slaves to sin and the devil. So this is also called the Ransom Theory.

In the first Century, Greco-Roman world at least a third of the population in urban areas would have been slaves.

To be a slave was to have the lowest status a person could have in society. It was considered “social death”. A slave was a property of another person, they had absolutely no rights. In fact, a released criminal had more rights than a slave. Enslaved people of businesses were not listed as employees, but rather instruments and tools for businesses. The treatment of slaves was horrific. Slaves were often whipped, branded and cruelly mistreated. Their owners could also kill them for any reason and would face no punishment. Women would often be sold for sexual exploitation. It was common for slave owners to impregnate slaves in order to build their slave count as any child a slave woman had was legal “property” of her owner.

So when we read in the New Testament or sing in songs about Jesus “paying the price” or “ransoming us’’ or “redeeming us”, that’s the analogy it’s using, nothing to do with punishment, like we see in the PSA model.

"The Son of Man came to give his life as a ransom for many”. Matthew 20:28

“Christ Jesus gave himself as a ransom for all people.” 1 Timothy 2:5-6

“Once you were slaves of sin, but now you are free from your slavery to sin, and you have become slaves of God instead.” Romans 6. (Bearing in mind what I’ve just said about slavery, don’t worry about that last bit — remember it’s just a metaphor, that shouldn’t be pressed too far!)

1 Corinthians 7:23 says. “You were bought with a price, so don’t become slaves of people.” Don’t sell yourself back into slavery.

One of the reason people ended up in slavery was financial, because they couldn’t pay their debts, so with nothing else left to sell, they sold themselves.

Colossians 2:14 says that Jesus “cancelled the certificate of debt against us - nailing it to the cross.”

You can imagine how powerful ransom imagery would have been in that world, in picturing what Jesus had done to release us from slavery to sin and it’s effects.

Paying the price, cancelling our debt of sin, buying us back (to belong to God), paying for our freedom and saving us from a life of slavery to sin and death.

Battlefield Imagery

And then there is the battlefield way of explaining it which says that through Jesus’ death and resurrection, he won a victory over the hostile cosmic powers that are the enemies of human life - sin, and death and Satan and the evil under which people are suffering.

We call this theory, Christus Victor.

Hebrews 2:14 says that since we are human, Jesus had to share in our humanity, “so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death, the devil…”

Christus Victor would have made a lot of sense because the Ancient world was very supernaturally aware - everyone believed in gods and spirits and spiritual forces and saw them as involved in everything that happened in the world.

And both of these early explanations come together in Colossians 2:13-15:

“He forgave us our sins, having cancelled the charge of our legal indebtedness… he took it away, nailing it to the cross.

And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.”

Ephesians 4:8 says that when he ascended on high, he led captivity itself captive!

I love how the apostle Paul put it in Colossians 1:13, he says “For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves. In whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”

What a wonderful image.

Conclusion

So these are just briefly, two more Biblical metaphors or models of atonement, of How Jesus saves, how we are brought into relationship with God. Neither of them involving punishment from an angry God. Two golf clubs in the bag of many to take Scott McKnights analogy or Two facets of a beautiful diamond. There are many more and if you want to delve a bit further, I can recommend a couple of books:

“Telling the Old Old Story” by Steve Burnhope - if you want something you can pick up easily, this will give you a concise summary and is a handy reference book to have on your shelf.

If you want to spend a bit more time, looking at it in a bit more detail, then “Rediscovering the Scandal of the Cross” by Mark Baker and Joel Green.

If you prefer to listen to things, Danielle Strickland did a great podcast series, a few years ago called Mind blown which particularly speaks into some of what we have been looking at today.

Next week, I’m going to be looking at 2 more images, those of sacrifice and covenant - neither of which also have anything to do with understanding the atonement through the lens of crime and punishment (which may surprise you).

But for now, lets take a moment to ponder what we have been talking about today and share in the Lord’s supper together.

Colossians 2:13-15:

“When you were dead in your sins…… God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having cancelled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross.

And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, truimphing over them by the cross.”

More in this series