Jesus’ Death, Part 1: The Richness of the Way God Loves Us [Lent 4]

Psalm 32

2 Corinthians 5:16-21

Survey of responses to Jesus’ death. (Posted separately).

What questions or insights came to you as you took the survey?

Some of these statements about the meaning of Jesus' death may have stumped or befuddled you.  That’s ok.  Scripture says many different things about Jesus’ death.  There are lots of different images and metaphors in Scripture that deal with Jesus’ death.  So there is a richness to our salvation that can’t be captured by any one image or metaphor.

 

For something that is rich and complex and multi-faceted, you need lots of different ways to describe it.  If you taste something that is rich, you taste something that has fullness to it.  There might be several layers of depth to the flavors.  You would need more than one or two words to describe the experience of tasting it.  Our oldest Henry is living and working in Emporia, KS right now.  And we visited him yesterday to take him out for lunch for his birthday.  No one was all that excited about dessert, but I made a case for bread pudding and ordered some for the table.  I talked about the bread, the eggs and cream, the sugar, the cinnamon.  It’s like a cinnamon roll or French toast in a different form, I suggested.  When it came to the table, Henry tried it and concluded, “It’s soggy bread.”  I had forgotten to mention the texture. 

Or take the richness of something like a marriage.  Any marriage that endures any length of time has a kind of richness to it.  You can’t capture it or summarize it with just a few lines.  You would need to tell lots of different stories.  You would need to pile up many different metaphors to express something close to the heart of the matter.  Most marriages are some mix of friendship, affection, partnership, admiration, cooperation, shared work, sexual intimacy, mutual help, and financial planning, not to mention a cluster of arguments and annoyances, betrayals and failures.

The same would hold true of anything complicated like a deep friendship or devotion to a skill or a craft.

In the same way, there is a richness to the way we talk about “salvation,” the good news of God loving us by saving us from threat and making possible a new kind of life.  You may have noticed already that in the Heidelberg Catechism there are two very different metaphors side by side.  In the first metaphor, Jesus Christ has “fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood.”  That metaphor in fact has two distinct images within it.  First there is payment of a debt we owe; and then there is a reference to “blood,” which calls to mind the ways Jesus’ death resembles the sacrifice of animals in the Jewish rhythms of worship.  In the second metaphor, Jesus Christ has “set me free from the tyranny of the devil.”  Now that’s quite a different image.  Here the imagery isn’t debt payment or animal sacrifices.  The image involves the way that my life is caught or imprisoned or held by some evil power.  And Christ’s death on the cross releases me from that tyranny into a new kind of freedom.

Our reading today from 2 Corinthians 5:16-21 describes yet another layer of richness in the way God loves us.  In the death of Jesus on the cross, God reconciles us when we are estranged.  These are relationship metaphors.  One of the effects of our sin is that it estranges us from God.  It puts us at odds with God.  It makes us hostile to God.  And that’s not all.  Our sin also estranges us from others, and even from ourselves.  But rather than abandoning us, rather than giving up on us, God enters our stories in the life of Jesus.  And God bears our wrongdoing on the cross so that we don’t have to.  There is a wonderful exchange, as Martin Luther would put it.  On the cross, Jesus Christ takes our sin.  And in exchange we are given his perfect righteousness. 

And now we see things not from an old, human perspective.  We see things from a new angle.  God is not some distant power or aloof judge.  God is the loving and forgiving presence within and among us that allows us to live in a new way.  No longer are we estranged from God.  No longer are we estranged from others and from ourselves.  Now we are part of a “new creation.”  Now we have been called to a “ministry” of announcing and expressing this new relationship in our own lives, so that God can continue to draw others into this new way of life through us.

Yes, the lives God offers to us are dying lives.  But Jesus Christ himself shows us that our dying lives can be lived from a new angle.  No longer is there an awkward or threatening distance between God and us.  Jesus’ death brings us back into the relationship of those forgiven and loved and entrusted with this good news of God’s love for all of creation.  Amen.