“JESUS BECAME LIKE US”

Tim Moore

Sardis Baptist Church

Galatians 4:4-7

August 4, 2019

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

Tim Moore was our guest proclaimer this week, and also led our discussion in Sunday School. His notes/handout from the lecture are in the link below: 

08-04-19 (1)

1) The word “atonement” is not one we typically use in everyday life, and increasingly use less and less in the Church. Even if we cannot define it, explain it, or describe it, for people in this congregation, as I begin talking about it many will recognize it and possibly say, “That’s the religion I ran away from.”

Atonement is a theological word that combines several Christian concepts or beliefs, any one of which might be the poison pill that some of us will no longer swallow, while other concepts or beliefs may be personally important, foundational, even, in the spiritual journeys of some of us.

Around a thousand years ago, Anselm, the archbishop of Canterbury, took different ideas from the Bible and earlier church theologians and created what was later called the Substitutionary Theory of Atonement. It has been the dominant explanation of what happened with Jesus on the cross and how Christians are saved through Jesus ever since. I should be a little humble with a theory that has stood the test of time for 10 centuries. I should be, but I’m not going to be.

Here are four (4) basics of what Anselm first taught: 1) Human beings are born defective, born in original sin, which has irreparably broken human relationships with God because God must punish sin, 2) God sent Jesus to earth to fix this problem, 3) Jesus, a perfect human, sacrificed his life on the cross for the sins of humanity, thereby quenching God’s anger, and repairing the breach between God and humanity, 4) Therefore, humans may be saved from sin and death by faith in Jesus.

That’s it in a nutshell. I apologize if anyone is experiencing a wave of PTSD.

Maybe when Anselm constructed this model in the 11th century, it made perfect sense to peasants living on the lands of feudal lords, but it has significant problems for people of faith trying to follow Jesus in the 21st century.

The “wrath of God” image is really a downer, not to mention that the whole thing begins with human beings are defective. Then, there’s the fact that God NEVER forgives in this story. NE-VER. That’s troubling, isn’t it? God receives payment for sin. God gets the pound of flesh. But there’s no forgiveness. I told the folks in the “First Thought” hour, that it is like a mafia business transaction. That doesn’t go over too well in our 21st-century, pluralistic world.

So, how do we approach the cross without this theory coloring our thoughts about the cross? How do we read the Bible – both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament – without these atonement glasses that distort the messages from God we are reading?

First, let’s acknowledge that Christianity did pretty well for a thousand years before this theory. Lots of people were Christian in the first millennium and they didn’t believe this stuff. Second, we need to approach the cross. Too often liberal Christians just ignore it, because while they know they don’t like the traditional atonement, they haven’t figured out what they do believe. So, they just avoid it. We are going to face it and begin reimagining it.

2) “When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.”
Paul writes this sentence in the middle of his short letter to the Galatians. He is teaching them, or re-teaching them, to have faith in Jesus Christ, instead of trying to earn God’s righteousness by keeping the Mosaic Law (as Paul understood it). And notice that Paul doesn’t say, “When the fullness of time had come, God killed Jesus on a cross in order to redeem those who were under the law.” The cross is not the conduit whereby we might become the children of God. No, it is that Jesus is born of a woman and born under the law.

The incarnation of Jesus, not the crucifixion, is the way by which we receive adoption as God’s children – Jesus’ sisters and brothers. The cross is one moment in Jesus’ life, one moment in his incarnation – of God taking on flesh, of becoming human, but it is one part, not the whole.

It is in the incarnation, where God becomes human, that we become one in Christ and with God.

Irenaeus, a bishop in the 2nd century, once said something like, “Jesus became like us, that we might become like Christ.” Jesus became like us. When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law. Jesus became like us, that we might become like Christ.
God wanted to become more like us, so that we might become more like God.

And God gets more than God had anticipated. The moment Jesus is born in a manger, Jesus had to die, was destined to die. Why? Because he had to save sinful humanity? No, because that’s what it means to be human, to be mortal. Whether it was the cross, or cancer, or old age, Jesus was going to die. And then, what? What was God going to do, then? Leave Jesus in the grave? Hardly.
Once God jumps into the incarnation, once God becomes like us, God invites death into God. The immortal enters mortality. And God has a resurrection reaction.

3) I worship the God described in Exodus 34: “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for a thousand generations, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin.” And because God’s steadfast love is so great, I do not believe humanity’s relationship with God has ever been irreparably broken. I do not believe in original sin. The story of Adam and Eve is the magical story of every human being that grows up from an innocent age where you can stand naked and not be ashamed – every toddler has done that right? – to when you eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil sometime in childhood and realize actions have consequences and that everything dies, even you. And when that happens, God has to send you out into the world; you can’t go back to being a toddler.

The story of Eve and Adam is not the story of original sin that was passed down to every generation. It is the story of human becoming, of growing from an innocent child into a mortal human being that understands all our actions and decisions have consequences. And that’s how God made us, because only beings like that can have full, mutual relationships.
And that’s why God became human, so that God might have full, mutual relationships with us. God had to find out what it was like to be human and in doing so God found out how wonderful being human is and how terrible being human is.

For me, in one sense, this redeems God.

Human life on this planet can be so beautiful and wonderful at times that it can take your breath away. It can also be so brutal that it can make you wonder if it has any meaning.
If God had stayed far away in the heavens, safe from all our brutality, then I don’t think that God would be worth worshiping. Certainly, that kind of God wouldn’t be worth dedicating my life to that God. We know that God didn’t stop the Holocaust, or the killing fields of Cambodia, or the slavery and death of 10 million Africans, or the genocide of indigenous peoples by conquerors and colonists. All those things and much more happened in human history and are still happening. I couldn’t worship a God who stayed safe and away from all that.
In the fullness of time, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law.

When Jesus was born in a manger, God left the heavens above and became like us. Embedded in all the wonder and beauty of life as we experience it by being human, Jesus also became embedded in all the brutality that can happen. Jesus joined us in struggles and sufferings. As Luke says at a key moment in Jesus’ ministry, “He set his face to Jerusalem.” Jesus faced the injustices of his day. He confronted the way we treat the poor and disadvantaged. He called us to love our enemies and bless those who persecute us. That we should forgive 70 x 7 times, or indefinitely. And that we should be merciful and perfect as God is merciful and perfect.

Jesus was killed unjustly, fighting the forces that oppress people – in his case Empire and bad religion. And in doing so, God suffered like a Jewish mother in a gas chamber, or an African chained to a boat crossing the Atlantic, or a runaway teenager sold into the sex market. It didn’t stop any of those things from happening. History tells us it didn’t. But it changed God.

If there’s an atonement that happens on the cross, it’s not humanity being changed to appease an angry God, it is a God being changed by the hate of angry humans. When God absorbs into God’s being the worst that humans can do to each other, and when death finally happens in God, God has a resurrection reaction. God will not allow death and evil and sin to be the final word.
At this moment God finally becomes Emmanuel – God with us, which was promised in Matthew’s birth story. So, wherever life takes us, moments of wonder and beauty or even moments of terror and tragedy, God is with us. God has walked the pathway of the suffering and the oppressed. And when all of us walk into our final moments we walk into a pathway God has already crossed, we do not walk alone.

And a God who would leave the safety of the heavens above to do that with us, well, I believe that’s a God worth worshiping and one worth following with our lives.

Jesus became like us, that we might become like Christ. AMEN.