Category Archives: Atonement

The ‘Good thief’ and us

03 Saturday Apr 2021

Posted by in Atonement, Consequences, Lent

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This was Jessica’s post on NEO on Easter Saturday in 2013. @013 was a rather incredible year for our posts both her and on NE. For much of it, we were both posting every day, and doing perhaps the best posts we ever did. Most of what I posted this week is from the two of us Holy Week 2013 on NEO. Enjoy. Here’s Jess

Only St Luke carries the account of the conversation of Our Lord on the Cross with the two thieves. We know from his prologue that Luke collected information from many eye-witnesses. He is the only Gospel which contains accounts of Our Lady’s reaction to the news that she would bear the Saviour of the World, and it does not seem too fanciful to imagine that it was from the same source that this account of the last words of the Lord came.

One of them was the voice of this world. Even in his death agonies, he could find nothing better to do than to mock. But the other thief, whom tradition calls ‘Dismas’, was another matter. Christ ends by telling him that he will be with Him in Paradise that day. Do we stop to wonder why, or ask questions? After all, as Dismas himself admits, he deserves his punishment – he was a thief, a robber, a breaker of the law, and he acknowledged his sins. There is the first place he sets an example we could all follow. He admits his sins. He fears God and makes a clean breast of it. There are no ifs and buts, no ‘well, you see, it was society’s fault’; no, none of that; just the confession of a man who fears God’s wrath.

What else does this poor man do? He confesses Christ as Lord. Jesus is, he declares, innocent, and here Dismas bears a true witness; it is a good deed, perhaps the first for many years; but he does it. He also acknowledges who Jesus is by calling Him ‘Lord’. This confession is accompanied by an outpouring of faith, as he asks Jesus to remember him when He comes into His kingdom.

What humility and what faith do we see here?  If, as the Roman Centurion said, ‘Truly this man is the Son of God, then of Dismas we might say, ‘truly this man confessed Christ, repented and followed Him.’

Is that true of us?

The silence of the tomb

11 Saturday Apr 2020

Posted by in Atonement, Faith, Lent

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Pathways

 

It is the darkest time of the Christian Year. The silence of the tomb envelopes the crucified Jesus. The spear that pierced His side also pierced the heart of His mother; it was not just Jesus on the Cross who felt the pain of abandonment. To those who had watched and who had taken his broken body to the tomb, He was now beyond human emotions; but they were not.

Their loss was total: the hopes invested in His words and His person were dashed; it was over. We cannot reconstruct their state of mind, but from what the Bible tells us of the Disciples hiding away, we know they were afraid. Grief, mixed with fear, are bad partners. The death of Jesus was the death of hope. Peter, who had denied his Master after Gethsemene, John, to whom the Blessed Virgin had been entrusted, and the rest of the Disciples went into hiding; the one exception, Judas, hanged himself. It was over. There was only the silence of the tomb. Hope had dwindled. To get out of Jerusalem alive would have to suffice.

The grief of Mary can hardly be imagined. To have watched her beloved Son die in the cruellest manner was the latest of the sacrifices demanded of her by God; always she had abided by His will; but this was asking all she had. As she heard those words asking why God had abandoned Him, it is not fanciful to suppose that she must have empathised with her Son’s anguish. Silence was a relief from the tears and the fears; but every knock at the door, every hurried footstep would have reignited both.

For us, this year, there was neither a chance to kiss the Cross on Good Friday, nor any leaving the Church in silence. But there was plenty of fear, and being confined to the house. The usual rythmns of that day were absent. In that absence we were forced to find our own way of marking the day that hope seemed to die.

For my own part, I found the Stations of the Cross at Shrewsbury moving, as I did the service at St Bartholemew the Great in London, where Fr Marcus Walker had had the foresight to prepare something for the eventuality that the Church would be closed on Good Friday. The reflections offered by the Bishop of Oxford, Stephen Croft, I found especially useful in meditating on the mysteries of this time, not least these words from his reflection on Peter’s denial:

We come with our doubts and our betrayals and our denials. We come conscious that we may be tested and found wanting in the present crisis. We bring the darkness in our hearts and our love of darkness. We do our best to bring these things into the light: to open our lives afresh to the deep grace of God. We come remembering this Jesus who invites us into the light, offers his life that we might be forgiven, loves us beyond our understanding and longs to restore us in his service, however far we have fallen.

For we know, as Mary and the Disciples did not, what comes next. We know that the darkness did not extinguish the Light of the world; we know that if Hope had died, it was so He would rise again on the third day. He died that we might be forgiven. We are not commanded to believe. We are invited to believe. The choice is ours, and we can behave as Judas did, or we can follow the example of Peter. Both men betrayed their Lord; only one repented and believed.

Our failures and shortcomings can be laid at the foot of the Cross in the sure knowledge that God forgives those who confess their sins and restores those who are penitent. May our sins lie in the silence of that tomb, and may they die that we might rise with Him and be made whole.

Atonement: a Good Friday meditation

14 Friday Apr 2017

Posted by in Atonement, Easter, Faith

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It is not fashionable in polite Christian circles to talk about judgement. That, we are told, implies a God who is capable of wrath. In which case, one wonders what Good Friday is actually about? We know God is love, men say, and therefore He does not require a propitiation. God is love, says the Bible ,and therefore he provides a propitiation. To take away the notion that Christ is the propitiation for our sins is to empty the Bible of its import, and to rob Christ’s stoning sacrifice of meaning. As one author put it many years ago:

Nobody has any right to borrow the words ‘God is love’ from an apostle, and then to put them in circulation after carefully emptying them of their apostolic import. . . . But this is what they do who appeal to love against propitiation. To take the condemnation out of the Cross is to take the nerve out of the Gospel . . . Its whole virtue, its consistency with God’s character, its aptness to man’s need, its real dimensions as a revelation of love, depend ultimately on this, that mercy comes to us in it through judgment. (James Denney, The Second Epistle to the Corinthians, Expositor’s Bible, Hodder, 1894, p. 221f.)

The notion that God reacts to wickedness by in effect saying: ‘Oh well, don’t worry, I will love you and forgive you anyway’, belittles His love for us. What Father could be indifferent to the suffering of a child? Like the Father in the Parable of the Prodigal, God watches for us far off, ready to embrace us –  but first we must repent. That is what God is looking for. But the evil that sin has done needs to be redeemed, as we do, and so we get the supreme sacrifice this day marks.

On the first Good Friday, Jesus fulfilled the words of the prophet:

He was wounded for our transgressions
and bruised for our iniquities;
upon him was the punishment that brought us peace
and with his stripes we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
We have turned every one to his own way;
And YHWH has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
(Isaiah 53:5-6.)

Our sins were laid upon Him. As St. Paul told the Corinthians: For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.The author of Hebrews says: Therefore, in all things He had to be made like His brethren, that He might be a merciful and faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. St Peter tells us: For Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive by the Spirit. He died for our sins.

There are many theories of the atonement, but only we moderns have managed to pretend we don’t need it. It is sin which angers God, and in His love for us He sent Christ to bear our sins. Jesus is the fulfilment of God’s justice. ‘One died for all, therefore all died,’ he wrote in 2 Corinthians 5.14; and thus, seven verses later, ‘God made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin,’ he concluded seven verses later, ‘so that in him we might become the righteousness of God’ (5.21). And it is within that argument that we find the still deeper truth, which is again rooted  in the Old Testament: that the Messiah through whom all this would be accomplished would be the very embodiment of YHWH himself. ‘God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself’ (2 Corinthians 5.19).

Theories of the atonement may vary, but they have been there from the beginning. It is sin which arouses God’s wrath, and we have sinned. We can (and do) argue over who was saved in this way`, but I prefer the plain reading – Christ died for us all. He suffered there for you and for me – for all who will receive Him. Those who chose not to receve Him, well, they make their choice and must abide by it.

Good Friday is our day of Judgement before the Last. We who were lost are found, we who deserve naught but chastisement receive mercy, we are redeemed in that precious blood. We gaze with awe upon the Cross through which we have received salvation.

O Rex Gentium

22 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by in Advent, Atonement, Bible, Catholic Tradition, Faith

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O King of the nations, and their desire,
the cornerstone making both one

Come and save the human race,
which you fashioned from clay

With this, the sixth of the O Antiphons, we move from abstract attributes, as it were, to a human one – ‘King of the nations’. As usual with any attempt to use human comparisons to help us understand God, this one falls short – as they all must. But at the time when these Antiphons were composed, a King was one of the grandest people of whom anyone could conceive, and so it was natural to use it of God. Moreover, the Jews had long conceived of God as their special tribal God, one who would, for example, deliver them victory in battle over their enemies; the Psalms are full of such references. He is the King of Glory, before Him all the nations shall bow, and every tongue shall confess His holy name. All of this emphasises the grandeur of God – and even in so doing fails to capture all but a fraction of that.

One of the earliest objections to the message that the Messiah had already come, was the want of grandeur. He had come in the form of a mewling infant; He had been suckled at the breasts of a lowly maiden who had been suspected of becoming pregnant outside of marriage; His foster-father was a carpenter; He had foster-brothers or cousins who were of equally lowly status. Was it really from such a back-ground that a King could come? Israel had one example of such a king in the form of David, but he, at least had proved his prowess in battle. What was the great world to think of a king who had suffered the death of a criminal, and who had hung in agony on the cross? When one considers what the Jews had been expecting of the long-awaited Messiah, one sees precisely why so many of them were unwilling to accept Jesus as the Christ.

But Isaiah said that His form would have no beauty, and that He would be despised and rejected of men, so if the Jews had paid more attention to him, they would not, perhaps, have been as surprised as they were, something St John pointed out in his Gospel when he wrote: ‘These things Isaiah said when he saw His glory and spoke of Him’. Isaiah’s prophecy was accurate, he had been allowed to foresee that the King would be a servant-king, a suffering servant-king. He would not be some great warrior whose advent would allow the holy to wreak revenge on all those who had insulted them and their God. Instead He would be wounded for our transgressions, and He would be bruised for our iniquities. What earthly king would do that? The pagan cults were familiar with the idea of a temporary king being sacrificed for the tribe if, for example, the rains failed. But this was something altogether different. This was King who so loved His people that He suffered for them. This was a direct inversion of the world order; this was revolutionary. He came not to command, but because He loved, and He calls our love forth. He is not just a King, He is a creator, and He comes to die – and rise – that His creation should live with Him forever. Easy to see why sinful mankind has trouble with this concept. But all we need to do is to repent, amend our ways and follow.

O Lord of Nations, may we see thee more clearly and follow thee ever more closely that we may be refashioned to be worthy of the King whom we love and serve.

BuzzFeed’s hit piece on Chip and Joanna Gaines is dangerous (and annoying)

06 Tuesday Dec 2016

Posted by in Atonement, Church/State, Politics

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Chip and Joanna Gaines of HGTV’s “Fixer Upper” (HGTV)

Chip and Joanna Gaines of HGTV’s “Fixer Upper” (HGTV)

There was a hit piece published on Buzzfeed last week on Chip and Joanna Gaines last week. If you don’t know they are the hosts of one of HGTV’s house flipping shows. And no, I haven’t seen it, I no longer have cable (other than for the internet) and rarely watch TV. But the difference in this one is that the hosts are Evangelical Christians, and that was the point of attack. Here’s a bit from Brandon Ambrosino, writing in the Washington Post (yeah, I went , “Huh?” too).

I am currently planning my wedding, and I’ve never been happier. I believe that God brought me and Andy together and that God celebrates our love. I also believe that our marriage will offer a powerful testimony to skeptics that queer love can be God-honoring, and even sacramental.

I have heard from a few well-meaning Christian friends that they feel they can’t attend my ceremony. I think that’s silly, I think it’s theologically misguided, and it hurts me deeply because it makes it seem as if they care more about abstract principles than me, their friend and family member.

Still, I do not think these conservatives should be shamed or mocked. I do not think they should be fired. And I certainly do not think they should be the butt of a popular BuzzFeed article.

I’m referring to a non-story written by Kate Aurthur, published Tuesday on BuzzFeed. The piece starts off innocently enough by describing the success of Chip and Joanna Gaines, a husband-and-wife team whose series “Fixer Upper” is one of the most popular shows on HGTV. After pivoting to the religious beliefs of the Gaineses, and pointing out that they go to an evangelical church whose pastors oppose same-sex marriage, Aurthur then poses these questions:

“So are the Gaineses against same-sex marriage? And would they ever feature a same-sex couple on the show, as have HGTV’s ‘House Hunters’ and ‘Property Brothers’?”

The entire article is an elaborate exploration of that hypothetical question. And yes, it is very much hypothetical, by the reporter’s own admission: “Emails to Brock Murphy, the public relations director at their company, Magnolia, were not returned. Nor were emails and calls to HGTV’s PR department.”

But that does not stop Aurthur from writing almost 800 more words about the non-story. Her upshot seems to be: Two popular celebrities might oppose same-sex marriage because the pastor of the church they go to opposes same-sex marriage, but I haven’t heard one way or the other. (I can’t imagine pitching that story to an editor and getting a green light, by the way.) […]

BuzzFeed is probably at the forefront of discussions surrounding diversity in entertainment. But do their reporters think diversity refers only to skin color? Does ideological diversity count for nothing, especially when it is representative of, again, a sizable chunk of the American public? It’s hard to make the case that the website promotes this kind of diversity, particularly on same-sex marriage. In June, Ben Smith, the publication’s editor in chief, told Politico that “there are not two sides” on the issue.

via BuzzFeed’s hit piece on Chip and Joanna Gaines is dangerous – The Washington Post

Ok, ya all got that? There are not two sides to the question, so sit down and shut up, not to mention believe what we tell you to believe.

Well, guess what? A whole bunch of people say there are at least two sides to this question. Our churches (unanimously till about 15 minutes ago) have always believed and taught that marriage is between one man and one woman. A case can perhaps be made for SSM, civilly anyway, although I’m not going to, so don’t even go there with me. But the mainstream view is one man and one woman.

And you know what else? This supercilious, arrogant attempt to shut down the debate, that they created, is a good bit of why Donald Trump will be President. Because we all, any of us who disagree with the overly narrow left about anything, have simply had enough.

Decidedly true in America, in fact, you might even ask Kelloggs, who recently and ostentatiously pulled their advertising from Breitbart, and now is looking at a possible conservative boycott, or the failing network ESPN and it’s NFL franchise, or Target, and its frantic backtracking on bathroom policy.

A good many of us have simply decided to put our money where our mouth is, and you know, it works, not least because we are a 40% (at least) plurality of the country, and we’re not very happy lately. Vote with your feet, vote with your ballot, and yes, vote with your pocketbook. Remember this? So do we.

mad-as-hell

NT reading for the Feast of the Assumption

14 Sunday Aug 2016

Posted by in Atonement, Bible, Commentaries, Reading the BIble

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The Church in England and Wales marks today as the solemnity of the Assumption, so rather than giving the NT reading for the 20th Sunday in OT, year C, I give the one for this occasion

1 Corinthians 15:20-27

Ambrosiaster reminds us that in stating that Christ rose, Paul is refuting those false prophets who claimed Christ was never incarnate, so not having been born, could not rise again. The resurrection proves Christ was a man and able to merit, by his righteousness, the resurrection of the dead. Although he was, by nature life, he tasted death, St Cyril tells us, for the sake of us all; by his ineffable power he trampled on death in his own flesh that he might be the first born from the dead – he destroyed the power of death. He does not suffer in so far as he is viewed as God by nature, yet the sufferings of his flesh were according to the economy of the dispensation. For in what other way could he be the ‘first born of every creature’ and ‘of the dead’ unless the Word, being God, made his own flesh to suffer?

Athanasius teaches is that by the sacrifice of his own body, Jesus put an end to the law that was against us and made a new beginning of life for us, by the hope the the resurrection which he has given us. Since it was by man that death prevailed over us, so for this cause was the Word of God made man and through his sacrifice has cancelled the bond of death and destroyed its dominion over us. If the redeemer did not pay the price in his own flesh, St Basil tells us, then he could not have destroyed sin; we who had died in Adam could not have been raised in Christ unless Christ had truly been man.

This does not mean, St Augustine wrote in his City of God, that all who die in Adam will be raised in Christ, for not all will confess him, and those who do not will be punished for eternity by a second death. Adam died because he sinned, Ambrosiaster wrote in his commentary, and so it was only Christ, who was without sin, who could overcome death for us. We enter death through Adam, and eternal life through Christ alone. It is the rule of the devil and of death that Christ will destroy utterly, and the powers of hell will be nullified.

St Gregory of Nazianzus challenges anyone who interprets verse 25 as meaning Christ’s reign will have an end. Who, he asks, will bring that reign to an end? Who could? This is to mistake the meaning of the word ‘until’ (as some do with Matthew 1:25), which is not always exclusive of what comes after. What sane person would interpret Jesus’ saying “I am with you until the end of the World’ as meaning he could be with us thereafter?

Just as death was the first fruit of Adam’s sin and was the first sin to enter the world, so it will be the last to be destroyed, Chrysostom reminds us. Our new life begins by faith and is carried on, says Augustine, by hope, but the time will come when death shall be destroyed and we shall be changed and be like the angels; we have now mastered fear by faith, but then we shall have the mastery in love by vision. He takes upon himself our infirmities, and heal them through his love and his sacrifice.

In saying all things will be subject to the Father, Christ is not saying, as the Arian falsely taught, that he and the Father are not one, Theodoret of Cyr reminds us. They confuse two things – Christ’s humanity, which like all humanity will be subject to the Father, and his divinity, which is , of course, one with the Father

NT Readings 17th Sunday in OT Year C

24 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by in Atonement, Bible, Colossians, Commentaries, Faith, Reading the BIble, Salvation

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The Gospel reading for this Sunday can be found here along with a beautiful rendering of the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic.

The Epistle is St Paul to the Colossians 2:12-14

We are told by St Ambrose that our flesh could not eliminate sin unless it were crucified in Christ Jesus; he is crucified in us that our sins might be purged by him, he, who alone can forgive sins, nails to his Cross the handwriting that was against us.

Death, Augustine reminds us, is the common lot of all men, but for the believer it is a passage from corruption to incorruption, for baptised in Christ, we rise with him. For the Christian it is the death of vice and the awakening into virtue. The Gentiles were dead because they refused to receive the Law which had been given as a witness to God, and as a means of condemning vice. With Christ comes the forgiveness of sins. And Augustine reminds us that if we find these passing days, in which we recall his passion and resurrection with special devotion and solemnity exhilarating, then how much more blessed and blissful shall we find that eternal day which dawns when we see him face to face. What exultant joy will God give to his Church on that day.

Chrysostom discusses the nature of the debt we had to pay, which is that of Adam, for by eating of the fruit of the tree he and his successors forfeited God’s favour and the devil held them in bondage. It is from that bondage we are redeemed by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. But we need to see to it that we do not again become debtors to that old contract with Satan. Theodore of Mopsuestia thought the bond is the one we incurred by our inability to keep the whole of the Law, but says that once we pass through baptism the Law is not needed for our hearts will incline toward God.

St Ambrose reminds us that Christ was without sin, yet he took on himself the burden of our sin – he freed us from the bond of sin. The Cross is not the death of the Son of God, but of Sin, it is Sin which is nailed to the Cross.

The whole scheme of salvation is, Augustine wrote, one by which God became man for the sake of finding us and redeeming us. The bond of sin is obliterated in the Saviour’s blood. In him and through him we are saved.

Gospel, 4th Sunday in Lent, Year C

06 Sunday Mar 2016

Posted by in Atonement, Commentaries, Faith, Lent, Reading the BIble, St Luke's Gospel

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Luke 15:1-3, 11-32

St Cyril of Alexandria notes the way in which the Pharisees fail to understand the nature of Jesus and of his mission; he came to save all, and the Pharisees sought to close the gates of heaven to all but those like them. They were outraged at his gentleness with and love for sinners; they looked for sharp rebukes and scolding – but in the story of the son that was lost and was found, Christ gives a true picture of what the love of God means; sinful, prideful men like the Pharisees found this a scandal – their God was of their own hearts, not the God who sent His Son to save sinners. When a sinner repents, that is all that is needed – and we are to rejoice and without reservation.

The Fathers saw several interpretations attaching to the two sons. St Cyril thought that the elder son represented the holy angels, and the prodigal the human race; but he notes that others thought the elder son the Jews, and the younger the Gentiles.

St Ambrose notes that the Father is full of generosity, and lets the son have his request – but it is the son who squanders what he was given, wastes a fine inheritance on the tawdry rewards of this world which, when the times become hard, will not sustain him. Augustine notes that to be in the realms of lustful passion is the same as to be in the realm of darkness – far, far away from the face of God. Ambrose notes that the famine is a famine also of goodness, of good deeds and of the wisdom of God. The younger son attaches himself to a patron of this world, but his reward is that of this world – barren and without nourishment.

Peter Chrysologus comments that the fate of the son is that of all who desert God’s grace for the rewards of this earthly life – fleeing from a generous provider, he ends by wallowing in dirt and endures a severe judgment.

Philoxenus of Mabbug noted that in spite of all his sin, he did not lose the honourable title of son – and though he felt unworthy and a sinner, he still called God his father – so the Grace of the Spirit had not departed from him. We, too, call God Father through the Grace of the Spirit.

St Ambrose commented that the son acknowledged he had sinned against heaven and the Father; that confession brings Christ to intercede for the sinner, and that intercession produces pardon. He acknowledges his manifold sins and wickedness and confesses he is not fit to be called son – he will be content to be a servant. But those who humble themselves before God will be raised – and the Father sees him a long way off and has always loved him and now rejoices that he was lost is found, he who was sunk in sin is now risen from the dirt – and the son is freed from the yoke of sin. The Father kisses and welcomes him, he imposes no penances, demands no restitution – the love of God to the repentant sinner is absolute and without qualification. Blessed are those whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered. (Romans 4:7).

What love is this, St Athananius asks? It is the divine love beyond all expression, which rings out a pean of praise in heaven over the one sinner saved. The sinner is restored through the love of Christ, love that endured the pains of the Cross for our sake – the robe (everlasting life) is restored, and the ring, the symbol of fidelity to the Spirit, is placed again on his finger. Corruption is replaced by incorruption – and joy is unconfined because the beloved who was lost, has been found.

But the elder son, the representative of those who believe the Law saves, cannot rejoice. He knows the letter of what the Law prescribes for such a sinner before his repentance can be accepted, and he is scandalised that, as he sees it, his unworthy brother is so easily restored. But God, who alone knows all things, is the only Just Judge, and his reasoning is as high above ours as the angels are above our earthly lives. The elder brother is proud, and in his pride, honours the letter but fails to understand the Spirit. It is a hard saying for those who think they are righteous, that the love of God forgives all who repent – like the Pharisees at the beginning of the reading, they are scandalised at the company Jesus keeps.

The Faith once received?

19 Tuesday Jan 2016

Posted by in Atonement, Faith

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Rich young ruler Heinrich Hoffman 1889

As someone who is neither a Catholic nor an Anglican, and whose local chapel consists of about sixty of us on a normal Sunday morning and about forty in the evening, it may be I ought to concentrate on my own communion and stay out of other folk’s business, but since that would make my contributions to this place even more boring than they otherwise are, I tend to comment more widely – and not least because all Christians live in the same context in the West – that of a society in which religion seems to matter less and less to those in power, except in so far as it might involve folk killing others on the streets of London or elsewhere. It is that same society which provides the atmosphere in which we live, move and have our being. Once it was amenable to Christianity, now it is less so. Christianity has always been very good at adapting, which is one of the reasons it has lasted so long and spread globally, but reading Jessica’s excellently argued accounts of recent proceedings in her own Church, and reflecting on the concerns of my Catholic colleagues here, it strikes me that there are some dangers here.

At the heart of the Christian message is a call to repent. That means facing up to the inescapable fact we are sinners. No one likes being called a sinner, and so when I read that the Episcopalians who recognise same-sex marriage are saying they can’t repent because they don’t consider it a sin, I hear not just the clamant message of a single-issue pressure group, I think I hear a wider societal response. Several times here folk have asked about ‘love’ and why some of us seem to react to the word in a way that is less than the warm, pink, fuzzy feeling that seems to be mandatory? There is sometimes, in that questioning, an implication that we are reacting thus because in some way we lack love, and I’m not sure that, certainly in my own case, there isn’t something there. I grew up at a time and in a place when men were expected to keep stiff upper lips and where overt displays of emotion were frowned upon, so I daresay I am not overly inclined to talk about love. That said, there’s something else here, and it is summed up in the words ‘cheap grace’.

Jesus did not die upon the Cross for anything else except to save us from our sins; he, who was without sin, became sin so that in him it could be destroyed so that we, by embracing him, should have life and have it in abundance. It is not a lack of ‘love’ which makes me suspicious when I hear this sin and that sin and the other sin dismissed as culturally condition, it is the feeling that what is really going on here is an attempt to downplay sin until it hardly exists. I don’t now what religion this is, but it isn’t the ‘faith once received’.

That’s not saying that Christianity is a miserable religion which tells everyone is a sinner and we’re all worms, it is saying that Christianity is a joyful religion which tells everyone that they are a sinner and they are redeemed and forgiven by Christ’s blood. If you don’t believe in sin, if you don’t believe you are fallen, then why would you need a redeemer? If you don’t need redeeming, you don’t need Jesus, so you can get an extra few hours in bed on a Sunday morning, have your Sunday evening for watching TV, and all will be well in the afterlife because God loves you. That is false teaching, it is dangerous teaching, and it will lead souls to hell.

What’s false about it? Isn’t God love? Yes he is. He is so much love that it was out of love for us he hung and suffered on the Cross at Calvary. That was not so we could go through our lives doing as we please without regard for the consequences. We are redeemed from the consequences, but there is a price for us too. It is not a big one, but for us all it can be expensive – we are to turn from sin and embrace God. Not because we are scared of him, but because, having received his love, we return it in repentance and obedience. That is love.

Honest doubt

24 Tuesday Nov 2015

Posted by in Atonement, Bible, Faith

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 jesus-on-the-cross
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds
So wrote old Tennyson in In Memoriam, a poem I doubt many now read. When they did, it was the fashion of some to quote these lines as though Tennyson himself approved of such a position, but no honest reading of it can support that line, as it goes on to describe the way in which the poet overcame his doubts. But it is natural that from time to time men should have their doubts – and so when the Archbishop of Canterbury confesses that he had his doubts about the presence of God after the Paris massacres, that should occasion neither surprise nor criticism – though it has done both. His own view in his own words can be found here, and should be read before anyone casts aspersions.
What is called ‘theodicy’ – the question of why bad things happen to good people, has perplexed us all from time to time, I should guess. Chalcedon passed this on to me from one of his sons, who is a Pastor in Stoke, and it seems to me to answer the question of how we should react pretty well:
So what do we say? We go to the cross, first of all, where God is most present IN the suffering and dying one. And we go to the empty tomb, where we see the victory of God. Then we go to the end of this story, to the Second Advent, and the day of God’s Judgement of the world. Yes, there are times when this world’s evil causes doubts, and our response must be to fight those doubts, and overcome them by the Cross.
Hard to beat that, I think.
Christ knew this world’s keenest woes, and he took them upon himself that our sins should be remitted. But he could not drive out of this world the stain or original sin, nor could he save us, in this world, from its consequences. So, bad things will happen, not because of God, but because of sin – our sin and the sinfulness of others. There is one remedy only, and that is in the Cross of Christ. If you doubt it, then ask where else a remedy is to be had? Save for Christ, there is none. There can be the dulling of it all by indulgence in sin which will soon take our minds off what ails us – only to leave us with a spiritual hangover of immense proportions. Sin is sin and it means to destroy us. The evil deeds of ISIS come from where all evil originates – the devil who encompassed our fall. Salvation comes from where it has always come from – the name of Jesus. In him alone are we made righteous, and in him alone do we have eternal life. As Paul tells us:
3 And not only that, but we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance; 4 and perseverance, character; and character, hope. 5 Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.