Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 12, 2005

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

There is a question about one of the fundamental beliefs of the Christian faith that keeps recurring among us. I have preached on it many times, and you, quite properly, keep asking me about it. That question is: What does it mean when we say that Jesus Christ died for us? I want to talk about that question some more this morning. I know that for some of you no answer will be sufficient. I know that for some of you the whole notion that Christ had to and did die for us is distasteful at best and barbaric at worst, and that’s OK. I am not here to tell you that you must believe that Christ died for us. That’s not how we do it in this church. Still, the confession the Christ died for us is, historically speaking, a central part of the Christian faith, and its meaning is a puzzle for many of us. So bear with me this morning as I attempt to shed at least some light on the question.

But before I do let me repeat what I’ve said many times here before: I do not accept the classical theory of atonement that says, in the words of the old hymn, "only He was good enough to pay the price for sin." I do not believe that Jesus died because God required His death as a sacrifice before God could forgive human sin. I know that that medieval theory has become virtually synonymous with the Christian faith in the popular mind in America today and in many of our churches. Yet that theory is in fact not synonymous with Christianity. I and a great many other Christians both liberal and Orthodox reject it. It does not speak to me, and I cannot accept its implications about the nature of God. So please try to hear what I have to say without filtering it through that legalistic and overly mechanical theory.

To get at a different understanding of what it might mean to say that Christ died for us I want to take you back to the first days, weeks, months, and years after the crucifixion of Jesus. One uncontestable historical fact is that the movement he started did not end when the Roman Empire executed him as a political criminal. His movement lived on after his death, unlike the movements of many other would-be Messiahs of first century Judea whose movements quickly died after the Romans executed them the same way it executed Jesus. Why didn’t the Jesus movement die with its founder? Well, I can sure tell you one thing that is not part of the reason it lived on. It didn’t live on because Jesus’ followers had a well-developed, thoroughly thought out and convincing theology about him and his death. They didn’t, but more importantly even if they had, a sophisticated theology in and of itself would not have keep the Jesus movement alive. Theology is important, but the history of the Jesus movement shows us that for faith something else is far more important. The first Christians didn’t have much of a theology, not at first; but they had something far more important. They had their experience. They had their experience of Christ as risen from the grave. They had their experience that in some way they couldn’t every very well explain Jesus Christ was their true Lord and the Caesars of the world were not. And they had their experience that Jesus Christ died for them. They felt it in their bones. They knew it, even if they couldn’t very well explain it. Jesus Christ died for them. His unjust death in agony on a cross somehow was for them, somehow changed everything for them and indeed for all of creation. As much as anything else, that experience, that conviction in the depths of their souls, kept the Jesus movement alive and launched it on its way to becoming one of the world’s great religious traditions.

Paul’s letter to the Romans was probably written in the middle of the sixth decade of the first century of the common era, around the years 56 or 57 CE, or about 30 to 35 years after the death of Jesus. That makes it not the earliest witness to the Christian tradition but still a very early one, at least10 to 15 years before the earliest of the canonical Gospels, the Gospel of Mark. And in that early Christian letter we find expressed quite definitively the early Christian experience that Jesus’ death was for us. In the passage we heard this morning Paul says: "For while we were still weak, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed rarely will anyone die for a righteous person....But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us." Paul had the experience, he knew in his heart, that Christ died for him, for us. Paul’s theology can be quite opaque and at times seem even self-contradictory, but one thing is perfectly clear. Paul knew that Christ died for us. And he knew that Christ’s death for us had something to do with God’s love for us: "But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us." Out of God’s love for us God’s Son Jesus Christ gave his own life for us.

Now traditional Christian thinking about what Christ’s death for us means, how we are to understand it, usually has something to do with sin. Clearly Paul’s conception of it did, for he says: "While we still were sinners Christ died for us." Paul highlights how remarkable this is by saying that rarely will we humans die even for a righteous person, but God in Jesus Christ died for us despite our total lack of righteousness. God died for us despite the fact that from a human perspective we aren’t really worth dying for. And before we move on, note what Paul does not say here. He does not say that Christ had to die because we were sinners. He says only that Christ died for us while we still were sinners. Big difference. Keep it in mind.

Traditional Christian thinking about what it means to say that Christ died for us focuses on us and what it supposedly says about us. The traditional Christian understanding, at least in Western Christianity, is that Christ died for us precisely because we are sinners. Christ’s death for us has been taken over the centuries as an indication more than anything that we are indeed miserable wretches whose sin is so profound that God can forgive us only by becoming human in Jesus and dying for us. But the interesting thing in our passage this morning is that when Paul talks about Jesus dying for us he doesn’t point so much to what it says about us as to what it says about God. That Jesus died for us proves not something about us but something about God: "God proves his love for us" by coming in the person of Jesus and dying for us. Douglas John Hall, the theologian I quote so often up here, puts it this way. Jesus death of the cross, he says, is

first of all a statement about God, and what it says is not that God thinks humankind so wretched that it deserves death and hell, but that God thinks humankind and the whole creation so good, so beautiful, so precious in its intention and its potentiality, that its actualization, its fulfillment, its redemption is worth dying for.

That God’s Son Jesus Christ would die for us makes sense only if God so loved the world so much that God would die for it. That’s Paul’s point in our Romans passage. The death of Jesus for us has to do not so much with us as with the fact that God really loves us. When we say Christ died for us, we are saying more than anything else that God loves us. You don’t need a complex soteriology-that’s a four bit word for a theology of how salvation works-to get this. Paul didn’t really have one, and most of the other early Christians sure didn’t. What they had was the gut level knowledge that Jesus died for them, and they knew that that meant God loved them very much indeed. So I don’t think we really need much more than this to answer the question of what it means to say Christ died for us. Christ died for us because God loves us, and he died for us to prove to us that love. You don’t die for someone you don’t love. We, most of us who have children, would die for our children, and even do it gladly if it would save them. We, most of us, would not very willingly die for people we don’t know or don’t like, not even if it would save them. Christians have known from the very beginning that Christ died for us. In that knowledge we know that God loves us, loves us very much indeed, loves us beyond the measure of our worth, loves us even if it costs God’s own life.

And that, my friends, is salvation. As the Gospel of John says: "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life." John 3:16 (KJV) God’s love for us to the point of dying for us is our salvation. Because in Jesus’ death for us we see how much God loves us we are reconciled by that death with God. Because in Jesus’ death for us we see how much God loves us we can live as God’s beloved creatures, the whole, complete creatures God created and intends us to be. We can live as people reconciled with God. We can live as people reconciled with one another. We can live as people with the courage to struggle for peace everywhere in the world and for justice for all people. We can live as people whose mission it is to embody God’s love for us in the world, to share that love with the world and to make that love known to the world. Because we know that Jesus died for us, we know that we are saved, freed, and empowered to do God’s will in the world.

So, what does it mean to say that Jesus died for us? It means God loves us. It means that God is indeed a God for the likes of us, loves the likes of us enough to die for, and that means everything. There is more I could say about what it means. I’ve said a lot of it here before. I could spin a more complex theology around the question of what it means to say that God died for us. I’ve done it before and I’ll probably do it again. But today I suggest just this: Take a lesson from those earliest Christians. Know in the depths of your heart that Christ died for you, and know that Christ’s dying for you means that your are a beloved child of God, loved beyond measure, loved beyond all reason. Know it. Feel it. Live it. Share it with the whole world. We can, relying on the grace of God. Amen.