"For Us."

Romans 5:6-8

April 10, 2022 + Palm/Passion Sunday

I.

The idea that “Christ died for our sins” is basic to Christianity, and important for us to understand as we head into Holy Week.  This “for us” character of Jesus’ death is fundamental to what it means to be a Christian.  Somehow what Christ did he did for us.  

But what does that really mean, to say that “Christ died for us”?  The word “for” is very vague and can mean many things.  My dictionary lists 34 meanings of the word “for” in English.  In the original Greek the word is “‘υπερ,” which is a preposition that can mean “on behalf of,” “in the place of,” “with reference to,” or “on account of.”  Its oldest and deepest meaning, however, is “over.”  From ‘υπερ we get the English prefix hyper-.  Someone who is hyperactive is overly active; hypertension is when blood pressure is above what is normal; if you are hypersensitive you are highly-sensitive.  

  You may have noticed that when I read the passage I did so in this hyper-literal way.  How does that change our understanding?  "Over" can also mean different things, including "because of" or "on account of," as when we say don't get angry or upset "over" something.  To say “Christ died over our sins” with this intent might infer that our sins caused his death.  He died because of us.  This is not hard to imagine.

Humans of every time tend to commit the same sins.  Even if we did not personally commit them, others committed the same sins.  The sins of the religious and political leadership of Rome and Jerusalem, are no different from sins of the dominant system of our time.  And if we are at all honest, we must admit that had we been in the position of the scribes, Pharisees, and priests, or of the Roman authorities, we would certainly have used the same reasoning to do the same thing to Jesus that they did.  

I say this with some certainty because we still do the same kinds of things, using the same reasoning, causing the suffering and death of innocent people all over the world.  We show all the time that we agree with Caiaphas the High Priest who said, “It is better... to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed."  We still reserve to ourselves the right to decide who gets to die to preserve our vision of the way things should be... which is always closely related to what serves our interests.  How many Iraqis, Afghanis, Vietnamese, and so forth, had to die for us?  How many Americans do we in effect sacrifice in various ways to supposedly maintain our way of life, whether it be in industrial accidents, police violence, car crashes, or in the military?   We might even add heart disease, diabetes, and drug overdoses to the things we are willing to put up with rather than change our behavior.  How many lives might we have saved if our nation did a better job keeping the Covid restrictions?

We continue to do the same things Pilate and Caiaphas did.  Christ dies over what they did, and people continue to die unjustly because we underwrite and approve of the same things.  Therefore, when we say “Christ died over our sins,” we literally mean that our sins resulted in his death.  On Thursday night we will sing a hymn with the line “‘Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied you; I crucified You.”        

II.

If that were all it meant to say that “Christ died for our sins,” our main response might be guilt and self-punishment.  Not to say that this isn’t a major component of the way we Christians have talked about Jesus’ death over the centuries, but this can’t be all it means.  Guilt only goes so far.  Clearly, when we say Christ died for us, we also imply that there is some benefit that we gain by his death.

Indeed, we confess and affirm that we gain salvation, forgiveness, acceptance, new life, and even union with and in God, in and through Jesus’ death.  How does this happen?  How does Jesus’ dying ‘υπερ, over, or “for” us, accomplish this?      

The theological doctrine concerned with the meaning of Jesus’ death “for us” is called the atonement.  For nearly a thousand years the Western church has often thought about the atonement in terms of a payment Christ made in his own blood to satisfy God’s absolute and retributive justice.  This view of the matter is so common that most Western Christians assume it is the only way to talk about the atonement.  According to this approach, “for us” means “instead of us,” or "as a substitutionary gift to us."  The idea is that Christ endured the just punishment of an angry God in our place, taking on himself the punishment we deserved.  Now that God’s righteous wrath has been absorbed and placated, the theory goes, there is no barrier to our being reconciled to God.  We get into heaven because Jesus sacrificed his life for us, in our stead.

Unfortunately, this model has more to do with the feudal context of St. Anselm, who dreamed up this way of putting things in the 11^th century.  We have managed to read the Bible through this lens for a thousand years, even though it bears very little resemblance to the ways the atonement is actually expressed in the Bible.

        Contrary to this view, the God revealed in Jesus Christ is known for boundless love and radical forgiveness.  Think of the absurdly gracious Father in the story of the Prodigal Son.  The God whom Jesus reveals does not have a rigid sense of honor that can only be satisfied by the infliction of punitive suffering.  Other ancient near-eastern deities demanded blood as the price of their favor.  The God we see in Jesus does not.  People draw down catastrophe on themselves by their disobedience, which Paul refers to as "wrath," but this is not God's will.  God is always hoping we will stop hurting ourselves, and each other, and come home.

     In the Hebrew Scriptures, which are the basis for Christian thought, when God does ask for blood sacrifices, it is not to appease or satisfy God’s wrath or buy God’s favor.  Rather it serves to offer back to God what belongs most clearly to God: the life of the animal.  For the Hebrews, blood means life.  Paul makes this connection explicit in verse 10, where he says we are saved by Christ's life.  

When the blood of the lamb is spread on the doorways of the Israelites in Egypt, it is the life of the lamb displayed as a sign of God’s protection of the people against judgment, condemnation, and death.  And the Day of Atonement ritual, when the blood of one goat is sprinkled in and around the Temple, it is not a matter of appeasing God's wrath.  Rather, it restores the purity of the Temple, both protecting it from the effects of the people’s sin and reestablishing the connection between the people and God.  The sin itself is not somehow “paid for” in blood or pain, but loaded on the head of the other goat (the “scapegoat”) which is not punished, let alone killed, but sent away into the wilderness.  

III.

The Hebrew word for atonement is kippur.  And this word means “cover,” “recover,” “cover again,” or “repair a torn or broken covering.”  Atonement, then, has to do with covering something.  This is not so much to hide what is covered, but to protect it or to make it shine.  As we might protect and enhance a silver plate by polishing it, or ourselves from the sun by covering our skin with sunscreen.  It is analogous to the Earth's atmospheric covering which both protects us from, and makes beneficial, solar radiation that would otherwise make the planet uninhabitable.

The relationship in English between the words “over” and “cover” is obvious.  A cover goes over something else.  Thus both ‘υπερ and kippur reflect a relationship of one thing over, or covering, another.

On the cross, Jesus is lifted up and dies ‘υπερ us, over us, literally hanging above the heads of the witnesses who gathered around.  At the same time and in the same action, his blood, which is to say his life, covers us, kippurs us, symbolically and figuratively, spiritually and imaginatively.  It protects us and separates us from evil and death like the blood of the slaughtered lamb protects the Israelites during the Exodus.  It also restores us and the whole creation to wholeness like the blood of the the Day of Atonement ritual restores the sanctity of the Temple.  His blood, representing his life, the very life of God and at the same time the true life of humanity, becomes the conducting element, spread out over us, connecting us to God.

Since his blood is his life, we are led to reflect as well on the character of that life: what he does, how he behaves, what he says, the quality of his relationships, what he commands his disciples to do.  His blood covers us when we participate in his life by doing as he does.  We are therefore saved when we realize and reflect and express his life in our actions. 

 

IV.

When we sing, "wash me in his precious blood," as we will later, as gross and even horrifying as that may sound, it really means that his life cleanses and purifies us, revealing the true humanity we share with Christ, freeing us to obey him and act according to the justice, compassion, equality, peace, and joy he exemplifies and embodies.  It is an image of baptism, in which we emerge from the symbolic death of our old selves with new life, his life, God's life, empowered and enabled to live as Christ lives and do as he does.    

This is why we regularly and frequently share in Christ's body and blood in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.  When we take in his blood we take into ourselves this connectivity and this receptivity to life, which then permeates every cell of our bodies.  What was over us, covering us, is taken into us and becomes part of us.  Now it sort of covers us from within, which is where the real danger comes from anyway.  His life is ours, within and without, expressed in our actions in his service.

So when we say things like “Christ died for us,” “Christ died for our sins,” Christ freed us from our sins “by his blood,” or even “he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities,” we are saying that by the death of Christ the whole creation is covered by God’s protective and energizing grace over us.  Sin and death no longer have any power over us other than what we choose, out of our fear, blindness, and ignorance, to give them.  Christ’s blood, his life, now intervenes, separating us from violence and injustice, sin and death, fear and anger; his blood is now like a coating of adhesive, uniting us, even every cell of us, to God.

With this blood, this life, over us, covering us, and being expressed in our lives of discipleship, witness, and service, our existence cannot be dominated by the corrupt and destructive rules of secular power.  Under his blood, by his life, we cannot rationalize or justify our actions by the standards of fear, anger, violence, and sin.  

Covered now by his life, the pure love of God may shine fully into our lives, freeing us to live according to his life: characterized by peace and love, goodness and truth, forgiveness and grace, kindness and compassion, faithfulness and hope, justice and righteousness, knowledge, peace and love, that we may perfectly love God and each other, that we may worthily magnify God’s holy name, and walk in beauty forever, together, in Jesus Christ. 

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