John 1: 1-18

Acts 9: 1-19

At Easter, some churches hold liturgies called the Stations of the Cross. This involves the practice of using key events in the final hours of Jesus’ life as a structure for prayer and meditation. These meditations may centre on a series of paintings or stained-glass windows that depict the events, from Jesus’ condemnation by Pilate to his crucifixion. Sometimes texts are read out also as a way of bringing the events to mind.

Today I offer these three readings as stations of the cross. They do not depict the actual events of Jesus’ condemnation and death, but are each a station on the road to an understanding of atonement that is freed from God-ordained violence. Atonement has to do with God’s reconciliation with humanity, with how God put right what had gone wrong because of human sin. Central to the atonement is Jesus’ death on the cross. Although the atonement is more than that, Jesus’ death is its focus, and it raises problems for peace-makers and peace-lovers because his death was so violent. What then, do we make of it? In particular, did God require Jesus’ violent death to atone for our sins? If so, is not God, then, violent at heart?

My topic for today is ‘unpicking atonement’s knots’. By that I mean the knots that tie our theories of atonement so tightly and tenaciously to violence, a blood sacrifice required by God to deal with human sin. Can our understanding of atonement perhaps instead undermine the assumption that God needed this death to make us acceptable to God? Might it not subvert the view altogether that God is violent?

I would like to respond to these questions by standing before each reading like a station that we visit for a while, meditating on the text. Our focus will be on the question of violence, and whether violence needs to be tied to justice, righteousness, holiness and therefore, atonement. The way I see it, there is a gradual unpicking of the knot that ties atonement to violence following the trajectory of these texts that we have today, from Numbers, through John and into the road to Damascus story in Acts. Let us spend a little time, then, at each of these stations.

First, the reading from Numbers 25. This is not a very pleasant reading to be dwelling in for long, so I will focus on the points I want to bring to your attention. First, it is the Lord, whose wrath was kindled, who orders that the chiefs of Israel be impaled in the sun for their sin. The chiefs were held responsible for the people of Israel turning away from the Lord, so they were sacrificed in place of all of Israel who deserved the same treatment. This terrible act was justified in the story as a form of justice, an expression of God’s righteousness, a payment for sin. Within this, Phinehas took it upon himself, in his zeal for the Lord, to impale an Israelite and his Midianite woman. Again, this is cast as a righteous act, and as an act of atonement that appeased God, stopped the plague and saved the people.

Phineahas was invited into God’s covenant of peace. Here, peace was purchased through violence. And the violence was Phinehas’s, as a lesser violence that stopped the greater violence which was God’s. Phinehas had protected the people against God. Phinehas became a legend. Ps 106: 28-31 reads:

The only other person who had righteousness reckoned unto him was Abraham – and that was for faithfully believing in the promise of a child. In 1 Maccabees 2:50-54, Phinehas was among the ancestors remembered as having zeal for the law. Abraham was remembered for his faithfulness, Phinehas for being ‘deeply zealous’ for God and for God’s law.

This is one of the views of God in the Old Testament, a God who rules through violent means, and those means are justified as God’s justice and righteousness in the face of human sin. It is a punitive view of justice, though, and it is in contrast to other interpretations of God in the Old Testament. The prophets may have predicted doom, but they also gave wonderful visions of peace that are God’s desire for human life and for this planet. Humble, simple goodness and kindness are what God requires of us, according to Micah (6:8). This is what God’s justice and righteousness mean, though for the prophets this vision is still usually accompanied by God’s divine justice in the form of punishment and destruction.

So we find in the Old Testament visions of peace, but conflicting views as to how much this ‘peace’ justifies God’s acts of violence. We do not have just one view presented. We have a conflict of interpretations and it remains unresolved by the time we get into the New Testament texts. Let us then turn to the reading from John and see if it can shed any light on the matter.

We stand now at our second station. One of the reasons I chose this text was for the final verse: John 1:18. This says: ‘No one has ever seen God; it is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known’ (NRSV). Jesus, God’s Son, makes God known. The Greek word here is ‘exegete’. If you decide to study theology at, say, St Mark’s National Theological Centre, and you enrol in a biblical studies subject with, say, Jeanette Mathews, you will learn how to exegete biblical texts. That is, you would learn the art of interpretation. Exegesis means interpretation. So Jesus interprets God.

We have come to this text from a conflict of interpretations in the Old Testament. The conflict continues into the New, leading ultimately to Jesus’ death. But here, in the opening chapter of this Gospel, John makes very clear that the criteria for knowing and understanding God is Jesus, the Word become flesh. Everything else has to be interpreted through him if we are to get God right.

Let’s see then if there are other clues in this text for interpreting the violence attributed to God in at least some traditions of the Old Testament. It is here that we start to unpick the knots that tie atonement to violence as God’s justice, righteousness and holiness.

There are three clues in John 1 that interpret God as being utterly without violence. The first is that God is light, and Jesus is proclaimed as the light of the world. In the letter of 1 John 1:4 it states this more thoroughly: ‘God is light and in him there is no darkness at all’. It is not that sometimes God is a source of light and sometimes a source of darkness. The sun gives out light and only light and can do no other. So God is light.

Violence belongs to the darkness. It is a mark of a fallen world. In Gen 6:11, as God looks down upon the earth and is sorry that he had made it all, he decides to send the flood. This was because, ‘the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and behold, it was filled with violence’. So violence belongs to the fall, not to the original, good creation, nor to God, who is light. Through Jesus, we have come to understand that God’s good presence is like light that dispels darkness and heals it, as Jesus healed the blind. We are assured in John 1 that although the darkness has power, it has not overcome the light. God is light and in him there is not darkness at all.

The second and third clues in this text are in verse 14: ‘And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us full of grace and truth’. ‘Grace’ and ‘truth’. As John explains in v17, the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. Remember how Phinehas was zealous for God and for the law? Now we are given a new understanding of God, that zealousness, whatever else it might mean, will be full of grace. Any zeal manifesting itself in violence, is not zeal for the God of Jesus Christ. Interpreted through Jesus, God is light and grace. What about ‘truth’? What does it mean that Jesus is the truth?

I would not pretend to know fully what this means, but I do have a strong feeling that it is not to do with scientific proofs and intellectual arguments. John speaks of Jesus as being full of grace and truth. It has to do with his being, who he was, how he lived and loved, as an authentic expression of his person. There was no lie or deceit in him. He did not talk about grace and truth, and then act differently. Rather, he embodied them.

When we are acting authentically, true to our god-given nature as children of God and images of God, we will reflect our original goodness. We do struggle in this, and we are marred by sin in the world and in our own hearts. But the Word became flesh so that we may believe in him as the Son of God, the true child of God, and become again children of God ourselves – lovers of the light, of grace and of goodness. Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, and this is in contrast to Phinehas’s way of having faith in God.

So, at this second station we have discerned that God, revealed through Jesus, is not a God of violence, vengeance and divine punishment. Jesus came as the good shepherd to show us the way home, to bring us back to our true selves as children of God. Through knowing God as light, grace and truth, we have managed to unpick some knots that have tied atonement to violence and punishment, and instead free it up as a much more graceful reality.

Our third station is the story of Paul, then Saul, on the road to Damascus. Saul had been breathing threats and murder against the disciples of Jesus. Saul was a later-day Phinehas. He had zeal for God and for the law, and these disciples were following a blasphemer, one who was crucified for breaking the law, and therefore cursed. That was how Saul saw it. His violence was justified because he was following the law that God had given Moses. And, as Paul later pointed out, the law says ‘cursed be everyone who hangs on a tree’ (Gal 3:13).

But Saul, to his amazement, was confronted on the road to Damascus with Jesus – the one who suffered and died from the same zealousness that Saul had been enacting. Saul came face-to-face with the victim of his violence and his former enemy, and in that encounter he began to see that his persecution had killed the Son of the God he was worshipping. How could that have been? How could he have got it so wrong?

Saul was blinded by this vision and realisation. He was so confused by it that he had to be lead by the hand and shown the way. He was also thrown by Jesus’ gracefulness in the encounter. Saul was not condemned or punished, but called and forgiven.

What I like about this story is that when Ananias came to Saul and laid his hands on him, praying that he may be filled with the Holy Spirit and regain his sight, it says that the ‘scales fell from his eyes’. He could see again, but see differently. God is light, and God heals and overcomes darkness and blindness. Saul now saw with the eyes of the Holy Spirit, and his heart was changed. He saw that he had totally misunderstood God. Now, he switches allegiances. While previously he was aligned with those who persecuted Jesus, now he aligns himself with Jesus, the victim of human and religious violence.

Though Jesus, Saul understood God as light, grace and truth. From then on he preached that Jesus was the Son of God and the revealer of God. He preached Christ crucified, meaning that God took upon himself human violence in order to illuminate from within, the darkness of the human heart. In contrast to that, God is shown as much bigger-hearted and more graceful than anything that we human beings do by way of hurting and destroying each other.

What enables me to get this point, and never ceases to astound me, is Jesus in his post-resurrection appearances. After all that he had been though, he returns to his disciples and greets them with, ‘Peace be with you’. That very greeting is an embodying of grace and forgiveness. In the Gospel of John it is repeated three times, ‘Peace be with you’. This, for me, is the final untying of any notion of violence from the heart of God. There was no hint of judgement or punishment or vengeance. God’s heart is much larger than that.

There are many theories of atonement, some of which teach that God needed Jesus to be a sacrifice for our sin, to die in our place for we all deserved to be condemned. I have offered a different view today, though only hinted at it – that atonement, as reconciliation, brings us into a new relationship with God and recreates us as new people, a new creation. This goes for individuals and for Christian communities. But theories of atonement will never bring us to this point of decision, of being undone, as Saul was, knowing our own blindness and finding that when our eyes are opened by the Holy Spirit, we see differently – we see instead with our renewed hearts.

I have been using the phrase, ‘unpicking atonement’s knots’. This is the name of a chapter by James Alison in his book, On Being Liked. There he argues that although we have to do the work of unpicking these knots, in the end atonement is not about getting the right theory or argument. Rather, atonement can only be known by undergoing it, by ourselves being reconciled to God. It means knowing that we cannot be our true selves without God, knowing God’s forgiveness for our lives lived without or against God. It means allowing ourselves to be broken open and given a larger heart, one that, in the power of the Holy Spirit, sees the world with love and compassion, and desires peace.

Grace and peace be with you all,

Amen