This week in Bible study at SpiritWorks, we had a lively discussion about the atonement. Most particularly, how did/does it work? So many questions came up. Does Jesus take all our sins into his body, his heart, his being? Does he go down to hell and shine God's light and clean it out? How do the sins get out of us and into Jesus? What happens when he ascends, is he still carrying all the sins with him in heaven? The questions were so important to those asking them. They wanted to know how it works.
I was at a loss. I've been to seminary and studied theories of the atonement: Christus Victor, ransom, substitutionary, moral influence, satisfaction, scapegoat, liberation. I remember sitting on the floor of a classroom at Seabury with one of my classmates, wrestling with how to make sense of it and feeling like my brain might explode. Every time I felt like I was beginning to catch a glimmer of understanding, my classmate would ask, "But how does that save us?" I would look at him in dismay, as the little shimmers of comprehension danced away to the edges of my consciousness and disappeared. "I don't know," I would cry in despair. I knew they were going to ask me on the General Ordination Exams. And I knew I would fail because I could not explain it. I believe in grace. I believe in salvation. I believe that God redeems everything. But I could not and cannot explain how it works. It is a mystery.
This morning I was reading the chapter in Nadia Bolz-Weber's book, Pastrix, in which she talks about her experience with Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), working as a hospital chaplain. At the end of the chapter she describes how she heard the Passion read on Good Friday with new ears after her CPE experience. "God was not looking down on the cross. God was hanging from the cross. God had entered our pain and loss and death so deeply and took all of it into God's own self so that we might know who God really is. Maybe the Good Friday story is about how God would rather die than be in our sin-accounting business anymore" (p. 86).
I know that I long for God and turn away from God and long for God and do things that draw me away from God and the cycle goes on and on. I cannot save myself through my own efforts because I continue to choose my will over God's no matter how much I try to do it differently. At the same time I do not think that God is the great hall monitor in the sky adding up demerits and handing out detentions. I believe that God loves us with a love so extravagant that we human merely beings cannot fathom it, a love so deep that God was willing to become one of us to live and die among us, a love so strong that our sins are washed away in it. A God that would rather die than be in our sin-accounting business is a God I can believe in, but not a God that I can explain.
At SpiritWorks when we coach people, we often take them through a process of discerning core values. Each time grace comes up as one of my 3 core values. Each time I try to clarify what it means. The best I can come up with is that God redeems everything, and it is a gift to us. It's not something we can achieve or earn or will. It's unexpected. It's forgiveness where none should be possible, reconciliation and healing of that which is broken. It is light shining in the darkness.
I can't explain it. (And it's embarrassing as a priest to say that.) I do not understand how it works. But I am so very grateful that it does. Thanks, God.
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