Collect of the Day: Proper 15
Almighty God, you have given your only Son to be for us a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life: Give us grace to receive thankfully the fruits of his redeeming work, and to follow daily in the blessed steps of his most holy life; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. Book of Common Prayer
Evangelical Christians tend to focus on Jesus as the one who paid the price for our sins, Jesus the atoning sacrifice. This is good and appropriate. “There is salvation in no other name,” says the Apostle Peter in his sermon on the Day of Pentecost.
Church tradition contains various attempts to explain what it means for Jesus to be our atoning sacrifice. Of course this idea of the atoning sacrifice comes from the Old Testament: the sacrifice lamb is slaughtered for the sins of the people and the blood of the sacrifice is sprinkled on the altar.
The writer of the letter to the Hebrews lays out all of this logic from the Old Testament sacrifices. He tells us that Jesus is the sacrifice, priest and prophet, as well as the coming King!
When Jesus first went to see John the Baptist in the desert John said, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” John’s phrase could not be clearer.
Much later Anselm of Canterbury wrote a book called Why the God-man? In is book Anselm lays out the logic of redemption. He does not offer this explanationn as an a priori argument, a “before the fact” argument from intuitive logic alone. Rather he says that having learned from Scripture that Jesus is the Son of God, born of a virgin and born to be the sacrifice of sins, he lays out the logic of redemption, as philosophers would say “a posteriori,” after having learned about the redemption by revelation, he is able to follow it with his human logic. It is not an event or reasoning he could have come to without revelation, but having received it, he can “rationalize” it, give a reasonable explanation. There is no tension between revelation and reason. Revelation makes known and logic confirms.
Anselm’s argument is for penal substitutionary atonement. These days many people find fault with his argument: too bloody, violence against an innocent animal, etc. However, his logic is an explanation of biblical revelation. He is not inventing something to suit the tastes of his generation or ours. He is laying out the logic of scripture and revelation.
The atonement is an idea taken from the Old Testament. We must be recconciled to God. We are estranged from our maker.
The way to overcome this separation from our maker is through a sacrifice. We are guilty of sin, deliberate wrong doing, breaking God’s law, hurting our Father. We must pay a price to be reconciled to him. This is the “penal” part of penal substitutionary atonment. We are guilty before God’s law and a penalty must be paid.
We understand that atonement must be achieved and we now understand why a penalty, a “life for a life” must be paid, but why substitutionary?
God in his mercy had allowed the people of Israel to substitute a perfect lamb for themselves as a substitute for payment for their sins. Though the people should have died, God allowed the high priest to offer a sacrifice of a perfect lamb once a year on the Day of Atonement to cover the sins of the people.
Jesus is the sacrifice lamb. He is a perfect sacrifice and his death accomplishes our reconciliation with God.
Jesus death also redeems us. We had willingly sold ourselves into slavery to sin and the devil. Jesus pays the price to buy us back, buy us out of that slavery.
Anselm in trying to explain this “mystery” (mystery in the Bible doesn’t mean something beyond comprehension, it means something not yet revealed) draws on the Old Testament sacrificial system and the explanations of Jesus, John the Apostle, Paul and the writer of Hebrews. Anselm explains these scriptural ideas, this revelation, with reason, so that people can understand Jesus’ sacrifice and their own salvation.
Jesus had to be born of a virgin to be sinless. The sacrifice lamb had to be without blemish, perfect. A sinful person could not pay the price for other sinful people. Even the high priest could not cleanse himself from his own sin. Only a person who was sinless could be the sacrifice for sin.
Anselm also drew from the writer of Hebrews when he argues that Jesus or the sacrifice for sins had to be a man, a human. No animal could really pay the penalty for the sins of humans. Only a perfect man could make this sacrifice.
So, Jesus had to be born of a virgin as a man to be a sinless man and he had to be born a man to make atonment for men. However, no man could pay the infinite price needed to redeem and reconcile humankind to God. For this reason Jesus needed to be the Son of God born of a virgin to pay the penalty for humankind.
As well this sacrifice could only happen once. The Old Testament sacrifices went on year after year. None of them could atone for the sins of the nation. However, Jesus “offered the once for all sacrifice for sin” (Hebrews 10:12) his work was finished.
For the past twenty years Linda, my wife, and I have attended St. James Church, Voorschoten, NL (Church England, Diocese of Europe). I won’t explain how we ended up at St. James. It’s a long story.
However, I want to say one thing, which is logical, scriptural and emotional. When we celebrate the Lord’s Supper (Holy Communion) at one point in the liturgy the minister says,
All glory be to thee, Almighty God, our heavenly Father, for that thou, of thy tender mercy, didst give thine only Son Jesus Christ to suffer death upon the cross for our redemption; who made there, by his one oblation of himself once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world; and did institute, and in his holy Gospel command us to continue, a perpetual memory of that his precious death and sacrifice, until his coming again.
When the minister says: “one oblation (sacrifice) of himself once offered, a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world,” my heart sings.
I’m a very emotional person despite being a philosopher. I am not a thinking machine. However, Anslem lays out logically, what I choose to believe volitionally with my will. Logic can explain, but without a choice of the will there is no salvation. “The angels know and dread.” You can know the truth and still reject it.
I don’t see any problem laying out the logic of a “mystery,” since biblically a mystery is not something which can never be understood. Biblically a mystery is a secret which is finally revealed.
The Bible says that the prophets of old longed to see the day of the Messiah. The plan of redemption and atonement was not known to them. Not unclear to them, but hidden from them. After Jesus died and rose again they understood.
We should not pit rational explanation against “mystery” or faith. (I don’t mean godless, arid, modern Reason. I mean full orbed ancient and medieval reason.) Faith is not “believing what you know ain’t so.” Faith is placing your trust in Jesus the Savior having understood first what it means that Jesus is the Savior and that you need one.
Continuing in faith isn’t a mystery either. The Bible was given to us to understand that mystery and it’s implication: that Jesus died for our sins and that we must live our lives from here on out to please him.
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