Don’t do anything for selfish purposes, but with humility think of others as better than yourselves. 4 Instead of each person watching out for their own good, watch out for what is better for others. 5 Adopt the attitude that was in Christ Jesus:
6 Though he was in the form of God,
he did not consider being equal with God something to exploit.
7 But he emptied himself
by taking the form of a slave
and by becoming like human beings.
When he found himself in the form of a human,
8 he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death,
even death on a cross.
9 Therefore, God highly honored him
and gave him a name above all names (Common English Bible)
“Cross Words: Our Language of Atonement,” Week Two
I remember as a kid asking my parents what they would have named me if I had not been named Eric Nicholas. My mom said Herbert Aloysius. I think she was kidding.
But I still do not know what I might have been named, or how I was named. It is a funny mystery that I have mostly been content remain so. But how many of you know why your parents gave you your name? It may be Biblical, or represent an ancestor or other family member, or, if your last name is Davidson and you’re named Harley, it may just be a love of motorcycles.
What is in a name? History, testimony, sentimentality, strength? Some combination of the above? Something else entirely? Carrie and I named Sadie Lou for my great-grandmother and her mother, two fiercely compassionate women who have lived long, seen much, and handed down a great many lessons to us. We wanted that for Sadie Lou, and gave her the highest names from our families.
To have someone named after you is one of the sincerest honors that I think we are capable of bestowing, because doing so says, “I hope this person emulates the best of you, which has brought out the best of me.” It is a testament to you as a moral example for others, and it may be as close as we get to immortality in this plane of existence.
And Paul writes—or, rather, more likely quotes from an ancient hymn—poignantly of the impact of Christ’s own moral example: that He would be given a name above all names. But to reach that high place, it required Christ descending through the depths of suffering and hell. And we speak of that example today as we continue along our journey of atonement by focusing on that word itself.
This is a new sermon series for the church season of Lent, and as with last year’s “We Were There” series, it is meant to build up to our Holy Week devotional. This year, though, both the series and devotional come from you as Lola Kiser and I asked you share with us single words that you associate with the crucifixion. We took those “cross words” and split them between the devotional and this series, and so each Sunday I will be preaching on one of the cross words that you chose—with my own thrown in for good measure along the way. Because the words of this series come from you, I hope that you experience a real connection to, and investment in, this sermon series.
The fancy term for the question of what precisely was achieved on the cross is “atonement theory,” and each cross word in this series represents one particular strand of that theory. We began the series last Sunday with a word that was likely already familiar to you all, “substitution,” for another word which mirrors it—sacrifice—was submitted by several of you as well. Today we move to a word that was submitted and goes to the very heart of this entire series: atonement.
To atone for something is, fundamentally, to make something right, or if it cannot be made right, to do the very most you can to repair or make amends. Sometimes, it is for something you yourself did, like when we wrong each other personally. Other times, it can be for something you as part of your people did, like when West German Chancellor Willy Brandt knelt in humility before the memorial commemorating the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto during the Holocaust. And sometimes—or really, one time—it is on a cross, with humanity itself upon your wrenching shoulders.
Private atonement—when we go personally to someone we have wronged—is a part and parcel of Christ’s message. He preaches in the Sermon on the Mount that if there is discord between you and a sibling to go and make things right with your loved one before you dare approach the altar of the Lord. It is the same sort of spirit that we find in 1 Corinthians 11, when Paul instructs us to examine ourselves before taking holy communion so that we do not do so unworthily. What Paul says implicitly Jesus says explicitly: we should not go to God expected to be lavished with favor when we have left a wronged sibling of faith behind.
That is just the beginning step of our own atonement work in following the moral example of our Savior. Not only did He right wrongs in personal interactions—like when he dismissed the Syro-Phoenician mother in Mark 7 only to heal her daughter after she quite rightly rebutted Him—but He taught us of public and shared atonement as well, of repairing and restoring to right relationship entire nations, such as in Matthew 25 when Jesus makes clear that the salvation of us as peoples rests on right relationship in the form of feeding and clothing one another, visiting and treating with dignity, and caring for one another in times of sickness and need.
We should expect nothing less from our teacher because the very act of incarnation, of choosing to become flesh, was an act of atonement, and that is at the heart of this excerpt of the ancient hymn Paul introduces and then relays to us. Jesus is obedient, even to the point of death on the cross, but His atonement on our behalf began far earlier when He chose to completely divest Himself of divine substance and take the form of a human, and not just any human, but a humble and vulnerable newborn.
That act of emptying ourselves, divesting ourselves of our own pride and selfishness, is how we emulate Christ’s example when we have no divinity of our own to jettison. We have only our own humanity, in all its brokenness and splendor, all its wonder and sinfulness. What we choose of our humanness to let go of, and what we choose to keep, is then perhaps the deepest expression of what we value.
Because to follow Jesus as a moral example, and to seek our own atonement by following His example, is a choice for us to make or not make. Far too often, I see in Christianity a desire to reduce Jesus down to a sacrificial lamb, to make His public ministry all about the cross, because blood sacrifices are not supposed to speak. It shuts up for a scapegoat a teacher who demands so much of us, to give all that we are and all we have to offer and to be willing to be transformed into new creations for His sake. Truthfully, it is easier to worship a Savior who goes quietly and meekly to His execution rather than one who says many of the things that Jesus said.
But it would also be wrong for us to. In our own wilderness, it is a temptation that Satan freely, enthusiastically even, offers up. Which is precisely the point of temptation. If it does not actually tempt you, it may be something else, but it is inherently not a temptation. I know that because I would have folded right at the very first one, I just love carbs that much. Satan could tell me to turn stones into bread and I would be like, “Hoagies or croissants?”
It is tempting to reduce Jesus down to a blood sacrifice because choosing Him as our moral teacher means choosing His moral teachings, and many of those teachings we do not want to follow. Woe to those who are rich, who have plenty and laugh? That doesn’t preach well in a culture today that loves a good rags-to-riches story. Sell all your possessions and give the proceeds to the poor? Ditto.
Atonement by following Jesus, then, means following Him not only to the cross, although that is certainly part of it. Atonement by following Jesus means following Him well before the cross—and after, for that matter. It means not celebrating His birth every December 25 and then picking things up as His death sentence is being handed down by an amoral Roman viceroy. We will have followed very little and atoned for very little.
C.S. Lewis famously warns in Mere Christianity against the temptation to reduce Jesus down to a moral teacher, but I think the inverse—to reduce Jesus down to a divine sacrifice—is just as real. As John reminds us in both endings of his Gospel, there are many more things which Jesus said and did that were not written in that scroll, and that if all the things which Jesus said and did were written down, the world could not contain the books that would be written.
One of those things Jesus did was to be executed, as a ransom and a proxy, a victorious restorer of right relationship and moral example. He was even more, though, and as Christians, we are to honor that totality. Paul tells us that the name of Jesus will be elevated above all others, and one of those names, shouted out to Him in the garden by the Magdalene, is Rabbouni—Teacher.
To follow Jesus all the way to atonement, then, means emulating what Paul describes—emptying ourselves, divesting ourselves, of our own prejudices and preconceptions of what Jesus must be to fit our own narrow lenses, and to let Christ be Christ. To let Him save us, in every possible and impossible way, as only God-made-flesh can.
What’s in a name? It could be history, memory, inspiration, aspiration, sentimentality, and so much more.
How about life? For as John again writes to first conclude his Gospel, these things are written and handed down to us so that we might believe that Jesus is the Christ and that in believing, we might have life in His name.
Life. Life can be in a name too.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
March 13, 2022