The love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: one died for the sake of all; therefore, all died. 15 He died for the sake of all so that those who are alive should live not for themselves but for the one who died for them and was raised.
16 So then, from this point on we won’t recognize people by human standards. Even though we used to know Christ by human standards, that isn’t how we know him now. 17 So then, if anyone is in Christ, that person is part of the new creation. The old things have gone away, and look, new things have arrived!
18 All of these new things are from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and who gave us the ministry of reconciliation. 19 In other words, God was reconciling the world to himself through Christ, by not counting people’s sins against them. He has trusted us with this message of reconciliation.
20 So we are ambassadors who represent Christ. God is negotiating with you through us. We beg you as Christ’s representatives, “Be reconciled to God!” 21 God caused the one who didn’t know sin to be sin for our sake so that through him we could become the righteousness of God. (Common English Bible)
“Cross Words: Our Language of Atonement,” Week Six
I remember hastily pulling out a dresser drawer, laying down the biggest hardback coffee table book I could find, and setting my laptop computer atop it. I adjusted the lamp behind me to try to project the optimal amount of light, and it ended up looking like I had given myself a halo (which I swear was not my intent!). It was all in service of the first-ever, and highest-stakes, sermon over Zoom I had ever given. While I had earlier in the pandemic preached a sermon for online consumption, it had been prerecorded and so I could ask for a redo or a mulligan if I really screwed up. But this was going to be live. And it was going to be my audition to become your minister. And I remember asking myself why I had agreed to preach on sin and forgiveness for this audition.
My introduction to most of you took place in the middle of a sermon series that your interim minister, Rev. Edd Spencer, was delivering on the Lord’s Prayer, and as a series preacher myself I did not want to interrupt the flow of that. So I said, sure, I’ll preach a Lord’s Prayer sermon, no problem, sounds great! Then I looked at the calendar of where my candidate Sunday fell in that series and saw that I had landed the line about forgiving and being forgiven for sins. And it’s always a winning strategy to introduce yourself to a new congregation by preaching about sin!
But now as we start this final stretch of our last four Sundays together, I think it is poetically appropriate for us to returning to the topic of forgiveness as almost a sort of book end of our almost two years together. It remains as important as it ever was, on the cross and today. I hope we can courageously tackle this topic once more together.
Today, Palm Sunday, is the final installment of our Lenten sermon series, and as with last year’s “We Were There” series, it was meant build up to our newly-releaseed Holy Week devotional. This year both the series and devotional come from you as Lola Kiser and I asked you share with us 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 have felt a real connection to, and investment in, this 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 three weeks ago 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. Then we moved on to the word “atonement” itself, which went to the heart of the entire series, and then “ransom” and “victory.” Last week’s cross word that one of you submitted was “redemption,” and today’s word, the final one in the series, is “forgiveness.”
I saved forgiveness for the end because forgiveness is rooted in the context of relationship, and so gives the crucifixion not only a past, but a future. Whenever a relationship is harmed, whenever covenant has been broken, forgiveness is put on the table as a source of repair of that breach. Sometimes, forgiveness is, by itself, enough to repair the breach. Other times, more is required, such as the making of amends or restitution. And still other times, the breach may be irreparable, at least in the present time and plane of existence. Which is what makes the cross so very necessary.
First, the Roman Empire refused to acknowledge not simply Jesus’s divinity, but God’s divinity. God was not their god, they had their own pantheon of deities (most of them stolen from the Greeks and subsequently renamed). So from the Roman perspective, there is no risk in rupturing their relationship to God by crucifying God’s Son because there is no relationship to destroy in the first place. If you will not even acknowledge a being’s existence, the care you have for offending that being is always going to be nil.
But just because you refuse to acknowledge the existence of the target of your offense does not prevent the target from being offended. On the contrary, it doubles down on the offense, because it tells whoever you are offending that they are fundamentally unworthy of your regard. God was seen as fundamentally unworthy of Rome’s regard, and it had no problem handing down a death sentence for God’s Son.
So, the need for forgiveness here is maximal, because not only has right relationship been breached in a violent and profoundly painful manner, but the relationship itself is denied. And it is so important to be clear about those multiple layers of culpability on Rome’s part, not only to underscore the depth of the need for forgiveness, but to underscore that this is Rome’s death sentence, with Rome’s method of execution. Not Israel’s. Blaming Israel for the crucifixion has led to centuries of antisemitism which we, in turn, need to ask forgiveness for.
In the face of these multiple layers of imperial culpability, God offers forgiveness in the most lifegiving way possible: God gives the Son right back to us. Even after what we did. Or, precisely because what we did emphasized our need for the Son, and for the Son’s work of—to use Paul’s words from here in 2 Corinthians 5—of reconciling the world to Himself and through Himself.
Reconciliation is an increasingly in-vogue word in our quarters of American Christianity as a term for attempting to address, if not necessarily right, massive and historic wrongs. Reconciliation is the restoration to right relationship from a state of estrangement or having been deeply harmed, and we as a church and a nation are frankly nowhere near that state of being yet. And that is because reconciliation—and the forgiveness it entails—requires a full accounting of what was done, of the harm that was inflicted and continues to be inflicted. If we simply pretend the harm never took place, if we try to move on without actually doing the repair work, it is like expecting cars piled up at a wreck to be able to continue driving down the road when you have done nothing to remove the obstruction that is blocking their path. The progress depends upon the repair work, and the repair work depends on acknowledging that there is something broken and in need of repair to begin with.
But we also are not being Christ-like. Christ, Paul says, reconciles the world to Himself, through Himself. But when we deny and minimize the full scope and scale of harm done, of the ways in which we benefit from harm done, of ways in which we continue to do harm, there is no reconciliation to be had because we are not first acknowledging our need to repent and seek forgiveness.
Say what you may about Paul—and there is much that can be said—in his letters he does not attempt to sugarcoat his own sinfulness, and his own past attempts to harm his neighbors. He freely confesses his guilt, and Acts of the Apostles documents the initial distrust towards him, indicating that even in the earliest versions of the church, forgiveness was not something to offer up willy-nilly. It allows Paul to be able to speak genuinely here about the reconciling work of Jesus Christ, work that he has personally experienced. And Paul’s resulting impact on the church, to this day, remains profound.
What if we were to own our need for forgiveness as authentically as Paul owns his? What if we owned our need for forgiveness not only for the things we have done but the things that we have purposefully left undone because we benefit from having left them undone? Because that, too, stands in the way of real reconciliation. That, too, stands in the way of deep forgiveness. Consider Jesus's parable of the Good Samaritan: it was not only about the Samaritan did for the traveler who had beaten and robbed in tending to the traveler's wounds and arranging shelter for him. It was about what the two religious leaders who passed by on the other side of the road chose to leave undone. Even though they were not the ones who had beaten and robbed the traveler, the parable strongly communicates their need for forgiveness for what they had left undone.
Over the course of the next three or so weeks, you and I together will have opportunities to consider such questions for ourselves, of what we have done and left undone in our time together. And I don’t just mean hindsight quarterbacking the past two years, I mean brave and courageous soul-searching that can be challenging and even frightening, but also potentially life-changing.
For it was meant to not only give new life but change life that God decided to reconcile us by giving Christ back to us. In doing so, God modeled the deepest forgiveness, a forgiveness that brought not only new life but right relationship and, through that right relationship, our salvation.
Through forgiveness, we are saved. And so I would repeat the words I said to many of you at our congregational meeting last August with Regional Minister John Mobley: for any moments when I made known God’s grace and love for you, I am beyond grateful and humbled. For any moments when I was an obstacle to God’s grace and love for you, I ask you to forgive me. I will strive to do the same for you.
May God forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us. And in so doing, may God save us.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
April 10, 2022