James and John, Zebedee’s sons, came to Jesus and said, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask.”
36 “What do you want me to do for you?” he asked.
37 They said, “Allow one of us to sit on your right and the other on your left when you enter your glory.”
38 Jesus replied, “You don’t know what you’re asking! Can you drink the cup I drink or receive the baptism I receive?”
39 “We can,” they answered.
Jesus said, “You will drink the cup I drink and receive the baptism I receive, 40 but to sit at my right or left hand isn’t mine to give. It belongs to those for whom it has been prepared.”
41 Now when the other ten disciples heard about this, they became angry with James and John. 42 Jesus called them over and said, “You know that the ones who are considered the rulers by the Gentiles show off their authority over them and their high-ranking officials order them around. 43 But that’s not the way it will be with you. Whoever wants to be great among you will be your servant. 44 Whoever wants to be first among you will be the slave of all, 45 for the Human One didn’t come to be served but rather to serve and to give his life to liberate many people.” (Common English Bible)
“Cross Words: Our Language of Atonement,” Week Three
Most of us, I think, have that one movie, play, or story that so scared the dickens out of us as children that we remember it even as adults. One of my friends was saying recently that for her, it was the film Jaws, and that it is still on her mind whenever she goes to the beach. For me, it is a short story by the famous writer O. Henry, which was turned into a play, and funnily enough is set right here in Alabama.
The gist of the short story is that two ne’er-do-wells kidnap the ten-year-old child of a local captain of industry, intending to hold the child for ransom. But the boy is so obsequious with his constant chatter, attempted pranks, and demands to play that the captors are eventually so worn down that instead of demanding ransom from the boy’s father (whom the boy is frankly fine to be rid of on account of the father’s unrelenting strictness), the captors end up paying the boy’s father to take the boy back. That is the ransom that ends up getting paid—from the captors to the father instead of the other way around.
I do not know what on earth about that play made me so frightened as a kid, but it 100% terrified me. I also do not know if O. Henry had intended this or not—the way that Charles Dickens clearly did in A Tale of Two Cities—but there is another branch of atonement theory in this story: ransom, or more specifically, ransom used as a method of trickery.
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 two 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. Last week we moved to a word that was submitted and goes to the very heart of this entire series: atonement. And now today we arrive at the word “ransom.”
You may ask, “why ransom?” in the context of the cross, and fair enough, it is not something we much talk about. But in the very early days of the church, this was one belief around the crucifixion that emerged and stuck around for some time before eventually being supplanted, at least in the west, by substitutionary atonement.
And that makes sense—both ransom and substitution entail Jesus functioning as a proxy or price for our own sinfulness. Where they differ is to whom that price is meant to be paid. Substitution treats the crucifixion as a transaction between God and humanity, with Jesus as the sacrifice. Ransom introduces another character into the transaction: the Adversary, Satan.
Essentially—and I am oversimplifying—because we as humans are sinful and Satan, not God, is responsible for authoring sin, we are slaves to Satan by dint of being, in Paul’s words, slaves to sin. And we have to be set free from that bondage to evil. Jesus represents the ransom that God is prepared to pay to free us, like hostages from a captor, except—and this is the part I love—God has absolutely zero intention of actually letting Satan take receipt of the ransom. Instead of remaining dead—in a state that represents, again to borrow from Paul, the wages of sin—Jesus resurrects and permanently escapes the clutches of the devil. So by triumphing over the wages of sin, Jesus also triumphs over the author of sin by tricking the devil into thinking that He—Jesus—is God’s ransom to be paid when God had no intention of ever making a pact with the devil.
We see the Scriptural roots of this particular atonement theory on display in this passage of Mark 10, which ends with Jesus referring to Himself a ransom for many, or in the Greek, a lutron, which was really a freedom price—a sum that would set free a slave from bondage. Jesus is saying that He is not meant to be served, but to serve—to take the function of a servant or even a slave, and in so doing, liberate others who are in bondage by ransoming them, by acting as their freedom price. Essentially, Jesus says that He will be the price that is paid for our freedom and liberation. Except that unlike in substitution, where that price is paid in full and paid to God, this price is a ransom to Satan that Satan was never going to benefit from.
And maybe the thought of God and Jesus operating in bad faith, even if it is with the devil, strikes you poorly, and I would understand why. A deceitful God is not God to be loved. Respected, maybe, and feared, certainly, but not loved. But lend an ear again to what Jesus is saying to James and John when they come across just really, *really* badly. Like, anyone here who has raised or taught young kids knows that when they come to you and lead off with, “will you do anything I ask?” the answer is just an automatic no, it doesn’t matter what comes afterward. Here, though, James and John presume to dictate terms of who will set at Christ’s right and left in paradise, and Jesus essentially responds by saying, you don’t know what you’re asking for.
There are a lot of moments when I think that if God really wanted to punish us, God would answer our prayers, because we don’t always, or even often, know what to ask for when we go to God with a request. Not everything we ask of God is good just because it is God to whom those requests are made. Even if we are virtuous in so many other areas, we are continually in need of being set free from our limited understanding of who God is and who God can be.
So God confounds our expectations, especially if they are expectations like those of James and John, which are really more about themselves and their own selfishness than about God. God comes to earth not as a conqueror or a man of power, but as a newborn baby. God is born not to royalty or nobility, but to an unmarried teenager and her day laborer fiancé. God addresses the world not on horseback with a sword in hand, but upon a donkey and with a shepherd’s crook. Who is to say that such a God would even be interested in human-affirmed hierarchies to benefit flawed men like James and John? It was, and is, our own expectations of God from which God sees that we desperately need to be set free.
And then God-as-flesh does one more act—in furthering the abdication of divinity, God permits to be executed on a cross because the only thing more awe-inspiring than saving yourself from the cross at the crowd’s request is to resurrect when you are already dead and buried.
And who puts these narrow-minded, limiting expectations in our heads? Not God, surely. In whose interests would it be for us to constrain what God is down to our own earthly notions of hierarchy and exploitation? Who could tempt us to break the commandment that we shall not make God in our own graven image, and who would want to tempt us so? Who, if not the original tempter and adversary?
So if God, in incarnating, dying and resurrecting, confounds our expectations, may it also be a confounding of the evil one who tempts us with such expectations. In the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection, we can be set free from both our expectations that box God in and the author of such expectations.
And at this point, I should probably come clean and, in the penitential spirit of Lent, confess that “ransom” was the cross word that I contributed to the mix. I threw it in there because I fundamentally believe that our natural state as God’s creations and as God’s children is a state of liberation from evil and freedom from sin. Eternal life without liberation is eternal life in a state of subjugation or bondage, and that is not paradise. Eternal life includes life that is lived freely. And if it means a bit of divine trickery to achieve, so be it.
For as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 7, you were bought for a price. And maybe, just maybe, God already knew that your ransom would never belong to the tempter who took you hostage. For you did not, and do not, have to belong to that tempter after all.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
March 20, 2022