Just as through one human being sin came into the world, and death came through sin, so death has come to everyone, since everyone has sinned. 13 Although sin was in the world, since there was no Law, it wasn’t taken into account until the Law came. 14 But death ruled from Adam until Moses, even over those who didn’t sin in the same way Adam did—Adam was a type of the one who was coming.
15 But the free gift of Christ isn’t like Adam’s failure. If many people died through what one person did wrong, God’s grace is multiplied even more for many people with the gift—of the one person Jesus Christ—that comes through grace. 16 The gift isn’t like the consequences of one person’s sin. The judgment that came from one person’s sin led to punishment, but the free gift that came out of many failures led to the verdict of acquittal. 17 If death ruled because of one person’s failure, those who receive the multiplied grace and the gift of righteousness will even more certainly rule in life through the one person Jesus Christ.
18 So now the righteous requirements necessary for life are met for everyone through the righteous act of one person, just as judgment fell on everyone through the failure of one person. 19 Many people were made righteous through the obedience of one person, just as many people were made sinners through the disobedience of one person. (Common English Bible)
“Cross Words: Our Language of Atonement,” Week Five
I have spent a lot of time over the past month-plus since Russia invaded Ukraine thinking about whether there is any redemption at all for a leader who beats up on a neighbor like that—whether in Europe, or in the Near East where Saudi Arabia has for years been meting out similar treatment to Yemen, or in Africa, where Tigray has faced similarly violent endangerment, or anywhere else, including my ancestors’ homeland in Armenia after Azerbaijan’s attack a year and a half ago.
And I don’t know what level of redemption is possible. Certainly it isn’t without any remorse and any attempts at repair. The human suffering, the loss of life, livelihood, and home on that scale…it puts someone outside the category of principled and moral.
And in wrestling with this question, of what—if any—redemption awaits such a person, I turned to the moral voice of someone who has been a friend of my parents for some time, whose name you may know from the mid-90s movie Dead Man Walking based on her life and work: Sister Helen Prejean. She writes of serving as the spiritual advisor of inmates on death row, and one of her many tasks is to lead them to really reckon with and come to grips with the enormity of their crimes.
By the day of their appointed deaths, literally everything else has been taken from these inmates: their freedom, their autonomy, their dignity. And that is by design; our penal system is meant to, well, punish. The inmates often compound this by stripping away at their own humanity by subscribing to racism, homophobia, and all manner of prejudices. And all that is left for them to give away, aside from maybe a few assorted sundry possessions and effects, are their lives.
And they do. Sister Helen conveys how each of the men she writes about use their last words to ask for forgiveness for what they did, or to say that they hoped their deaths would bring relief to their victim’s family.
Cheap words, perhaps, but if you are out of chances and all that you have left to give away is your life, and you declare that doing so should be in the service of bringing relief to the people who you have most hurt, there is something profound about that. I don’t know if that is redemption either—whether it is or not I think is God’s affair. But I do see the desire for it, belated as it is.
This is the next-to-last 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 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 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.” And today’s cross word that one of you submitted is “redemption.”
Redemption is a funny word because it inherently connotes imperfection, mistakenness, even evil. Redemption is the response to imperfection. Just as there is no reaction without action, no exhale without an inhale, there is no redemption without sin. If you are perfect, then you have no need for redemption, and we can all go home, can’t we?
But we aren’t, and we do, and so here we are on Sunday morning, searching for what we cannot find on our own, and hoping to build that which cannot be manufactured or artificially engineered.
Humanity’s need for redemption is as old as humanity itself, which is why Paul chooses to frame this passage in Romans 5 the way he does. The thirty-second version is that Paul sees Jesus, as the Son of God, serving as God’s do-over after God’s first Son, Adam, tried to take from God that which should have belonged only to God: the knowledge of good and evil. Adam doing that was like Caesar crossing the Rubicon, it was a point of no return, as evinced by Adam’s immediate sin in basically blaming Eve for the entire affair and even blaming God for giving him Eve to begin with.
In this, Adam proves to be a titanic disappointment to God as God’s first Son, for he fundamentally fails at what Paul treats as a vital component to living a faithful life: obedience to God. God tells Adam not to eat from this one tree, and Adam does so. Contrast this with the image of Christ that Paul serves up in Philippians 2, which we unpacked in this series just a few weeks ago, in which Christ is not merely lauded for His obedience to the point of death on a cross, but that this obedience leads to Christ’s acclamation before God as the name above all names.
For Paul, Adam and Christ, each Sons of God, offer a case study of dueling opposites around the question of obedience to God’s will: many were made righteous as the result of one Son’s obedience, while many were made sinners as the result of the other’s disobedience. And I want to make this abundantly clear, because Paul’s perspective on the Law gets taken as a justification for Christian antisemitism: the Law does not result in sinfulness, and here, Paul in fact says that the Law steps in to highlight Adam’s failure and our own sinfulness. The Law in its righteousness convicts us precisely because it should—we do not live up to God’s Law, just as the inmates to whom Sister Helen ministered didn’t measure up to our laws. Redemption seeks to repair that relational fracture.
So this is not, and should never be about, the Tanakh, or running roughshod over it. This is about whether there is redemption after disregard for God’s will, and if so, what that redemption might look like. It is about the restoration of covenant, of right relationship, between us and our creator, which we will get into even more next week, but for now we simply need a starting point.
The starting point that has been in vogue for some decades now is what is called a Sinner’s Prayer, which takes many forms, but its essence boils down to praying, “Jesus, I’m a terrible person and deserve death, I accept you into my heart as my personal Lord and Savior.”
I’ve never been a big fan of this. It may start out from the place of extreme humility of the tax collector in Jesus’s parable, who stands off to the side in the temple and bows his head in humbleness while the religious leader stands center stage and thanks God for not making him like the terrible tax collector over there. But when we begin to accept the notion that God sees us as terrible—not that we have done terrible things, but that God sees us as worthless without God, then what is the point of saving such terrible and worthless creations to begin with? We’ve talked about this before, that if we really are so wretched beyond belief and comprehension, then Jesus is a fool to die to ransom us or to set us free. Better to write us off like Adam, cast us out east of Eden on our own.
So no, that’s not it either. And Jesus is not merely our personal golden ticket to heaven, that is such a profound disservice to the One who went to the Cross for us. Just as Jesus must not be written off for a fool for dying for us, he must not be shut up for a sacrificial lamb, who has nothing to say or do except die for us.
Instead, Jesus represents God’s second attempt at perfection. And lets talk a moment about that word, perfection. In Genesis 1, God makes everything, light and dark, sea and sky, sun, moon, and stars, all the plants and animals, and at the end of each day says, “It was good.” Not adequate, or average, or so-so. Good. Imagine if God was saying “perfect.” “You are perfect” to the light and dark, “you are perfect” to the sea and sky, “you are perfect” to the sun, moon, stars, plants and animals. And then God makes Adam out of dust and wind and tells this man, “You are perfect.”
Yet Adam chose not to be. Adam was the first attempt at perfection, and God, through Adam, failed. That is a big thing to say, especially from the pulpit, that God experienced failure. But God did. In fact, throughout the Bible, God does. God feels failure so acutely in the Noah saga that God sends the flood as a giant reset button on creation. God’s first nine plagues fail to free the Israelites from bondage; in fact, Pharaoh’s heart is only hardened further. Only after ten plagues is the liberation of the Israelites secured.
The God of the Bible is not the God of the self-help section of our bookshelves. There is more to God’s experience than success; there is failure. There is death. As we talked about last week, in the message on victory, there is defeat.
All of which are the necessary ingredients for redemption, precisely because, again, perfection and redemption are mutually exclusive. If you are perfect, you have not been redeemed. You have not needed to be redeemed.
Accepting your need for redemption does not mean that God sees you as a terrible, worthless, good-for-nothing creation. Quite the opposite: God sees you as worth redeeming, as worth the price of redemption to begin with. Even if God has experienced failure before, God does not want to experience it with you. God wants to succeed with you, alongside you, so that you flourish as the child of God you were always meant to be.
And in so doing, may you not only come to know and experience divine redemption, but, like Christ, may you become a face of it for others.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
April 3, 2022