“Cross Words: Our Language of Atonement,” Week One
We all have that one novel in high school English class that we despised having to read—possibly several. It was too much of a slog, or too boring, or just too above our teenaged heads to do justice. I have always been an avid reader, but even I had that high school English book I couldn’t stand—it was Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Unlike a few Dickensian works like A Christmas Carol and The Haunted Man, A Tale of Two Cities desperately needed a better editor and was overwhelmingly lengthy. I detested most of the thoroughly vindictive and/or selfish characters. And I didn’t care about the finer points of 18th and 19th-cenutry French and British law. Only the threat of an F kept me reading.
Now, as an adult, I can see that A Tale of Two Cities is a story of resurrection through-and-through. While Dickens himself was not a particularly good Christian—he had numerous affairs, resented his wife and many of his children, and he professed xenophobic attitudes towards other peoples—his writing was profoundly informed by his understanding of Christianity, and in particular the resurrection and the cause of justice and economic security for all.
In A Tale of Two Cities, this concern gets incarnated in the form of Sydney Carton, a gifted but ne’er-do-well attorney who is deeply cynical and drinks far more than is healthy. Carton is a dead ringer for another character, Darnay, who during the Reign of Terror that followed the French Revolution, is arrested, and is sentenced to death in a kangaroo court. For someone as concerned with justice as Dickens, the Reign of Terror and its many unjust executions represented an egregious collective sin.
Carton, the cynical dead ringer for Darnay, provides the antidote. He gains access to Darnay’s cell, drugs Darnay, and switches places with him so that he may be executed in the innocent man’s place. The novel ends with Carton ascending the guillotine as Darnay’s substitute, and it includes this stanza from Carton’s final thoughts:
I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out. I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous, and happy, in that land which I shall see no more.
The novel soon concludes with the famous line, “It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done before. It is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
In substituting himself for Darnay, Carton becomes an obvious Christ-like figure, and if that is not clear enough, his prophetic telling of the future of a people thriving in his place seals the deal.
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 begin the series with a word that is likely familiar to you all, for another word which mirrors it—sacrifice—was submitted by several of you. Today’s cross word to begin the series is substitution.
We are starting with substitution because it is familiar—the idea that Jesus died in our place on the cross to atone for our sins. That is one strand of atonement theory, though by no means the only, but it is probably one of the most popular in our context of American Protestantism, because the crucifixion as substitution is seen as unlocking the grace upon which Protestantism says that our salvation is based.
We see the beginnings that perspective in this passage from Hebrews 9, in which the epistle writer speaks of Christ as “get(ing) rid of sin by sacrificing himself,” and “tak(ing) on the sins of many people.” But the understanding of Jesus’s crucifixion as a substitution would take almost 1100 years to become more fully formed. Substitution on the cross is rooted in Cur Deus Homo, When God Became Man, by St. Anselm of Canterbury in 1097. The most concise summary of his argument I’ve ever heard comes from the Bible scholars John Dominic Crossan and the late Marcus Borg:
Anselm’s argument is brilliant and, given his presuppositions, his logic is impeccable. He presupposes a legal framework for understanding our relationship with God. Our sin, our disobedience, is a crime against God. Disobedience requires punishment, or else it is not taken seriously. Hence God must require a punishment, the payment of a price, before God can forgive our sins or crimes. Jesus is the price. The payment has been made, the debt has been satisfied. And because Jesus is provided by God, the system also affirms grace—but only within a legal framework.
So our sinfulness represents a fundamental disservice or dishonor to God, because God’s children are disobeying God, and what gets added in is the idea that we deserve death and hell for our disobedience, which I always found…if not devastating then certainly not very Biblical. If original sin began with Adam and Eve, God does not sentence them to death, and in point of fact they go on to live full lives, albeit in exile. So if original sin did not merit a death sentence then, why should it now?
But more to the point, even as there is sinfulness in each of us, there must be goodness as well, or else Jesus is a fool to die for people so hopelessly evil and sinful. If we were so disobedient, so depraved, so terrible, why should the Son of God die for people so awful and evil? I’ve no doubt that such persons can, have, and do exist, but I believe just as strongly that on balance, each of us is on some point of the iustus-et-peccator spectrum (to borrow briefly from the Lutherans): each of us is both saint and sinner, sometimes more (or even much more) one than the other, but at the very least capable of accepting God’s grace when it is offered.
For Jesus to die in our place, there must be something in us worth something—worth redeeming. And to the extent that I personally believe in substitution, it’s that. Jesus saw, and continues to see, something in you that is worth saving. Otherwise, there is no reason for Him to be crucified other than pure, hopeless inevitability.
My hope in this series is to build upon this and expand our understanding of the cross. I don’t want to negate substitution, especially if it is a foundational building block for you, but remember when I said that it really only came about in 1097, when Anselm wrote Cur Deus Homo. For almost the first 1100 years of its existence, the church did not profess substitution as the reason why Jesus died.
And this is important: different ideas about what was accomplished on the cross are not mutually exclusive. You do not have to adhere to only one. You may believe in substitution but hear about another branch of atonement theory later in this series and think, “Wow, this really goes hand-in-hand with my faith.” In fact, I hope you do. One way in which we grow in faith is by seeing connections that we may have been unaware of but had in fact been there all along.
For once you connect the redemptive dots of the crucifixion and resurrection, it becomes easier and easier to see its influence all around you—not just in your own faith, but in the faith of others expressed in their lives and their work. Authors have filled libraries of books about sacrifice and new life, musicians have composed untold numbers of songs, artists have covered canvases aplenty, and dramatists have filled stages, airwaves, and silver screens with productions.
Put another way: the crucifixion and resurrection has, over time, become so compelling to Christian and Christian-influenced writers, musicians, and artists that we not only receive the deeply moving image of a Sydney Carton substituting himself for Darnay, but we receive alongside it the vision of hope that is meant to make the substitution meaningful and worthwhile. Because just as Christ is a fool for dying for us if we are not redeemable, so too was Carton a fool to die in place of Darnay if Darnay were to waste his new lease on life.
That truth for me, as much as any, would be why I would speak of substitution. Because it can so easily, and has so easily, gone in the other direction, that we are so terrible, and God so bloodthirsty, that only the blood of God’s son could satisfy so furious a deity. I’ve no doubt of God’s wrath and do, as Paul says, leave room for it. But I’ve likewise no doubt of God’s mercy and love, and it is because the cross and empty tomb tell me so.
May they serve as divine reassurance for you as well in the Lenten days to come, that God saw something in your worth dying for, and worth resurrecting for.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
March 6, 2022