“Cross Words: Our Language of Atonement,” Week Four
One way in which I am definitely a curmudgeonly old man is that I am really, really bad at keeping up with popular music, like so bad that I find myself thinking, "Is Raffi from my childhood still making new stuff?" but when a musician does manage to make their way through my blinders, I tend to really enjoy them. Dua Lipa is one such artist—not only is her music quality, but she herself consistently comes across as a solid, grounded, and thoughtful person genuinely devoted to using her celebrity to make the world a better place.
And a couple months ago she went on Stephen Colbert’s late night talk show. And I am so grateful to be parenting in the age of DVR, because I am too tired to ever be up late enough to watch anyone’s talk show. But this clip made the rounds because Colbert offered Dua Lipa the chance to ask him anything—instead of him holding the power over the agenda as the interviewer—and she chose to ask him about his faith and how it informs his comedy. Colbert is a devout Christian, and he answered in an incredibly profound way that even for me, as an ordained pastor, took several repeat viewings of the clip to fully process. But this is the part I wanted to share with you:
There’s funny and there’s sad, and there’s funny about being sad. In the same way, that sadness is like a little emotional death, but not a defeat if you can find a way to laugh about it, because that laughter keeps you from having fear of it…So if there is some relationship between my faith and my comedy, it is that no matter what happens, you are never defeated and you must understand and see this in the light of eternity and find some way to love and laugh with each other.
And though your ears may or may not hear it initially, that quote is the Christus Victor—the Victorious Christ—branch of atonement on the cross through and through.
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 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,” which I had submitted. And today’s cross word is a great one from so many perspectives: victory.
Victory is something we sing of often, not only during the season of Easter, although we certainly do that too with famous and beloved hymns like “Christ the Lord is Risen Today,” and “He Lives.” But we sing of it elsewhere too, in “Victory in Jesus” and “Because He Lives,” and more. Christ’s resurrection as a victory is interwoven into our tradition of song and music going back centuries. It should be familiar to many of us if for no other reason than that.
Yet I needed to lay the groundwork of the first three messages, on substitution, moral influence, and ransom before arriving at victory because of the relationship of those first three to the belief in the resurrection as a victory, and in Christ as a victor. Just as substitution owes its popularity to a book by a historical bishop—Anselm of Canterbury—so does Christus Victor owe at least some of its modern popularity to a book by a more contemporary bishop—Gustaf Aulen of the Church of Sweden. Aulen summed up the first three answers we have talked about so far—substitution, moral influence, and ransom—before moving on to Christ as a victor over death and evil.
Aulen takes what I described last week, of Jesus acting as a ransom to the devil that was never meant to be paid and thus liberating us from evil through theological sleight of hand, and updates it to suit his sensibilities, namely that Aulen sees no acceptable way to make Jesus into a ransom or freedom price without the whole thing becoming transactional rather than liberatory.
I’m simplifying here, but the objection—and it’s a reasonable one—is that once Jesus becomes a price, whether paid to God as a substitution or to the devil as a ransom, our salvation on the cross becomes a monetary or legal transaction rather than an act of divine freedom. Victory on the cross and in the resurrection cannot merely be transactional because economic and legal transactions are part of why people suffer to begin with. Which we know to be true, just look at how many people suffer under medical debts, credit card or payday loan debts, student debts, and more. So, if this sort of economic or legal transactional model contributes to people’s suffering, it cannot then be the source of their salvation. Christ must eclipse or overcome that model in favor of another.
The victorious Christ is a Jesus who is not a price to be paid at all, but a triumphant Savior through and through. He is not a price to be paid to either God or the devil, but rather makes possible our own salvation entirely on His own.
That is a long way around of arriving at our Scripture passage today, from 1 Peter, but I hope it makes so much more sense considering everything I just said. This is one of my favorite passages from either epistle attributed (likely incorrectly) to Peter, because it lays out so succinctly the stakes for the crucifixion and resurrection: if we call upon a God who judges all peoples according to their actions, we must conduct ourselves well. Yet so very often we do not. Our actions, both individually and collectively, actively contribute to the harm of others. We stand convicted for those actions.
Why? Why should a loving God convict us at all? Because when we forget that it was God who saved us, and who saves us still, we will almost always attribute our salvation to someone or something else. It could be silver and gold, as Peter names, it could be the empty lifestyles that gold and silver can buy us and that Peter similarly cites, it could be a Caesar, a politician or candidate for office, it could be our own selves. When we forget that salvation is offered up by God, and by God alone, bad things almost always tend to happen next.
When our faith and hope rests not in God but in, say, our interpretation of God—notice the difference there, because we have such a habit of trying to make God in our image rather than the other way around—when our faith and hope does not rest in God, we have not been fully set free by the silver or gold or Caesars or empty lifestyles. We remain in need of liberation. And God, through Christ, every day offers us that freedom.
But that offer of freedom must have something behind it—we need to have faith that God is indeed capable of freeing us from ourselves. The crucifixion is that something. The resurrection is that something. Even when executed on a cross, God is not permanently banished. God is beaten, bruised, bloodied, brought down and dying, but God is not defeated. God experiences death, God experiences defeat, but God refuses to remain dead, and God refuses to remain defeated.
Defeat is not a word we like in American English. Defeat does not jibe with our self-image as a great superpower, and especially as the predominant religious faith within a great superpower. But that too would come from the empty lifestyle Peter condemns. That aversion comes more from us being Americans than us being Christians. Christ experienced defeat and emerged victorious, yet still we have an aversion to defeat, as though it is impossible for victory to ever follow.
Maybe, just maybe, we need to be freed from that as well. That’s the beauty of this paradox—that to be set free from our aversion to defeat, we maybe have to experience it. We have to experience those moments of sadness and defeat that Stephen Colbert refers to as little emotional deaths.
And would it be so bad if we did? I am, by the by, preaching as much to myself and my own aversion to failure as I am to any one of you by this point. That aversion runs deep in me, contributing fullness rather than emptiness to my lifestyle.
Because an aversion to failure is not the same thing as striving for success. Striving for success means being willing, eager even, to leave your comfort zone even if you do not like it. But trying not to fail is all about the comfort zone. It contributes to an empty lifestyle rather than frees us from it. The aversion gives you nothing, equips you with nothing for when the sadness, when the defeat, when the emotional pain inevitably comes.
And when—not if, but when—it does, may you be held in the promise of a God who experienced death and tasted defeat, but then rose victoriously, as only that God could.
God went ahead of you not only into defeat, but into victory. When the women discover the empty tomb, the angels say that He is not there—that you will not find Him amid defeat. He has gone ahead of you to Galilee, to victory. There you will find Him. There may you find yourself as well.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
March 27, 2022