18
What Jesus Tells Us About God
WE’VE TAKEN QUITE a journey so far. We’ve traveled through prehistory and history, Hebrew and Christian scripture, and two thousand years in the life of the church, all the while considering the single most important event in Christianity. So far we’ve learned:
• The desire to sacrifice is rooted deep in the human evolutionary psyche.
• Israel’s sacrificial system (animal sacrifices) was an improvement on its neighbors’ (human sacrifices).
• Through the prophets, God expressed ambivalence about Israel’s sacrifices—while God valued the sacrifices, God prefers simple obedience.
• Jesus did not explicitly condemn the sacrificial system, but neither did he endorse it.
• The Gospel writers clearly saw Jesus’ death as a Passover sacrifice.
• Paul considered the crucifixion the single event through which all of faith and life should be understood, and he introduced the idea that Jesus’ death atoned for human sin.
• Theologians of the church introduced various ways to explain what God did in the crucifixion, each with his own model of the problem and the solution. Those models are the following:
Human sin took honor from God, and Jesus’ death made payment for that sin. Further, our sin incurred a penalty, and Jesus took the punishment that was meant for us.
Our sin made us subjects of Satan, but the crucifixion was God’s victory over the devil and evil.
Sin introduced a distance between humanity and God, and the cross is a magnet that draws us back to God.
Sin diminished our intended capacity to be one with God, and Jesus’ death restores our divinity.
Blood sacrifice allowed human society to develop by temporarily mitigating rivalries, but it institutionalized violence; on the cross, God held up a mirror, showing us that our sacrificial systems are ultimately bankrupt.
• Various other explanations of the death of Jesus have sprung up as well, each attempting to make sense of the reason that God would save the world through the death of his son.
Now it’s our turn to think through the reasons for Jesus’ death, both theological and personal. To put it bluntly, if there’s no good reason for the crucifixion, then there’s no good reason to be Christian. If the crucifixion doesn’t bring us closer to God and inspire us to be more loving to one another, then we may as well abandon the faith altogether.
But if Jesus’ death somehow brings us closer to God, then on this event everything hinges. If God can bring peace out of a violent act, then we should put our faith in this event—we should even follow Paul and make this event the central aspect of our lives.
If we can figure out how the crucifixion of Jesus is good news, then we can be proud to wear crosses around our necks.
We’ve seen how others make sense of Jesus’ death. Now it’s our turn.
Smelling the Cross
Remember the smell test from chapter 3? I’ve had a couple of real-life examples of that concept lately. Our garden emits more produce than we can eat or give away, so, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve taken up canning. My grandmother canned like crazy, but the expertise was lost in my parents’ generation. So I’ve had to teach myself, using books and YouTube. I’ve become quite proficient at pickling, especially cucumbers, beets, and beans. Our garden is bean-friendly, so I harvest bushels per year. And beans are not my family’s favorite.
So this year, I decided to branch out from pickling and put up cut green beans. I prepped my jars, lids, and rings. I picked about a bushel of beans, trimmed them, and blanched them in salt water. I put them in jars, poured in hot water, and immersed the sealed jars in boiling water for twenty minutes. After they cooled, I brought them downstairs and shelved them with all the pickled items.
A couple of weeks later, I was putting up some more pickles when I whiffed a rancid smell. I looked at all my jars and noticed one of the green bean jars had a bit of a gray tinge to the water. Then I had the experience that every canner dreads: I pushed down on the top of the lid, and I felt and heard a pop. That meant the seal had broken, and the beans were now exposed to the elements. When I checked the other jars, I heard pop after pop. Every jar of beans had gone bad, a dozen in all. I carried the jars upstairs, opened them, and poured them in the sink. The odor was overwhelming as I jammed the rotten beans down the disposal with a dish brush. I could still smell the stink on my hands two days later.
But that pales in comparison to what happened a few years ago. I had an old freezer in the basement, and it was full of ducks, pheasants, and grouse that I’d hunted and cleaned. While I was on vacation, the freezer died. In August. Never have I experienced a smell so vile. I vomited a couple of times while cleaning the rotten blood that had pooled at the bottom of the freezer. Finally, I gave up on cleaning it. I enlisted a couple of buddies, hauled the unredeemable freezer upstairs, and took it to the dump.
Our theological smell test will operate on a similar calculus. We’re going to establish what we know of God, Jesus, and their relationship from our investigation of the crucifixion. Along the way, we’re going to sniff and see if what we’re growing smells sweet or pungent.
And we’ll start with the simplest axiom in all the Bible: God is love.
This most famous line in the Bible comes from 1 John, a book we considered in chapter 9. Coming out of the same school of thought—if not by the same hand—as the Gospel of John, this letter is more of an essay or homily. Written around 100 CE, it’s among the latest and the most theologically sophisticated books in the Bible. It seems that a group of believers had strayed from the essential teachings about Jesus and left the church, and 1 John was written to remind the rest of the church to stick with the faith.
The simple and profound phrase God is love is repeated twice in the fourth chapter of 1 John. Loving one another is the thrust of the chapter, and love for fellow human beings is reinforced with the reminder that God is love. Consequently, there can be no love of God without love of others. So strong is this love, the author continues, that when perfected it will cast out all fear. Love conquers all.
Noteworthy for our purposes is that between the two instances of “God is love,” comes the phrase, “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.”1 You may recall from chapter 9 that this is one of only two times that this word for atonement shows up in the Bible. In the very early church, the love of God, Jesus’ death on the cross, and love for our fellow humans are inextricable from one another. They cannot be separated.
So this must be our first commitment: the crucifixion must show the love of God, and it must provoke us to greater love for one another.
This, the sweet smell of love, will be our test.
How God Shows Love
Of the various biblical metaphors for God, among the most prominent is that of a parent. In the Hebrew Bible, God is compared to a nursing mother and a mother who comforts her child.2 Jesus alludes to God as a hen who “gathers her brood under her wings,” and he regularly refers to God as his father.3 And in related analogies, God is compared to a bridegroom, a lover, and a spouse.4
In either the parent-child or the spousal relationship, one thing we know: the relationship will only flourish if each individual is given room to grow. There’s no better way to destroy a romance or drive away a teenage child than to smother. The latest term for this is the “helicopter parent”—someone who hovers over his or her child at every moment.
When human children are born, they rely completely on their parents. In fact, human children depend on their parents for survival much longer than other species do. Nevertheless, as children grow, their parents must pull back. Only through self-limitation do parents give their children the space—physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual—that they need to grow.
It’s not much different in a romantic relationship. At first, young lovers smother one another in love and affection, and they likely have a great deal of understanding with one another about this. But as time passes, an equilibrium develops: the public displays of affection decrease so that friends and family no longer roll their eyes; the couple doesn’t feel as if they have to spend every waking moment together; and the two become comfortable enough in their love that they don’t have to constantly profess it. However, if one partner keeps pressing, keeps smothering, the tolerance of the other partner is likely to run out.
Whether it’s parent-child or lover-beloved, boundaries and self-limitation are essential for relationships. Without them, relationships suffer and die. With them, they thrive.
As the biblical metaphors of parent and lover indicate, God’s story is a story of humility, of self-limitation. Before the creation of the cosmos, God was all there was. For there to even be anything other than God, God had to withdraw, to retreat. That is to say, God had to make room for something that was other-than-God. You and I and everything else that’s not God exist because God withdrew enough to make room for us. God began creating with an act of self-limitation.5 And that act set the course for God’s activity up to the present day.
This does not in any way compromise God’s freedom. In fact, core to the very notion of God is the idea that God must be a totally free and independent being. God can’t be contingent. For years, a billboard stood on the northbound side of Interstate 94 in central Minnesota. It read, “Unless You Confess, God Cannot Bless.” That theology works on the same pattern as the Payment and Victory theories. In each, some other law or framework precedes God and transcends God. In each, God is subservient to something else, either a law of justice or an epic struggle with Satan or an “if . . . then” conditional statement.
Let’s think about that billboard. If God is really unable to bless someone unless they confess their sins, then God is handcuffed by us; God is bound by human action. If the billboard were accurate, Jesus could not have welcomed the thief on the cross next to him into paradise that very day, for that man did not confess his sins. He simply asked that Jesus remember him when he came into his kingdom. The emperor Constantine, the first really famous person to convert to Christianity, waited to be baptized until he was on his deathbed in 337 CE. He didn’t want to take a chance that he might sin and tarnish his baptism; he wanted to meet his creator with a clean slate. While this was a somewhat common practice in the early church, it fell out of favor as centuries passed, and with good reason. Baptism isn’t some magic act that erases past sins and has no power over future sins. Baptism doesn’t work like that, and God doesn’t work like that. God cannot be reduced to a mechanistic formula.
God is by nature noncontingent because, as Jesus says, “for God all things are possible.”6 God has complete and utter freedom—in fact, more freedom than we can imagine. As human beings, we are limited by our nature. The frameworks to which we are held captive are obvious upon some reflection: language binds us, as do our bodies, our governments, our allegiances, our emotions, and finally death. Paul calls these frameworks principalities and powers, and philosophers call them structures and superstructures. Try as we might, we cannot free ourselves from their constraints, and we are thereby limited by them.
Not so for God, who by definition moves freely, unlimited by any supervening structure. This freedom set the Israelites’ Yahweh apart from their neighbors’ gods. The gods and demiurges of Mesopotamia fought with one another until the cosmos was birthed out of their violent conflict, and the gods of Greece and Rome notoriously acted like petulant children, even mating with humans when they felt the urge.
Israel’s theological innovation was the belief that there is one God, and that God created the cosmos freely, independently, and out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo). God was not forced to create out of conflict, as in other creation myths, nor did he spurt us out in a mistake. We do not exist because a Titan created us from clay and then stole fire from the gods, as in the Greek myth of Prometheus. In Israel’s telling, our creation was voluntary and deliberate. It was an act of love by God, and love is neither coerced nor required.
Danger stalks us when we anthropomorphize God or God’s activity. Nevertheless, let me venture to say that we know something of the nature of love based on our human experience. Love is, by its nature, self-sacrificial. To love another, I must limit myself. Anyone who has loved or been loved knows this to be true. In order to love my spouse, my children, my parents, and my friends, my ego must retreat. That’s a constant challenge and a constant necessity. But love doesn’t work any other way. Love makes space for the other to thrive. Without that space, my desire to care for another is merely an extension of my ego. Without that space, others don’t feel loved; they feel swallowed. Think of a time that you’ve been at a dinner party, and there’s been one guest who, as they say, sucked all the air out of the room. That person’s ego was so big that no one else could make a point or start a new conversation. The way that true, healthy conversation happens is when there is a genuine back-and-forth, and that means sometimes biting your tongue, pulling back, and letting someone else have the floor. When we engage in this kind of self-limitation, we allow those around us to flourish.
So it’s not such a stretch to claim that God, in the act of creation, began with an act of self-limitation. God withdrew his essence so that something other than God—something with which God could enter into relationship—could be born. While we can only guess as to God’s motivation for creating us,7 we can conclude that God’s act of creation was an act of self-limiting love.
God’s very first act was an act of humble love, an act in which God retreated and gave us room to live. In complete freedom, God gave up an aspect of noncontingency. From that day forward, God was bound to creation. Again, this was a free act by the sovereign God. But the Hebrew Bible is clear that God is in an interactive relationship with Israel. There’s a back-and-forth between them. The God of the Hebrew Bible is not the immaterial Mind of the Greek philosophers, hovering above the ether. No, Israel’s God is involved in the world, engaging with the people, responding to their cries. God is now somehow contingent, for when Abraham and Moses (and you and I) deeply engage with God, God responds. In the language of the Hebrew Bible, “God changes his mind.”8
God shows us love by giving us freedom. God even shows us love by allowing us to influence him.
The Freedom of God, the Freedom of Jesus
Could there have been another way for God to save us, or did he have to kill his son?
The question comes in different forms and at different times, but every youth pastor knows it. In my fifteen years as a youth pastor, I heard it often. Teenagers are renowned for their ability to cut to the heart of the matter, to ask questions that adults find impolitic. No matter when the question came, or in what form, I found it challenging to answer. Behind that question lies all sorts of presumptions about God’s freedom to do whatever God wants, God’s relationship to time, God’s plans for the world, and the relationship between the first and second persons in the Trinity (Father and Son). And any answer to the question is similarly laden with assumptions. To answer this question is to begin peeling away the layers of an onion: there’s always another layer beneath.
If, on the one hand, God could have chosen any way he wanted to save the world, it’s discomfiting to think that he chose his son’s death as the way. Wouldn’t a loving God choose a nonviolent way to redeem us?
If, on the other hand, God had no other choice but to save the world through the death of his son, we’re left to wonder how powerful he can really be. Is the God of the universe so helpless that he’s limited to one option?
And then there’s the altogether complex set of questions around the relationship between Jesus and God. As I was asked by numerous teens over the years, “Wait, you said that Jesus is God’s son, and you also said that Jesus is God. How does that work?” Through our six questions in previous chapters, we’ve already concluded that God and Jesus must be united in their work on the cross. But we’ll also have to consider just how this relationship works in order to determine what happened between them when Jesus died.
The adolescents in my youth group saw this dilemma, and they didn’t want to be stuck on its horns. They wanted an answer, and I thought they deserved one. But I struggled to give them a response that was satisfying, because I wasn’t satisfied with the answers I’d heard. Some Christians are not bothered by this conundrum, but I was (which led ultimately to this book).
My friend, Ron, asked me about my progress on the book the other day, and that got us talking about Jesus’ death. He asked how people have traditionally interpreted the crucifixion, and I replied that they often say that God had no choice; that the only way to atone for human sin was the death of a perfect, sinless God-man.
“That’s ridiculous!” Ron exclaimed. “God set up the whole deal, so God could just change the rules. It makes no sense to say that God had no other choice. Isn’t the whole definition of God that God can do whatever God wants?”
Ron’s rhetorical question puts a fine point on it. Our definitions of God hinge on God’s power and freedom. But part of freedom is the freedom to give up that freedom. That’s what God started in creation, and that’s what God did most poignantly in the birth of Jesus. Let’s return to a passage we’ve already encountered twice, in which Paul writes poetically about God’s humility in becoming human in Jesus of Nazareth:
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.9
Sorting out the relationship between God and Jesus is one of the trickiest adventures in all of faith. Traditionally, Christians have believed that God was fully in Jesus yet still retained some sense of independence from Jesus—that’s why and how Jesus prayed to God. This conundrum is solved with the doctrine of the Trinity, which states that God has always existed in three parts, or persons, and it was only one of these three persons—called the logos or the Word or the Son—who inhabited Jesus.
If we can hold this concept of the Trinity, even tentatively, we can look again at the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and see that Jesus was granted full autonomy by God to move about in the world as he chose. The Gospel writers often state that Jesus did or said something “in accordance with the scripture” or so “that the scriptures might be fulfilled,” but they never give us the impression that Jesus is a puppet and the Father is the puppet master. Jesus wasn’t pushed from town to town and eventually to Jerusalem by the invisible hand of God. And Jesus wasn’t nailed to the cross by God. That much the Gospels make clear.
But where was God the Father when Jesus died? We might be ready to say that God did not kill Jesus, but if he stood back and allowed Jesus to be executed, isn’t that almost as bad?
Let’s return to the parenting metaphor so common in scripture. When I was in therapy during my divorce, an issue that brought up lots of emotion for me was my three kids—at the time they were eight, seven, and four. I struggled mightily with the idea that I wouldn’t be able to tuck them in every night, attend every swimming lesson and doctor’s appointment, and bandage every skinned knee. I worried about the rules and environment in their mom’s house. I wept from missing them so much. Through it all, my therapist coached me toward my new reality, that I wouldn’t be as involved in their lives as I had been. I had no control over the other house they lived in, only in my own house and the time they spent with me. Like all divorced parents, I had to give up some of my control over my kids’ lives well before they went off to college. Circumstances demanded it.
I don’t want to make a one-to-one correlation between human parents and God, but the Bible gives us enough backing to claim, at least cautiously, this kind of parental relationship: that God the Father withdrew enough to let Jesus follow his own fate. We so often experience this in our own lives—we wish that God would intervene and help us on a test or cure our friend of cancer. But God doesn’t, and we fail the test or the cancer follows its terrible course. Likewise, Jesus experienced the vicissitudes of human life, with all of its joys and its sorrows. In the desert at the beginning of his ministry, Jesus refused the devil’s temptation that he throw himself from a cliff and rely on his heavenly Father to send angels to rescue him. And at the end of Jesus’ ministry, God resisted the temptation to intervene and save his son from a terrible fate.
Here is what I have learned. God is love, and love means freedom. It means autonomy. And it means that Jesus was beholden to the exigencies of this world just as much as you and I are. God did not show a lack of love by refusing to intervene and stop Jesus’ execution. Instead, God showed an extraordinary measure of humble love by allowing Jesus to be fully immersed in the human experience, holding nothing back and encountering nothing less than torture and death.
The Bible is silent about how God the Father experienced the death of Jesus, but we can guess from all the parental language between the two that God the Father surely grieved as he watched his son being hung on a cross—just as God grieves now whenever one of his children is hung, lynched, tortured, or otherwise sacrificed.
And if you believe, as I do, that God was actually in Jesus, then we can go one step further and say that God actually experienced all these things, too.