“For this cause he is the Mediator of the new covenant”
For centuries in the Western Churches, the Passion Sunday Gospel was from John 8. 46-59. That passage highlighted two things: the identity of Jesus with the revelation of God to Moses as “I am Who I am” (Ex. 3.14); and the rejection of Jesus by the Jews. “Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.’ So they took up stones to throw at him” (Jn. 8. 58,59). That conclusion of the chapter complements its beginning in the story of the woman taken in adultery which is a critique and an attack on Jesus through her. “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” (Jn. 8. 7). The images speak to the deeper realities of human sin. We are meant to see ourselves in the beginning and the end as those who condemn others and reject God; in short, as sinners. That ancient Gospel reading also complemented the Epistle reading from Hebrews to highlight the nature of Christ as the Mediator of the new covenant. As Mediator he is both God and Man.
The thematic idea that lies at the heart of the Passion is atonement, the idea, as Paul puts it in 2 Cor. 5, “that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation” (vs. 19). That idea continues in the Gospel reading which is the Matthean account of the Gospel from Luke read on Quinquagesima Sunday about going up to Jerusalem. With Matthew the focus is on two things: our knowing and unknowing about what we truly seek and desire, on the one hand, and the sacrificial service of Christ who has come “not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mt. 20. 29), on the other hand.
Atonement belongs to the rich seam of reflection about human redemption. It concerns the relation of the divine and the human, of God and the world, of divine justice and mercy, of human sin and evil. Thus it belongs to the core elements of theological thinking. Passion Sunday inaugurates deep Lent which is our attempt to ponder the mystery of human redemption as divine love, the love which seeks the reconciliation of all things to God. But this can only even begin to make sense only if we take seriously the idea of sin which is really about taking seriously human agency and divine truth. The awareness of our separation from God belongs to a deeper reflection about the reality of the human experience in a world of uncertainty and confusion and of our own hearts in disarray. The radical nature of this separation is the infinity of sin, if I may put it this way. Sin creates an infinite barrier between us and God and between ourselves, our world and one another. By infinite I mean a chasm, an abyss, which we make and cannot unmake, a negative infinite.
To realize this is the beginning of the discovery of the truth of human agency as grounded in God, the positive infinite. Passion Sunday and Passiontide opens out to us the infinite justice of God which is his mercy and truth in the redemption of creation, God reconciling the world to himself through the pageant of Christ’s Passion. The focus is on the Mediator, Jesus as both God and Man, and on the idea of reconciliation as justification: what God in Christ does for us and in us. Everything turns on the relation of the divine and human in the person of Jesus Christ.
The work of human redemption is both divine and human. This is the point of the reading from Hebrews seen in relation to the Old Testament images of sacrifice which are viewed proleptically, in anticipation of Calvary in the Christian understanding. “If any one sin,” as the last of the Comfortable Words of the liturgy puts it, “we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the propitiation for our sins” (1 Jn. 2, 1,2). Propitiation is the atoning sacrifice, the love which makes us at one with God and with the infinite justice of his creation. It is atonement, the true harmony and unity of the Creator and the created, accomplished and made visible in the sacrifice of Christ, true God and true man. This idea lies at the heart of the Christian Faith and belongs to the logic of our participation in the life of God. To take sin seriously is to take God seriously.
The paradox is that it also highlights the dignity of our humanity, not through presumption and pretension, as signalled in the Gospel reading from Matthew in the request of the mother of Zebedee’s children, seeking places of privilege, domination, and entitlement for her sons, but through the dignity of humility in service and ministry. Human dignity is not found in the desire for power and attention but in loving service. Nothing could be more counter-culture. That idea of service is highlighted in the Epistle and Gospel as sacrifice, the atoning sacrifice of Christ. “By his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us,” as Hebrews states. The Son of man came “to give his life a ransom for many,” as Jesus says about himself in Matthew’s account.
He is at once the sacrifice for sin that overcomes the infinite abyss of sin and he is the exemplar of sacrificial service for us. The term ‘ransom’ belongs to what will later be known as ‘substitutionary atonement’. He takes upon himself our sins in his love for the Father: such is the positive infinite which cancels the negative infinity of human sin. This is to view the world and our humanity in the context of the infinite justice and goodness of God who alone negates the empty folly of sin and evil. It is, to be sure, the triumph of God over all that opposes the goodness of his will but it is accomplished by the one who is both God and man, Jesus Christ. The Passion, in this sense, is the further explication of the Incarnation, the unfolding of its deeper meaning.
As the great Anglican theologian, Richard Hooker, explains: “The world’s salvation was without the incarnation of the Son of God a thing impossible, not simply impossible, but impossible it being presupposed that the will of God was no otherwise to have it saved than by the death of his own Son. Wherefore taking to himself our flesh, and by his incarnation making it his own flesh, he had now of his own although from us what to offer unto God for us” (Lawes, V. LI.3). In ways that echo the Patristic insight of Athanasius that “Christ borrowed a body so that he might borrow a death,” Hooker notes that “Christ took manhood that by it he might be capable of death whereunto he humbled himself.” His humility is an example to us and one aspect of the atonement.
Hooker goes further to highlight the affective aspect of this saving act. “He humbled himself … because manhood is the proper subject of compassion and feeling pity, which maketh the sceptre of Christ’s regency even in the kingdom of heaven amiable.” This further emphasizes the necessary interplay of the divine and human in Christ both for us and in us but also in God himself. It holds in creative tension the power and the goodness of God without surrendering the one to the other. It upholds, in other words, the justicia dei, the justice of God both in itself and for itself and for us and creation. “He without our nature could not on earth suffer for the sins of the world, doth now also by means thereof both make intercession to God for sinners and exercise dominion over all men with a true, a natural, and a sensible touch of mercy.”
“Mercy seasons justice” or perfects it, as Portia famously says in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, but mercy also affects us, moves us to the love which reconciles and overcomes the fatal separation that is the infinity of sin as injustice. The justice of God is his goodness in himself and in what he wills both as that is revealed explicitly in the pageant of the Passion and as it is grasped by our thinking upon the idea of God not just as all powerful in arbitrary ways, which is just as much a human presumption as the attempt to subject God to our ways and to make him accountable to us, but as all good. The theology of the atonement holds together not only the divine and the human but intellect and will on both the divine and human levels. Atonement is the dynamic of that relationship. The atoning sacrifice of Christ is our worship. As Cranmer puts it, we “worship continually in mystery what was once offered for the price of sin.”
We discover sin as our separation from the absolute goodness of God most fully in contemplating God’s infinite overcoming of our infinite presumption. Sin does not only deny God; it is the human parody of God. It is about our presuming to be God and thus denying the truth of our humanity not only as made in God’s image but as participating in God’s love. The atonement as reconciliation signals the deeper vocation of our humanity as sacrificial service which is nothing less than the reconciling love of God for us and in us, the love which is God himself. We come, as our hymn puts it, “mindful of the love/ that bought us, once for all on Calvary’s Tree” (Hymn # 221).
Look, Father, look on his anointed face
And only look on us as found in him;
Look not on our misusing of thy grace,
Our prayer so languid, and our faith so dim:
For lo! Between our sins and their reward
We set the Passion of thy Son our Lord.
This is to take seriously the love which seeks to move us.
“For this cause he is the Mediator of the new covenant”
Fr. David Curry
Passion Sunday, 2021