“The Son of man came … to give his life a ransom for many”
The Lenten Sunday Gospels may be seen to anticipate and to prepare us for the intensity of the Passion in Holy Week. For then we read through all four of the Gospel accounts of the Passion, a remarkable feature of the eucharistic lectionary in the classical Books of Common Prayer. It begins on Palm Sunday with Matthew’s account of the Passion.
The Temptations of Christ on the First Sunday prepare us for the reading of the Passion from Mark’s Gospel, beginning on Monday in Holy Week, which is framed by the breaking of the alabaster box of ointment by which Christ is anointed and by the tears of Peter at his betrayal of Christ. It includes Christ’s further temptation in Gethsemane and the betrayal of both Judas and Peter who succumb to the forms of human weakness and temptation, we might say. On the Second Sunday in Lent, the Gospel story of the Canaanite Woman, a testing of the disciples and a testing of her faith in perseverance, anticipates in some sense the continuation of the Passion from Mark in Christ’s cry of dereliction in the depth of the Passion, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me,” but which nonetheless leads to the faith profession of the Centurion that “truly this man was the Son of God.” As the woman said, “Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.”
The Gospel for the Third Sunday of Christ’s casting out a devil only to be accused of being demonic himself anticipates the beginning of the Passion according to St. Luke on Holy Wednesday with all of its intensity not only in the picture of Christ’s agony in Gethsemane but also in his remark to Peter about the temptations of Satan in Peter’s betrayal and, even more, his look of compassion that brings Peter to the tears in repentance in recalling Christ’s words to him. A powerful story powerfully told. The story of the miraculous feeding in the wilderness last Sunday, set in the context of the Passover, anticipates the beginning of the Triduum Sacrum on Maundy Thursday which explicitly connects the last supper to the Passion of Christ. The continuation of Luke’s Passion presents us with three of the seven last words of Christ from the Cross, especially the last word: “Father into thy hands, I commend my spirit.” He who carries himself in his own hands in the institution of the eucharist commends himself and our humanity into the hands of the Father.
Today’s readings on Passion Sunday anticipate Good Friday with its emphasis on the theology of the atonement. Throughout Holy Week in the Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer we read the Passion according to St. John in all of its fullness. The Sunday evening Office readings in Lent immerse us in the Passion according to St. Mark and St. Luke (Year I and Year II respectively). In every way, Lent and Holy Week concentrate our attention on the Passion of Christ and the nature and meaning of our participation in that Passion. It is about human redemption understood in terms of the theology of the atonement, our being made at one with God. But that doesn’t mean that God becomes less or other than God or that we become less or other than human.
Atonement turns on the recognition of the realities of human sin and the sense of separation from God which that entails. Cranmer’s Homily of Justification underscores an important reformed emphasis that there are three interrelated features to what he calls the “righteousness of justification,” an interesting phrase which locates the Prayer Book reformed catholicism within the larger dimensions of the theory of the atonement as developed by Augustine and Anselm and as biblically grounded. There is, he says, “God’s part,” “Christ’s part,” and “our part,” but all interconnected. “They must,” he says, “go together in our justification.”
The failure to hold these together in creative tension has been the modern problem in not appreciating the theological and philosophical concept of the justitia dei, the justice of God which is the underlying principle of right order in creation and with respect to our end in God. That we have no righteousness in ourselves to help ourselves is the key reformed insight that belongs to the concept of justification by faith alone. That faith is Christ in his sacrifice which grounds all our doings in him and not in ourselves apart from him. As Cranmer puts it:
Upon God’s part, his great mercy and grace: upon Christ’s part, justice; that is, the satisfaction of God’s justice, or the price of our redemption, by the offering of his body, and shedding of his blood, with the fulfilling of the Law perfectly and thoroughly: and upon our part true and lively faith in the merits of Jesus Christ, which yet is not ours, but by God’s working in us.
The key insight is that mercy and justice are not opposed but united in God and in God for us. This complements what we see in today’s readings about Christ. He is, Hebrews says, “the Mediator of the new covenant” who “by his own blood,” the blood which belongs to the humanity of Christ, “entered in once into the holy place,” a reference to the holy of holies of the Temple but more importantly to the inner heart of God, “that by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first covenant, they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance,” the idea of our end with God and in God. It is a very potent passage and highlights what we also see in the Gospel about Christ as the Son of man, “giv[ing] his life a ransom for many.”
The word “ransom” (λυτρον) has all sorts of connotations for us that come down to the idea of a kind of exchange. But what kind of exchange? Is it simply something juridical and procedural, something that belongs to our human and partial sense of justice and fairness? Even a kind of pay-off and a negotiation with evil? No. It means “the price of redemption” and “atonement.” This catapults us into the more profound theological and philosophical idea of God’s eternal justice which cannot be reduced to the limited forms of human justice and human emotion as if God were subject to us. The concept refers to the right order of God’s will in creation and in himself which is the foundation of creation and of all social and political structures and laws. They do not stand apart and independent from the eternal order of being but participate in it.
There are three theories of atonement which in modern times have become disconnected from one another when in truth they are interrelated and belong together. The falling apart has very much to do with a kind of reductionism: reducing God to our interests and concerns. Like the mother of the sons of Zebedee, we may think we know what we desire and what is good for us and for our children but, as Jesus points out, “ye know not what ye ask.” We see, as Paul put it on Quinquagesima Sunday, “in a glass darkly.” The cross in Passiontide is veiled, present but not fully understood by us. We are still in pilgrimage, still and always on the journey of understanding.
This is further emphasized in Jesus’ first word from the Cross: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” There can be no greater and more gentle rebuke of our shortcomings and failures than this word which convicts our consciences and counters the forms of human pride. As Christ’s response indicates, it is not about power and domination but about humility and service, a humility and service that is grounded in the forms of our participation in his Passion. It is here spoken of in terms of his baptism in which we too are baptized and in terms of his cup, a reference to the Passover, and to the eucharist in which we too participate.
The overcoming of sin and death is through Christ’s sacrifice. This is one aspect of the theory of the atonement which calls attention to the victory over evil. This becomes known as the classical theory but it is very much connected (and not separate) from the idea of proprietary or substitutionary sacrifice which is also scripturally based in Christ “being made sin for us,” and “bearing our sins” and overcoming them through the cross. This becomes known as the “juridical” or “forensic” theory of atonement often associated with Anselm. The third theory has to do with Christ as example, an example to us for our lives in faith, a view sometimes associated with Abelard in the Medieval period and with various Enlightenment thinkers as well. Both the juridical view and the exemplarist view, when disconnected from the theological and philosophical concept of the righteousness of God, as the principle of right order grounded in the eternal law of God, become simply forms of human thinking that make God subject to us.
This distorts the teaching of both the Fathers, the Medieval theologians and the Reformed thinkers and misses the scriptural basis for our atonement in Christ. All three aspects of redemption are held together in a kind of synthesis. Augustine, for instance, in the Confessions (X. 43) says:
But there is a true Mediator, whom in your secret mercy you have shown to men. You sent him so that by his example they too might learn humility. He is the “Mediator between God and men, Jesus Christ, who is a man” (1 Tim. 2:5), and he appeared on earth between men, who are sinful and mortal, and God, who is immortal and just. Like men he was mortal: like God, he was just. And because the reward of the just is life and peace, he came so that by his own justice, which is his in union with God, he might make null the death of the wicked whom he justified, by choosing to share their death. He was known to holy men in ancient time, so that they might be saved through faith in his passion to come, just as we are saved through faith in the passion he suffered long ago. For as man, he is our Mediator; but as the Word of God, he is not an intermediary between God and man because he is equal with God, and God with God and together with him one God.
As Fr. Crouse pointed out, all the characteristic elements of the atonement are held together here in synthesis: the divine justitia, propitiatory and substitutionary sacrifice, satisfaction, and example. They are all based upon the understanding of Christ as true God and true Man and upon our thinking through what belongs to each and in what way. To attend to this teaching counters the contemporary tendencies to reduce everything to ourselves whether emotionally or in the vanity of our projects and desires. “Ye know not what ye ask,” is Christ’s gentle rebuke to us in the prison of ourselves in order to gather us to himself and to his life in us.
It is not too much to say that this teaching and the language of the atonement itself is what we pray in the great eucharistic prayer. Jesus Christ having taken “our nature upon him, and having suffered “death upon the Cross for our redemption”, “made there” – there upon the Cross – “by his one oblation of himself once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world; and did institute, and in his holy Gospel command us to continue, a perpetual memorial of that his precious death, until his coming again.”
For he has come as our atonement, the one who makes us one with God in his saving work for our redemption; in short, “to give his life a ransom for many.” The point is made by Richard Hooker whose words, perhaps, may help us as we enter into Passiontide.
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.
This is simply the deep logic of the atonement and the logic of our participation in it.
“The Son of man came … to give his life a ransom for many”
Fr. David Curry
Passion Sunday, 2023