An Audio Recording of the Full Service : But this I know.... (Why Did Jesus Die?) - Dr Tony Moodie
The Sermon today includes a comment on the popular modern hymn "In Christ Alone" by Townend and Getty. About 15 years ago the Methodist Church in Britain published a new hymn book. The committee that worked on it wanted to include ‘In Christ alone’. They recognised it as an outstanding modern hymn not just for the words but also the tune, composed by Keith Getty. But the committee asked for permission to change the words, ‘Till on that cross as Jesus died / the wrath of God was satisfied’. They wanted to change the words to, ‘the love of God was satisfied’. The request was refused and the reason given was that the words, ‘the wrath of God was satisfied’ are supported by Scripture and by theological tradition. So, ‘In Christ alone’ wasn’t included in the new Methodist hymn book. The Methodist Church in Britain wasn’t the only Church with with concerns about that line of the hymn. About the same time, the Presbyterian Church of the USA requested permission to include it in their new hymn book. They wanted to change the words to, ‘Till on that cross as Jesus died/the love of God was magnified.’ The Presbyterian committee thought that getting permission would be a formality because the hymn had already been published with those altered words in another hymn book, used by some American Baptists. But the publishers of that hymn book had slipped up. They hadn’t requested permission, and that caused them a lot of problems. In the end the Presbyterian committee issued a statement saying that the song had been removed from the list of contents for their new hymn book. They said that they had done that with deep regret but they couldn’t support the idea that Jesus died on the cross to appease God’s anger. The Methodist committee’s reasons were pretty much the same. Is God wrathful or angry, and does that anger need to be appeased or satisfied before God can accept us? When I was about 18 years old I left the Anglican church that I’d been brought up in, and started attending a different church. I felt quite vulnerable there. Most of the people in the church were well instructed in the doctrines of their faith while I didn’t really know what I believed, and I wasn’t sure if I believed what everyone else in the church believed. They seemed to have all the answers but I was struggling with questions about the Christian faith that troubled me. Some of those questions came up in the Bible study group that I joined, and that met before the morning worship service. I liked and admired the leader of the Bible study group, John. John was one of the most attractive Christians I’ve known. But I couldn’t make sense of the answer that he gave one Sunday to the question, ‘Why did Jesus die?’. John said that although God loves us, the justice of God demands that we should be punished for our sins. And so, instead of of us being punished, our punishment fell on Jesus. Or, in the words of the hymn, ‘on that cross as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied’. I’ll come back to those words, and the explanation of why Jesus died. For now I’ll say something about another hymn that speaks of Christ’s death on the cross. I was familiar with the hymn, ‘There is a green hill far away’ from when I was a child. And I’d sung it often without being bothered by what it said about the death of Jesus. To be honest I’d never thought much about its words: There is a green hill far away Without a city wall; Where the dear Lord was crucified Who died to save us all. We may not know, we cannot tell, What pains He had to bear; But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered there. He died that we might be forgiven, He died to make us good; That we might go at last to heaven Saved by His precious blood. If I had stopped to think about the words of the hymn I might have had questions. How are we saved by the death of Christ? How are we made good by Jesus dying? It’s not wrong to ask questions. From the earliest days of Christianity, Christian thinkers have asked questions like that, and they have tried to provide answers to those questions. But the words of ‘There is a green hill far away’ and the words of ‘In Christ alone’ are a little different. In the old hymn there’s no mention of wrath. It just says, ‘He died that we might be forgiven’ … ‘Saved by his precious blood’. Unlike the hymn, in Christ alone, it doesn’t explain how Christ’s death on the cross makes it possible for us to go to heaven. It just says, ‘we believe it was for us he hung and suffered there’. That’s similar to the New Testament. The New Testament says that the birth, life, death and resurrection of Christ has somehow changed our relationship with God. But in general it doesn’t give much in the way of explanations of how that happens. The hymn, ‘In Christ alone’, does give an explanation – in those words ‘the wrath of God was satisfied’ even though it’s very brief. It’s a summary of the explanation that John gave to the Bible study group: By sinning we break God’s laws and that incurs God’s wrath, so we deserve to be punished. But God wants us to be saved, so Jesus died on the cross in our place, taking the punishment instead of us. In technical theological language that’s called the penal substitutionary theory of the Atonement. It’s part of the theological tradition that was referred to in the reasons for not changing the words of the hymn ‘In Christ alone’, and it’s one of a number of different theological explanations, or theories, of how Christ saves us. It isn’t wrong to want explanations – or to give them. Christian theologians through the centuries have done their best to explain their belief that Christ came to save the world. Their explanations or theories all draw from Scripture in one way or another although each theory tends to draw on different verses of Scripture to develop its explanation of how Christ saves us. One explanation of why Christ died, that was popular amongst Christians in the centuries immediately after the time of Jesus, was quite different. It was based on the verse in Mark’s Gospel where Jesus says that he did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. Early Christian theologians took the idea that Christ gave himself as a ransom and developed it into a theory to explain how Christ’s death saves us. They said that, because of sin, the human race was held prisoner by the devil. And when Jesus was arrested and crucified he was giving himself as a ransom to the devil, so that the devil would release all those who he held prisoner. In the ransom theory, instead of Christ paying the price for our sin by satisfying the wrath of God, Christ paid the price for us to be released from imprisonment to the devil. That may have been helpful as a way to explain Christ’s death to some people but for others it raised more questions that needed to be answered. And that’s true of every explanation – every theory about why Jesus died. This doesn’t mean that we should give up trying to understand things. It’s good to try to understand things, and explanations can be helpful up to a point, although some explanations may be better than others. No explanation is completely satisfactory, and it’s probably not a good idea anyway to try to impose our explanations on other people. This is where the non-subscribing principle is helpful. The NSPCI statement of faith says that the faith of this denomination is governed by the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments but it doesn’t prescribe any particular way of understanding Scripture. The NSPCI leaves it to members of the Church to interpret the Scriptures themselves in the light of their own consciences and using their own reasoning abilities. I would like to add, for myself, that we also need to read and understand the Bible through the Spirit of Christ living in our hearts and minds. But that’s a topic for a different sermon on another occasion. The important point is that Non-Subscribing Presbyterians don’t have to sign up to any particular explanation or theory. All the theories that theologians develop to try to explain why Christ died are based on images that they find in Scripture. The Bible uses many different images of what the saving work of Christ is like: it’s like a ransom, it’s like a debt being paid for us, it’s like the penalty for law-breaking being cancelled, it’s like the sacrifice of a lamb in the temple, and so on. Our Old Testament reading from Isaiah ch. 53, about the Suffering Servant of the Lord, was taken as a prophecy about Christ from the earliest days of Christianity. In that passage there are several different images of what the suffering of the Servant of God is about: He has borne our infirmities, he has carried our diseases, he was wounded for our transgressions, he bore the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. I’m sure that some of those images were in the mind of the author of that old hymn, ‘There’s a green hill far away’, when she wrote the words, ‘we believe it was for us he hung and suffered there’. The hymn ‘In Christ alone’ is based on some of the images of Isaiah 53 – he was wounded for our transgressions, he bore the punishment that made us whole. It doesn’t pick up on other images from Isaiah 53 – he has borne our infirmities, he has carried our diseases, by his bruises we are healed. I’m going to say more about just one biblical image, not one from Isaiah ch. 53. It’s an image in the passage we read from ch. 2 of the Letter to the Ephesians. It’s the image of a dividing wall that has been demolished. The first thing we should notice is that it isn’t concerned with judgement. It’s concerned with relationships. It’s not about laws that have been broken. It’s about walls that have been broken, broken down – walls that have separated human beings from God and from each other, and that have now been demolished. It’s about broken relationships and about relationships being restored. It’s about reconciliation between human beings and God, and it’s about reconciliation between human beings and other human beings. Verse 14 of Ephesians ch. 2 says that Christ has destroyed the dividing wall that separated Jews and Gentiles. But the more basic problem is the barrier that has grown up between human beings and God. Verse 13 says, ‘in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ’. Through the life and death of Christ, the wall between humanity and God has come down, and so all other dividing walls that the human race has allowed to be built up must fall too. To change the image a bit, we could say that through Christ, God has cleared away the rubbish that we’ve put in the way of our relationship with God. And, because of that, we have the opportunity also to clear away the rubbish that we’ve allowed to separate us from other people the divisions between Jews and Gentiles, but also the feuds and jealousies that divide families and neighbours, the hatreds that divide nations All those, and still others, can be cleared away. In Ephesians ch. 2 we aren’t given a theory to explain all this. We’re given a picture. And it’s vital for our spiritual and emotional health that we see that in this picture the blockage to our relationship with God is all on our side. There’s no wrath on God’s side, holding back God’s love for us. Although there is wrath – but it’s on our side. It’s there in the injustice, exploitation, oppression, conflict, aggression, violence, cruelty, and all the other things that are part of the mess that this world is in. On God’s side, there is only love, because God is love. The New Testament doesn’t only tell us that God’s love breaks down the barriers between us and God. It tells us that if we open ourselves to God’s love we will be enabled to do what is needed on our side to break down the barriers that divide people from each other. And often there a lot of work to be done. Ephesians ch. 2 says that all this is made possible through Christ, through the cross. If we have inquiring minds we will inevitably ask, ‘But how does that actually work?’ ‘How does the death of one man, Jesus, dying on a cross, bring all this about?’. Our final hymn is a meditation on the death of Christ. It keeps coming back to the words, ‘I cannot tell“. When I was preparing this sermon, I was originally going to say that I would leave it there, with those words, ‘I cannot tell’. I cannot tell how the death of Christ saves us. But there are clues in the New Testament as to what was involved in the life, and death, and resurrection of Christ. I’ll end by very briefly pointing to just one of those clues. In 2nd Corinthians ch. 5 verse 19 we read this: God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. God wasn’t somewhere way up there, looking down on Jesus. God was in Christ, in the life of Christ on earth and in the death of Christ. God, who is through all and within all, according to Ephesians ch. 3, is in Christ, and in us. To use another image, God is the fabric of everything that is. And what God does in Christ, God does everywhere. But I must stop here before getting into yet another theory about the death of Christ to add to all those other theories. Perhaps, our final hymn does give the best answer to the question, ‘How does Christ’s death break down the walls that divide us from God and from each other?’, I cannot tell ... I cannot tell how silently he suffered, as with his peace he graced this place of tears, But this I know, he heals the broken-hearted, ... and stays our sin, … and calms our lurking fear. Amen.
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