Our liturgy for the Great Three Days – Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Day – encompasses the Last Supper, the Passion, Crucifixion, Death and burial of Jesus, and the Resurrection. It is one continuous story that we separate into three different liturgies over three days.
One of the Bible readings for Easter Day this year is from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, and in it Paul makes the claim that “Christ died for our sins . . .”
What might it mean that Jesus died for our sins?
One way of understanding it is in the context of what is sometimes referred to in Christianity as ‘The Fall’, the transition of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden from a state of innocent obedience to God, to a state of guilty disobedience. As a consequence of the ‘Original Sin’ of Adam and Eve, humankind became separated from God. The death of Jesus was seen as a sacrifice to God which erased the sins of humankind and reconciled humankind to God.
This understanding led to the development of the Doctrine of Atonement, which in western Christian theology, describes the belief that human beings can be reconciled to God through the sacrificial suffering and death of Jesus. Atonement is derived from the Middle English word atone, meaning “agreed” or “at one”, and refers to the forgiving or pardoning of sin in general and original sin in particular through the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus.
At the heart of the Doctrine of Atonement is the ancient Jewish ritual associated with the holiest day of the Jewish year – Yom Kippur – which actually means “day of atonement”. The Book of Leviticus prescribes the process by which two goats are to be offered to God as a sacrifice for sin. The two goats represented the two ways in which God would deal with the sins of Israel: (1) He would forgive their sin through the first goat, which was sacrificed, and (2) he would remove their guilt through the second goat, the scapegoat, that was sent into the wilderness. In this ritual the High Priest would lay his hands on the second goat and transfer the guilt of the people of Israel to the goat. The goat was then driven into the wilderness thereby “taking away” the guilt of the people. This ritual was to be repeated every year. So we can see how the death of Jesus came to be understood in this way.
However that type of understanding probably makes very little sense in the twenty-first century, especially among people who have little or no comprehension of the Christian faith. What message does it send them about God? Did Jesus really need to be sacrificed before humankind could be reconciled to God? If that is true, then God doesn’t sound terribly loving. Messaging and explanations such as this make it very difficult for the church to connect or engage with people outside of the church.
Perhaps the church needs to find a new way to talk about the meaning of the death of Jesus?
