Christianity Should be Easier Than This

One of the most important challenges to Christianity is the complex story so many people tell about it. It usually goes something like this. God created humans in God’s image. Those humans disobeyed and that caused every other human to inherit original sin. This makes God mad — after all how dare we allow ourselves to be born to human parents? — and so God demands justice. Apparently, God is a bit of a snowflake who wants retributive justice and is worried about God’s honor. God’s solution is to call a nation out to set apart and give them some real wack rules. Naturally, humans fail at observing said wack rules and this proves they deserve punishment. God sends Godself down as a human in Jesus Christ and then takes out the punishment on Jesus by killing Him(self) as a sacrifice. Fortunately, if you believe in Jesus, you now get a get-out-of-Hell card where you can spend eternity with this insane and abusive God who let all of us be born into this living Hell without consent just to turn around and burn most of us for all eternity if we don’t believe. For some, belief isn’t just claiming Jesus is messiah, it’s also assenting to a whole list of new wack rules, which kind of nullifies the whole sacrifice idea anyway and we’re back to trying to keep the law.

If that’s how the story goes, then I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints. And also, yuck.

Here’s my version of the story. An amazing healer, prophet and mystic named Jesus blew people’s minds in the first century with the message that God is a parent, God is absolutely loving and the first shall be last and vice-versa. This is so radical, we kill Jesus for it. However, God is like, “nope, I got you,” and Jesus rises again. If you think that hearing that the meek shall inherit the Earth blew people’s minds, imagine what experiencing Jesus again after death did to them. God’s love has us even after death, no vengeance, no sacrifice. Just raising up Jesus to show us that empire and even death have no power greater than God’s love. These early Christians are amazed and confused by this. The religious language they speak is one of temple sacrifice and sin, so they pore over their scriptures and use all kinds of those old stories to try to explain Jesus. Jesus is the messiah, not in the mold of a conquering king but in the way of Isaiah’s suffering servant. Jesus is the model of this new kingdom-oriented, post-resurrection life, so let’s follow Him to become closer to what God intends for our lives.

Oh, and if this kind of thing matters to you, it seems to me like there is an afterlife even though Jesus barely talked about it and it just wasn’t that important to Him. Why wasn’t it important for Jesus to talk about? I think because Jesus was trying to get us to live our best God-centered life right here and right now. If the fear of death was stopping you from doing that, then there is no better comfort than the resurrection. Imagine I’m trying to teach you how to play scales on the piano and you keep asking me about piano maintenance and repair. Yes, it’s possible to repair a broken piano, but I don’t want to talk about it right now because it’s not going to improve your scale running. So in those few moments where Jesus might bump into a Sadducee and need to defend the afterlife, I think he’s saying something closer to, “don’t worry, God has this, it’s so different than you can ever imagine that I want you to focus on treating people well right now.”

In its most basic form, I think early Christians looked at atonement quite differently than the penal substitutionary atonement with which many American Christians bully us. Certainly, they believed in sin. I know it’s not popular to talk about sin in many of the progressive circles in which I travel. Sin has been used to batter and abuse. But it only takes a second to look around at ICE agents, the entire Trump administration, Gaza, Ukraine, children’s hospitals, wealth disparity, impending ecological disaster, corn syrup, selfie sticks, and my own mirror to see that sin is real. But sin is more a matter of separation and not living up to God’s hopes for us than it is about breaking the rules. So yes, an important aspect of atonement is forgiveness. We address our wrongs, and God forgives us by the measure we afford forgiveness to others. This saves the world one person at a time because the world is mostly destroyed by the grudges we hold dear. God wants to reconcile this broken relationship that we define as sin. God wants to help us grow into our intended moral and spiritual nature. A lot of early and Orthodox Christians have referred to that as the restoration of all things, but sometimes I see it just as evolution and growth. There must be some sort of spiritual growth that is required of us in God’s plan for creation. And then, yes, it so happens God’s plan was never for us to face eternal death and so Jesus shows us that, too.

Some people try to take all of scripture as the literal and inerrant word of God. That is not the function or role of scripture in our lives, it is in fact a perversion of scripture. Paul wrote some letters, and those letters were so helpful that we included them in our scripture. In those letters, he struggled with how to explain this incredible, mystical reality he met in Christ and the life-changing experiences that other Christians had. He used some metaphors to help. I used a metaphor above (which I will now turn into a meta-metaphor) about scale running and piano maintenance. I hope you understand that example as a metaphor and you do not take it literally. That is, Jesus doesn’t really want you to play piano, unless you feel creatively and vocationally drawn to it. Likewise, Paul and other early Christians were struggling to explain the experience of Jesus, so they used metaphors in religious and legal language that was familiar to them. They talked about things like temple sacrifice and ransoms and satisfaction. They talked about buying people out of slavery and bondage. They talked about wiping out debts. Yet, no metaphor is perfect and where these metaphors confuse us about the action of an eternally loving God, we need to realize we’ve gotten as much as we can out of them and stop while we’re ahead. We somehow got hung up on deriving some kind of salvation mechanics out of these metaphors. It’s not enough for us to just say that God has always loved us and always planned for us to be with God eternally. We have to imagine the, “how,” of it all. God has to purchase us. From whom? From Satan? God has to pay a penalty. To whom? To God’s own self? That would be utterly blasphemous against the God of love if it wasn’t so puzzlingly stupid.

I know some of you want to argue with me about overcoming divine wrath a la Romans 3:25, but I’m not interested. I don’t think divine wrath is much of a thing. There are things to which God says, “no,” but your very existence is not one of those things. Paul was using the language of the religious system as he understood it. We shouldn’t be limited by that. When you read these places in Paul that seem to go against your idea of an all-loving God, just imagine Paul saying, “it’s kind of like this,” in front of it. It’s kind of like Jesus was an atoning sacrifice like we do in the temple. It’s kind of like Jesus paid a ransom. It’s kind of like Jesus defeated death, even though death is not a person to defeat and God’s love was never even slightly abridged by death.

There is something amazing about this story that God became a human to reconnect us. That love is so far beyond my own capacity I’ll never understand the amazing and very Christian idea that God is not sending us to Heaven, God is coming to us. God is entering our human life so we can then become one, an at-one-ment. But I mostly think Jesus wanted to tell us we were doing it wrong. Love God, love neighbor, that makes the world right, that brings you closer to God. God is a loving parent. Are you afraid to follow me? Then let me show you what happens when you live a Christ-centered life. You die. Then you rise. That’s it, that’s the story.