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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

"Jesus died for our sins"
The Problem Restated

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The following is an excerpt from Dr. Leslie Weatherhead's "The Meaning Of The Cross":

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When a friend of mine learned of the title of this book, she said, 'The trouble is that the plain man does not look at the Cross at all, and cannot be made to do so.'

I can think of several reasons for this:

1. He is not interested in religion. What is more, he thinks of it as an 'interest' in the same category as music, gardening,or even golf...

2. Many plain men who are interested in religion do not think it is relevant to national and international aims... We don't really believe in any power except our own...

• We forget that on every new level of achievement man remains too selfish to meet the spiritual cost of his own plans... He is like a man who plans gloriously and writes out checks to meet the cost of his plans without having enough in the bank...

The world would be paradise already if planning and scheming and scientific resourcefulness were all that is needed...

3. Even those who go further [in religion] turn away from the Cross. Christ as the Teacher... Yes! Christ the Hero? Yes! ... Christ the Martyr in a good cause? ... the Example? ... the Revealer of the nature of God? ... The plain man says Yes to all that. But when one uses the word 'Saviour,' ... [the word] is not current coin in the verbal country in which his mind lives... [He] rarely thinks of himself as a sinner needing salvation. He will tell you that he is a pretty good chap. He is, too. He isn't conscious of many 'sins.' When he is, he often nobly endeavors to do better. If you used the word 'saved,' he would ask you, 'Saved from what?'... He doesn't get further with the Cross than believing that a brave man died for a cause he believed in...

Somehow we've got to make the plain man think again. I have great sympathy with him... [However, those] who expect to find in this book a complete and satisfying exposition of all that the death of Christ means ... had better lay it down at once... The view that is set forth in the following chapters, incomplete as it is bound to be, is the result of my own mental and spiritual need [the promptings from which began 30 years ago]... I realized that more than half of Mark's gospel is taken up with the incidents of the passion, not the incidents of the ministry of Jesus, and that

• the message which the apostles offered to a pagan world was not so much a message about his teaching and life as a message about his death and resurrection. One might make attractive ... sermons about the life of Jesus as exhibited in the incidents of the first half of his ministry; but that great Christian warrior Paul, facing an indifferent and often hostile crowd, did not fight with this weapon at all, it would seem.

One would think that

• a disciple would lay the greatest emphasis on his Master's teaching; but, so far from doing this, Paul hardly quoted him at all.

His message was not about what Jesus taught. It was about his death and resurrection and endless ministry. Again and again his theme was: 'Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures;' 'Him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf;' 'Christ Jesus, who gave himself a ransom for all;' 'He died for all;' 'Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us.' ...

• no honest student of the New Testament could deny that the message of the early church which turned the world upside down was a message, not about one who healed the sick, preached thrilling sermons... but about one who died and rose again, and ever liveth to do something vital for us and in us.

• This fact worried me... to be honest, I did not know what the sentence, 'Christ died for our sins,' really meant...

[As I read other scholars] I could follow what was being said, [but] the light did not shine... [It was like standing] in front of a picture in an art gallery because somebody says it is 'famous' or 'wonderful;' and stupid, superficial people will be heard vaporing about its merits merely because they are affecting a pose of being connoisseurs. The picture has no value as beauty unless it possesses the soul of the beholder and he makes a sincere response -- a response which cannot be coerced ... by any authority in the world...

• In the same way it is all very well for theologians ... to tell us that the Cross is the central message of Christianity; but if the truth is not put to us in such a way that we possess it ourselves, no weight of authority can make it a living thing in our own hearts, a living message we can give to others, or a means by which our souls are fed...

No wonder the man in the street finds it hard to understand theology... [technical theological words are used which have no common meaning today] ...

• We need more writers who can translate the language of the scholars into the language of the busman or the milkman... After all, Paul attempted this task for his generation.

He had to make sense of what from the human side was a ghastly crime... Being an Eastern Jew ... he naturally interpreted the Cross in terms of the age-old Jewish sacrifices... Hundreds of times in the olden days he had seen lambs sacrificed as sin offerings, so that the offerer could obtain freedom from the burden of sin. Had not Jesus himself been called 'the Lamb of God'?

• The meaning of the Cross to Paul became crystal clear -- to Paul, but not to us!

The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews followed in the same way, using the same thought forms: 'Apart from shedding of blood there is no remission.' And again: 'For the bodies of the animals whose blood is taken into the Holy Place by the high priest as a sin-offering, are burned outside the camp; and so Jesus also suffered outside the gate, in order to sanctify the people by his own blood.' And again: 'If the blood of goats and bulls, and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling them that have been defiled, sanctify unto the cleanness of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ ... cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?'

• Exactly! But then I don't believe the blood of goats and bulls does anything. No more, my dear reader, do you! So the whole argument falls to the ground. It is not the way of approach that takes us furthest today. We are not Eastern Jews....

But the Master Himself said that the first and greatest commandment is to love the Lord our God with all our mind. It is not loving God with our mind to try to take over an ancient and Eastern figure of speech if it obscures the truth rather than reveals it...

What we need [are] ... metaphors, thought-forms, and illustrations which are acceptable to the modern mind...

Let me set those questions down here quite bluntly [that are asked by the man on the street]:

1. How can the death of a man 2000 years ago have anything to do with my sins today, and the sins I have not committed yet?

2. How can another person bear my sins? If I did them, I am guilty of the doing. Isn't it a fiction to sing, 'I lay my sins on Jesus'?

3. How does Jesus 'take away the sins of the world'? The sins of the world remain to blight and curse the earth. My sin is not a burden someone else can bear, or a debt someone else can pay.

• My sins have become myself!

The habit tracks of my mind, even the molecules of my brain, are affected. 'I won't count it this time,' says the sinner after each new fall. Says William James ... 'He may not count it, and a kind heaven may not count it, but it is being counted, just the same. Down among his nerve cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering, storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes.' How can a death so long ago do anything about that?

4. How can Christ be thought of as punished for my sins as if he stood in my place and were sentenced by a judge? Surely the judge was his Father, whose beloved Son was carrying out the Father's will. It is not unjust to punish one for the sins of another, especially to punish one for doing what you willed him to do...

5. Men say that 'Jesus saved the world,' but from what? Not from sin, for that abounds... If my child 'sins' against me, I do not demand somebody's blood as an 'atonement.' I do not demand that somebody else should suffer for it, as though every sin had an equivalent measure of pain and could be forgiven only if such pain were borne by somebody... [With] repentance, what hinders immediate forgiveness?

• Is it implied that God could not forgive anybody unless this brutal and bloody murder was committed as a 'satisfaction'?

... in the days of his flesh Jesus forgave men before the Cross had happened at all. His blood had not been shed, but were these men not at one with him? And when the psalmist cried, 'As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us,' was this all bluff because Jesus had not died?

6. Thousands of people have suffered greater pain than Christ and over longer periods, but they have not agonized to be let off it or gone to it with such shuddering. Many of the early Christian martyrs were crucified singing songs of praise to Christ himself. How can one explain Christ's shrinking from the Cross: 'O my Father,if it be possible, let this cup pass away from me'? ...

The last thing I want to do is to arouse questions in minds that ask none and can just 'have faith.' But from letters and conversations through the many years I am quite certain that many people do ask questions...

Let us not be forever imprisoned in thought forms which appealed to earlier generations... Let us look at the Cross and try to find an interpretation which satisfies Western minds in our day.

We may read with superior feelings the sentence which Paul wrote to the Corinthians, to the effect that the preaching of the Cross was to the Greeks foolishness;

• but frankly, to most moderns it is meaninglessness,

and however ardently men may wish to 'believe,' the Cross will remain meaninglessness unless it can be [translated for] the mind of modern man...