Beyond
“Without the Shedding of Blood …”
I must say, I am thoroughly enjoying Christian theology in the budding
era of a post-retributive Gospel.
With the Western rediscovery of the Beautiful News, I’m feeling—dare I say it—positively
born again! I am in awe and worship of the Father of Love, the cruciform God enfleshed in Jesus of
Nazareth. The symbol of the ‘old rugged cross’ has once again come to
represent, for me, God’s essential nature: namely, his self-giving, radically
forgiving, co-suffering love. And that’s good news for everyone! On the cross,
in the face of human cruelty and bloodlust, God-in-Christ revealed his bottom
line character: a mercy that endures forever—the
loving-kindness that is everlasting.
We discover that ‘the blood of Jesus’—i.e. a metonym for God’s self-offering, sacrificial
love—can wash anything. Anything. Anyone.
Still, there will be holdouts who believe real justice requires retribution,
vengeance and satisfaction of wrath. It’s okay. Many of us did … for nearly
five hundred years. Happily, I can say it’s a passé ‘thing’ and we are starting to get over it. Hang in there! The shelf-life of the vengeful punisher is coming due and
should pass away in not too many generations.
Admittedly, that stubborn old retributive system is also rather
dangerous. I write this during a weekend when a famous Christian politician
declared to the NRA that if she were “in charge,” she’d let terrorists know
that “waterboarding is
how we baptize terrorists.” Lord,
have mercy! Such a departure from the Jesus Way! But don’t hate her for her
moment of sacrilege; it is what it is and didn’t come from nowhere. Maybe you’d
say it too in the right context for a sufficient honorarium … on the Colbert Report perhaps? We all have our
x-amount pieces of silver … this is why Jesus died even for Judas.
Moreover, such betrayals are not merely founded on a secular
Constitution; they have rich backstories in Christian theologies of
retribution. If, in our theology, God needs
to use torture to bring about freedom, why should we be surprised when we
become like the One we worship? Just a week or two ago, a radio preacher again made
it very clear that if Easter means anything, it “begins with Christ dying
to satisfy the wrath of God.”
Some theologians I respect to the point of a borderline man-crush (with
apologies to New Testament Wright) repeatedly insist that the Gospel of an angry God who can
only be assuaged through a violent sacrifice is just a caricature -- that no one
really believes that or preaches it seriously. If only it were true. Sad to say, the
caricature defense is an unsubstantiated cliché exposed easily enough by the
trick question, “Then how does atonement work?”
