Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

Israel was familiar with all the atonement mechanisms just described. After all, it had been in Egypt and it was familiar with the cultic sites in Canaan. It had been exiled to Babylon and was aware of the rituals of atonement practiced there. It had seen through it all and rethought it in light of its experience of God. Essentially, it had turned the concept of atonement in the religions on its head. For in Israel all “atonement” proceeds from God, as God’s own initiative. “Atonement” is a new enabling of life given by God. “Atonement” is the gift of being able to live in the presence of the holy God, in the space where God is near, despite one’s own unholiness and constant new incurring of guilt. Effecting “atonement” means not appeasing God or making God amenable to reconciliation, but allowing ourselves to be rescued by God’s own self from the death we deserve.²¹

Israel knew that human beings cannot work off their own guilt and that both “atonement” and forgiveness must come from God. “Atonement,” like covenant and the forgiveness of sins, is God’s gracious order, into which the human being can only enter. In all this, biblical thought—at least as regards the power of distinction—is clearly different from the religions.

Certainly the real question has not yet been answered. We could state it somewhat as follows: If everything comes from God’s initiative, why is there any need for “atonement” at all? If God himself has created “atonement,” just as he created forgiveness, why not simply forgive? Why can God not simply decree: your guilt is absolved; everything is forgiven and forgotten? Why is it not enough for catechesis and preaching simply to speak of the immeasurable readiness of God to forgive, or of God’s endless love, or even of God’s “crucified love”?

The answer is: if I simply say “God forgives everything on condition that I acknowledge my guilt,” the reality is too quickly covered up. The consequences of sin are not really taken seriously. Sin does not just vanish in the air, even when it is forgiven, because sin does not end with the sinner. It has consequences. It always has a social dimension. Every sin embeds itself in human community, corrupts a part of the world, and creates a damaged environment.²²

Even if God has forgiven all sin, the consequences of sin are not eliminated. What Adolf Hitler set in motion was by no means eliminated from the world by his death in April 1945, even if he was contrite and even if he himself was forgiven. The fearful consequences of National Socialism poison society until today, and they are still nesting in the lives of the surviving victims, even in the lives of their children and grandchildren.

So the consequences of sin have to be worked off, and human beings cannot do so of themselves any more than they can absolve themselves. Genuine “working off” of guilt is only possible on a basis that God himself must create. And God has created such a base in his people, and in Jesus he has renewed and perfected it.

Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary General of the United Nations, who died on 17 September 1961 in a plane crash near the border in Katanga while on a mission to try to resolve the civil war in the Congo, offers us a text that can help us better understand the connections we are discussing here. It is in his diary, published after his death under the title Markings:

Easter, 1960. Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who “forgives” you—out of love—takes upon himself the consequences of what

you

have done. Forgiveness, therefore, always entails a sacrifice.

The price you must pay for your own liberation through another’s sacrifice is that you in turn must be willing to liberate in the same way, irrespective of the consequences to yourself.

²³

This utterly penetrating observation, validated by Dag Hammarskjöld’s own life and death, makes it clear what is at stake when we talk of representative atonement: love forgives, but it cannot forgive the consequences of sin because they are long since buried within history. The chain of causality set in place by sin continues of itself. If love is genuine it therefore not only forgives but takes responsibility for the consequences of what the other has done. And that costs something. It cannot happen without sacrifice, and it can only succeed if many work to heal the consequences of others’ guilt. Dag Hammarskjöld indicates that when he says that one’s own liberation obligates one to give oneself for the liberation of others. So arises a new chain of causality that works against the causal chain of guilt.

When the New Testament tradition speaks of Jesus’ atoning death, it means that through his death—which was utterly and entirely death for others, self-emptying to the ultimate degree, agap in the most radical sense—he broke through the causal chains of evil in the world and created a new basis on which it is possible to work off the consequences of sin.