By Don MacGregor
Here is a little story I found on the internet many years ago. One spring day, there was a blind man sitting on the steps of a building with a sign by his feet and that read: ‘I am blind, please help’. A graphic designer was walking by him and noticed the man only had a few coins in his hat. He dropped a few more coins in and, without asking for his permission, picked up the sign, turned it around and wrote another message. He placed the sign by his feet and left. That afternoon, the graphic designer returned by the blind man and noticed that his hat was full of notes and coins. The blind man recognised his footsteps and asked if it was he who had re-written his sign and he wanted to know what he wrote on it. The designer responded, “Nothing that wasn’t true, I just reworded it”. He smiled and went on his way. The blind man never knew but his new sign read: ‘TODAY IS SPRING AND I CANNOT SEE IT’.
Expressing the same message in different ways can revolutionise things. What is the message that Christianity is trying to convey? My view of it is something like this:
• There is a God of love in whom we live and move and have our being.
• Jesus showed us what it is like to fulfil human potential, to be a god-filled human being, which led to his death and changed the information pattern, the morphic field, for all humanity. He demonstrated for us the Christ path.
• In this one man, humanity and the Christ aspect of God were joined. Divine Love and Wisdom shone forth in human form.
• In following the path blazed by Jesus the Christ, we are all on a journey of transformation into wholeness.
• There are new spiritual energies coming in at this auspicious time which are raising the consciousness of humanity, aiding this transformation.
• This is the way forward for the human race, to be slowly transformed for the betterment of humanity.
• The gospel message should be, ‘Awaken now to the reality of the divine presence within and embrace the mind of Christ’.
The message we are trying to convey is crucial. It may mean that we need to revisit some of our basic theology of God the Father and God the Son. For instance, many serious theologians now question the idea of Christ dying on the cross as a punishment for our sin, the retribution of an angry God, because that is not the God revealed by Christ, nor is it a very acceptable way of looking at it in today’s world. There are many other ways of thinking about Christ’s death on the cross, all stemming from different ways of interpreting the bible. The theory (and it is only a theory) of Jesus being a substitution and taking the punishment that is due to us all was not fully articulated until 1098 by St Anselm in his search to provide a rational argument for the necessity of the incarnation and death of Jesus.
Anselm used a cultural model drawn from his time and place: the relationship of a medieval lord to his peasants. If a peasant disobeyed the lord, could the lord simply forgive if he wanted to? No, because that might imply that disobedience didn’t matter that much. Instead, compensation must be made. Anselm used this model for our relationship with God. We sin and therefore deserve to be punished, but God also loves us and wants to forgive us. This theory says the price of sin must be paid, so Jesus the sinless one steps in as a substitution. That’s the feudal logic. The good news is that we do not have to stay with this medieval, feudal model! We can change the way we see it. Life on Earth is a privilege given for our souls to grow and learn and gives humankind opportunity to make a real choice: separation or union. Ultimately, union will happen in time.
In Jewish tradition, sacrifice is not really about avoiding punishment. Actually, although animals were sacrificed in the Judaic temple, it can be argued that the purpose of this was not about payment for sin, but it was an act of making something sacred by giving it as a gift to God. Sacrifices were not about something being killed as an appeasement to a wrathful God, but were offerings made to give thanks, to purify and to reconcile their own inner feelings of guilt. Seen metaphorically, these acts are not about a transaction, they are expressions of transformation.
I vividly remember one of our daughters who, as a six-year-old, could not bring herself to say sorry when she did something wrong. We gave her every opportunity to express some form of repentance, but she couldn’t bring herself to say anything, even though she was totally forgiven and loved to bits by us. One day, she took herself off and came back with a picture of ‘Lady and the Tramp’ that she had carefully traced from the video cover picture, and the word ‘Sorry’ scrawled large underneath. She offered this up to us without a word, just a little smile! This was a moment of transformation for her, not a transaction for us. What she offered up was a symbol of a deep change in her.
The transformation that Jesus undertook in his life and death was on behalf of all humanity, forging a new path, changing the field to make it more possible for us all to follow. The sacrifice Jesus made was of his lower desire-nature in order to live from his divine soul-self. It was not a transaction in payment to satisfy the requirements of, in the best version, the sense of justice in a loving God, or, in the worst version, the appeasement of an angry dictator God. It was a transforming, life-affirming, path-blazing, all-loving act of sacrificial giving.
Jesus said ‘Repent and believe the good news’ (Mark 1:15) years before his arrest and crucifixion, before any thought that he died for our sin. So what was the good news he talked about? Simply that, if we follow him and become like him, we shall be transformed and brought to a place of wholeness and healing, which is the central meaning of salvation. His life has made that transformation more possible for us all.