Imagine you are a married man, with a wife and a teenage son and daughter. Three men come to your house and tell you they want to use your son as a suicide bomber. If you do not agree, they will shoot you, your wife and your daughter. What do you do?
Imagine that someone who believes that criminals do not deserve to live gets a job as cook in a prison, and adds poison to the prisoners' food, with the result that they all die. What do you think?
Imagine you go on holiday to an exotic place. When you arrive, the customs insist on the surgical removal of your middle finger-nails, and confiscate the biscuits you have taken for the journey - wheat flour is not allowed in the country, only barley or oats. What is your reaction?
Unreasonable, misguided, criminally insane, evil, downright wicked - you may say, but the last example might have given a hint of where this article is leading. For bodily mutilation and a ban on ham and oysters feature in our Bible. And the description of how God persuaded Abraham to set off with the intention of killing his son Isaac demonstrates the same sort of psychological pressure that might be used to recruit suicide bombers. As for mass extermination, we need think no further than the plagues of Egypt, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, not to mention the near-total genocide in the time of Noah!
Theologians struggle with the problems of theophany - why does God seem to stand aside when the innocent die - through war, through famine, through senseless accidents, through natural disasters? But these problems are particularly acute when it seems to be God who is actively causing these things - doing things which we would condemn if a human being were performing them.
It is not enough to say that God's ways are not our ways. Or that God knew something that we don't - that there was something worth preserving in Noah, his wife, their children and their children's wives, or that the Egyptians who pursued Moses and the Israelites through the Red Sea were so wicked that they deserved to be killed. "God is love," insisted John in his first letter. Paul at his conversion heard Jesus' call to preach to those who had not known God "to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me." How could a loving and forgiving God punish so cruelly, or make such arbitrary rules for living?
These questions strike at the centre of our faith as Christians. For as Christians, we believe that Jesus became human to lead us to new life by dying for our sins. By his death, the way was opened for us to be "at one" with God. How this "atonement" comes about is at the same time very simple ("through faith") and very complex ("a great mystery"), but this has not stopped people from arguing about it, and one such argument runs the danger of polarizing thought in the church today.
The Bible has numerous ways of describing Jesus' death - as a ransom, as a sacrifice, as an offering, as a punishment for sin. It is easy to pick one of these images to the exclusion of others, and to exaggerate one aspect or another of what was happening. The story of Abraham going to sacrifice Isaac, but discovering a ram caught in a thicket which he could sacrifice instead, is one such image - especially if we forget that "the Lamb of God" recalls first and foremost the lamb sacrificed at the Passover, whose blood daubed on the doorpost persuaded God's angel to "pass over" the Children of Israel. But a God who "requires mercy, not sacrifices" is not one who "rejoices in the blood of lambs" (look at Isaiah 1:11!).
For Jesus' death was not a punishment by an angry God, but something which God came and did for us, because we could not do it ourselves. Like the father in the story of the Prodigal Son, God is always ready to welcome us. But we have to want to return to God, and our own lifestyles, our life itself, stand in the way. In Jesus, God shared so deeply in our life, in the pain of separation, that a way opened up, so that we, by sharing in Jesus' death, could also share in the joy of a new life, the life of the reborn, the resurrected, the truly free!
HD