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The Redeemer: Why?

Sunday Evening March 15th 1964

by Kenneth Barnes

Most people in England are not regular churchgoers, but there are-many who go only at Christmas and Easter. Is this just a matter of convention, a half-hearted tribute to Christianity and respectability, or is it like a small insurance policy, keeping a finger-hold on the Christian faith in case after all it should prove to be true and God to be real? Or is it that there are many people who know in their hearts that Christianity is true and who need to show, if only very occasionally, that they acknowledge this. Whichever of these explanations is true, at least we can say that Christmas and Easter are festivals that make us stop for a moment to think and to try to understand.

To understand: How necessary this is, for Christian doctrine is loaded with archaic words and phrases: almost a foreign language to the modern mind, and as much in need of translation. The Christian Church has been obdurate and indolent in its failure to put its knowledge into current speech, behaving as though the emotion associated with ancient phrases were more important than their inner meaning.

Easter celebrates the death and resurrection of Jesus, and asks us to think of him as our Redeemer. That is the word I must try to explain. It is a dusty word; it has a mouldering smell about it for many young people today. Perhaps they feel about it as they would about something found in the attic of a house of a maiden aunt who has just died - something belonging to the past that they thumb over with a feeling of remoteness and incomprehension, yet with an awareness that it must have meant something big to someone a long time ago. A long time ago? But don't we still sing the Messiah, year after year, with vigour and a sort of conviction with those words in it: I know that my redeemer liveth? Those words came from the Book of Job; and Job was able to say them after all the vicissitudes and suffering he had been through; so if we think of life in this world today as full of pain and problems, perhaps the words are relevant.

What does redeem mean? In Cruden’s Concordance there are these meanings given:

To buy again something sold, by paying back the price to the buyer.

To deliver sinners from the tyranny of Satan, from sin, death and Hell, by the purchase of Christ’s blood and the power of his grace.

When do people have occasion to buy things back? It is when they have made use of a pawnbroker. Suppose you are in need of money to pay the rent. You take your beloved camera to the pawnbroker and temporarily sell it to him. If later you earn some money, and if it is not too late, you can go and get it back by paying what you got for it, plus interest. Now a common explanation of the act of redemption of Jesus is based on this sort of idea. Jesus bought back humanity from the bondage of sin by paying with his own blood. However did such a concept arise? It was from something primitive and universal. As soon as man became in the least degree a reflective being, something more than an animal, he acquired a sense of guilt. Men began to feel guilty not only when they saw that their own actions brought trouble; they extended the feeling of guilt to the calamities of nature, to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, storms and pestilence. When homes were smashed or swept away, when bodies were injured or destroyed, they believed it was because of some offence they had committed.

This thought is expressed in the story of Noah and the flood, which puts into the mind of God an intention of universal destruction, an intention as fierce as the worst of men today might put into the use of a hydrogen bomb,

And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and It grieved him at his heart.

And the Lord said: I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them. . . . . . . And behold I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die,

Great floods have indeed happened in the history of the earth, and this is how a guilty people explained a destruction that lingered in the memory of their race. Myth and legend, in the Bible and elsewhere is full of such interpretations. With the sense of guilt there grew the impulse to buy back the favour of the god by sacrifice, and this was associated very early in human culture with fertility rites as for instance in the worship of the Canaanite deity Baal. A sacrifice had to be made to persuade the god to make the crops grow, and if the crops did not grow it was because the sacrifice had not been earnest or great enough.

Everyone must admit that blood is an intensely exciting substance: vivid in colour, and extraordinarily vigorous in the way it spurts from a cut artery or even when it wells from a superficial prick. It is not, surprising that it became the symbol of life, and that to sprinkle the spurting blood of an animal on the soil was to ask for fertility,, And you can imagine how this idea of blood sacrifice was extended to cover the whole of man’s activities and was prompted by the guilt he felt when in any part of his life he failed to meet the demands of tribal custom or morality. The guilt, required that he should do something to appease the outraged god. What have we done? What will he do to us next? How can we bring ourselves back into his favour?

Only the death of the most precious would satisfy the demands of god. It had to be perhaps the King himself, as among some of the Central American cultures: the King, specially chosen, honoured, feasted, indulged, then laid out upon the altar stone to have the heart ripped from the living body. In the early history of the Hebrews and persistently among their Canaanite neighbours it was the first-born child who was sacrificed - slain in the sanctuary and then perhaps thrown into the fiery belly of the god. There was a continual tendency among the Jews to revert to this revolting practice in spite of the deepening spiritual insight of their prophets, and it was out of the habit of blood-sacrifice, deriving from something utterly primitive, that the idea grew of Jesus as the one who was slain for the sins of men. In him both the King and the child were slain: the "King of the Jews" and the "son of Man": the last great blood sacrifice by which man was bought back from the bondage of sin and guilt.

I can imagine that many orthodox Christians will pout and puff at this crude description of the concept of redemption, but it is precisely at its crudest that such concepts have held the imagination of men. It raises a question. Must the spirit and nourishment that the Church provides for its members always be achieved through a development of their most primitive impulses and fears? Is it desirable that it should, or shall we sometime be able wholly to disentangle the exalting from the legacy of the disgusting? It is bewildering to reflect on the fact that the Christian act of Communion derives from the habits established in the darkness of the past, many thousands of years before Christ, when primitive man, living in squalor and swaying between terror and euphoria, drove his teeth into the flesh of a sacrificed animal and believed he was eating the body of his god.

Let it be admitted at once that Biblical scholars who have most carefully examined the concepts of redemption and atonement, and the almost identical meaning of these two words, find much greater depth, subtlety, and refinement in them. Primitive concepts of sacrifice can be profoundly transformed to serve higher purposes, and this certainly happened among the Hebrews. In one of the most dramatic episodes of his life Abraham discovered that God did not want human sacrifice; and even the animal sacrifice that was substituted became restricted after the Exile so that by the time of Jesus it was centralised wholly in Jerusalem. The greatest of the Hebrew people began to realise that God did not want blood-sacrifice at all. In the 51st Psalm, the writer is deeply conscious of his own unworthiness and iniquity:

Hide thy face from my sins,

And blot out all mine iniquities.

Create in me a clean heart, 0 God;

And renew a right spirit within me.

_{o o o o o o}

0 Lord, open thou my lips;

And my mouth shall show forth thy praise.

For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it:

Thou delightest not in burnt offering.

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit:

A broken and a contrite heart,O God thou

wilt not despise.

It has to be remembered that the word sacrifice means “to make holy"; in itself it does not mean killing or destroying; so that any act that induces a condition of holiness or oneness with God (at-one-ment) can be called a sacrifice.

A further point about the idea of redemption that makes the "buying back" idea more tolerable and understandable to us, rests in the fact of slavery - widely existent at the time of Jesus. A slave could be redeemed, that is, bought back out of slavery into freedom. Christianity made a tremendous appeal to the "underdog" of those days and to the slave populations. Jesus had identified himself with the poor and oppressed; he had died in taking up their cause. So to those humble early Christians he brought a great lift of the heart; he saved them from spiritual death, he gave them a place in earth and heaven. He had indeed bought them back to life, even though they remained in the physical service of their masters.

Jesus himself seems to have been drawn towards the Passover - the time of the spring sacrifice – as the moment for his greatest challenge, his last effort on behalf of the weak and the outcast against the powerful and the respectable, his final condemnation of exploitation and hypocrisy.

One last point: the demand among the Jews for an expiation of sin and the assertion of this in a symbolic act had at least this in its favour that it was an assertion of the need for justice, part of a development away from capricious gods and a curruptible (sic) morality towards a just God and a uniformity of law,

But what are we to make of the concept of Jesus as Redeemer in our time? It is one thing to find a justification or an excuse for the retention and development in history of an idea; it is quite another, to believe that we can continue usefully to fit our experience today into its pattern. And there is always a tendency for the primitive element in a pattern of belief to reawaken at any time a primitive attitude devoid of its later refinements. This indeed happened often enough in the centuries that followed the death of Jesus. The inner meaning was often lost as the magical took charge. For a thousand years - from about 200 AD to 1200 AD - the most popular belief was that the blood of Christ was the ransom paid to the Devil to release man from bondage.

“It was generally held that man by his sin had put himself into the devil's power, and that this 'right of possession by the devil carried a just claim for compensation which God met by the ransom of his Son delivered into the devil’s power on the Cross". [1]

It is possible to read some grain of sense even into this, but why should we force new wine into old bottles? Why should we continue the redemption-by-payment idea when it imputed to God what cannot be in the nature of God as revealed by Jesus himself? Jesus contradicted it with unanswerable simplicity in the parable of the Prodigal Son, the greatest parable of all, The love of God, represented there, is unconditional. The wayward son wasn’t even allowed to make his offer of humble service before his father had flung his arms round his neck and kissed him - kissed' him in the sheer delight of knowing that His son had come back to him with a contrite heart and wanted him again. The inheritance had gone, the son had lapsed into misery and squalor. All that was at once forgotten and forgiven in the outpouring of love to a son who now knew what he needed. There was nothing to pay back.

The essentials of Christianity are simple and comprehensible to all who have ears to hear. No high intelligence is needed, no capacity for erudite argument. Our continuous, challenge is to sort out these essentials from the accretions of time and the elaborations of scholastic thinkers. The truth is in Jesus and his actions, not in doctrines about him. He redeemed mankind because he enabled people to discover how life can be lived in love and freed from fear.

Lets Iook at the troubles of life, its agonies, and afflictions. How far are we responsible for what happens to us? There is undoubtedly much suffering for which we are responsible, at least partly. Hence the idea of sin, doing things that are an offence against the rules of right conduct set up by a church or culture. I’m not happy about concepts of sin in general; too often the codes of supposedly right conduct, whose contradiction is sin, fail to direct attention to those actions and attitudes that are really destructive and corrupting yet outwardly within the law. A man or woman can keep the rules of sexual morality and yet sow the seeds of hatred and misery in human relationship. A man can keep all the rules of honesty yet be an exploiter in business. People can be strictly good by all the outward measures of goodness, “can give their bodies to be burned and bestow all their goods to feed the, poor” yet be cold and stony-hearted. And on the other hand, as Jesus knew so well, people can be sinners, yet warm of heart and quickly responsive to love and the need of love.

So we have to be cautious in making the accusation of sin; and we do not know how far people are responsible until we know them through and through and can see them against the whole background of their life and experience. I am so revolted by the misuse of the concept of sin that I would like to be able to do without it. But I cannot, and for this reason at least: Like the many others of my age who have lived through two world wars, I have seen evil arising in terrifying power in masses of men, seen it renounced only to arise again in ever more vicious and over-whelming form. Evil and the intention to do evil are realities of experience. The atrocities of Ausschwitz (sic) and Hiroshima were not accidents; they came from the heart of man. And I see sometimes even among children a form of wrong-doing that is not heedlessness or lack of understanding, but a deliberate turning away from what is known to be good.

Would it be enough to think of the task of redemption as the releasing of man from the grip of evil intentions? No, for it would still leave an immeasurable volume of suffering and frustration that cannot be put down to wrong-doing. I’m not thinking only of the suffering caused by natural disasters: volcanos (sic) earthquakes floods, and tornados, but of the suffering that comes from the fact that in the intensely complicated network of human relationships we can never foresee the ultimate consequences of a single action. In some ways it is like driving a billiard ball forward on an enormous table filled with thousands of other balls; though your aim may be directed with the greatest of care at the nearest ball, you cannot know what will be the effect on the furthest ball after the innumerable collisions. Further, human beings are not really like balls; you do not know exactly or fuIly what will be the result of an action even on your closest friend, for we are all in some measure mysteries to each other. Even actions carried out with the best of intentions may have injurious results. At critical periods in our lives we may be forced to choose one of two alternatives. The one that seems to be good and right may be the one that will lead into a destructive chain of events from which for a long time we cannot escape.

There’s a true story recounted in the current issue of "The Lady” about a woman, who was engaged to be married and feared that she would fail to be a good mother because she had an irrational terror of seeing a baby bathed. She accidentally discovered the cause of this when she came across her baby doll that had been packed away fifteen years ago among discarded toys. She then suddenly remembered what had happened. She had been about to wash her doll in the bath when her mother had called up to her to come down. She had petulantly disobeyed. Then her father, whom she dearly loved, had come rushing upstairs angrily to reinforce his wife's request. The shock of having so offended her beloved father had cast a permanent shadow over the whole business of bathing a baby; and she had put away the doll for good.

This young woman escaped from the horror when she remembered the cause, but many people never escape from the effects of such experiences, and she might not have done but for the accidental discovery in the attic. Could we then have blamed her father for making normal motherhood impossible for his daughter?

Should we say that this danger would be avoided if parents were never angry, and were always loving? But many parents who set out to be wholly loving, in the light of what they believe to be love, do irreparable harm to their children. A mother’s love can become possessive without her knowing it, and a possessively loving mother can destroy all possibility of maturity and happiness for her son. Further, the kind of mother who devotes herself unselfisly to home and husband and children may at 45, when the children have gone, be empty of interests and personality, no longer a companion to her husband. We may blame her for lack of wisdom, but not for lack of love,

More and more often in these days we are reminded of the tragedy of the illegitimate child. One in eight of the children born in London and one in fifteen over the whole country are born to women who are not married; so they have no recognised fathers. I’ve used the word “tragedy” because illegitimacy can be, even in these days, an experience that a child suffers from in mind for the whole of his life. Many of the young mothers never see the children born to them; they are taken away to be adopted. Some loving and courageous mothers accept their unplanned children, bring them up, earn a living in order to care for them and try to be mother and father in one. We've had many illegitimate children in the school, most of them adopted and we and their adoptive parents have done all we could to give them the love and reassurance they need to feel themselves part of a community and wholly accepted within it..

To have an illegitimate child is not in the legal sense a crime, yet it may be that the whole volume of unhappiness caused by illegitimacy is greater than that caused by the crimes for which men and women are brought to trial and imprisoned. Many of the people who bring these children into the world are culpable: irresponsible, deliberately heedless of consequences. I know, because I have spoken to many of the men involved; they are people who in all respects, as in their sexual life, “don't give a damn”. There are also the foolish, the stupid, the improvident. But there are many others for whom one can only have pity: young people pushed about by a world that has already robbed their lives of meaning, and has shouted to them from every vulgar advertisement that, "sex is everything": people who have sought temporary refuge and comfort in each others arms. There are many too, with plenty of substance and meaning in their lives, with intelligence and integrity and strong feeling, brought together by what they thought was love and swept off their feet. Dr. Marion Hilliard describes how when she was a doctor attending such women in childbirth and asked them how they got in such a fix, they just didn't know. “I couldn’t help myself” was the frequent reply. The most intelligent of people can in a moment of passion be so dominated by their “biology” as to act with as much stupidity as the irresponsible.

You see then that the very force that can bring people together in the richest of relationships can also bring misery and perhaps lifelong suffering to someone. The fact has to be faced that only to a limited extent are we human beings the masters of our own fate; we are pushed around, much more than we are prepared to admit, by powerful social forces outside us and persistent impulses in our own nature, impulses that we may not be strong enough to direct or contain,

It is our responsibility to live with all the understanding and foresight of which we are capable, but it isn't any use our thinking in terms of moral perfection. There are some people who talk as if everyone could become perfectly good and keep all the rules, or could become so understanding that he could predict the result of every action and therefore always act for the best. But this is not possible. If we could plan human life like this we should be treating it simply as an elaborate machine; for it is only with machines that we can wholly plan for a desired result. The wayward and the unexpected form an inherent part of human life, and suffering is part of the price we pay for the freedom, richness, and adventure of living. Thus it is that – in general – the difficulty and pain that people have to bear is out of proportion to the evil that is in them.

Life is always in a measure blundering and hurtful, bewildering and frustrating; visions of peace and perfection come before our eyes and we grasp at them only to discover that they are illusions leading us away from the task of living; we are caught in a network of relationships that limits our freedom and distorts our purposes. This is our inevitable condition; it is what we, call in philosophy the "existential predicament" of man. It is not only sin and guilt that hold us - but the essential nature of our lives. The Greeks saw this and they were defeated by it; they saw no escape. But it is to this whole predicament that Jesus is the Redeemer.

He brought redemption and liberation not by blood but by love and loving action. He did not primarily need to die in order to redeem. He was a redeemer long before his death. He was a redeemer while, he was living and loving all around him, transforming the “existential -predicament" for the thousands who touched him, who saw the light through him and felt his compassion and tenderness. His death was the result of his love, the result of his love, the result of his offer of truth; for love challenges hate and brings it out of its respectable hiding places into the open. Then, as so often since, hate had to win the outer triumph only to lose the inner. So it was not his death that redeemed, but the life and love that inevitably asked for that kind of death.

Why did Jesus love sinners, value their company and forgive their sins so readily? Why did he offer such unconditional love - the love of the father for the wayward son? Because had (sic) had compassion, because he saw men and women caught in the inevitable tangle of life, pushed hither and thither by forces they could not understand or control; because he too, in the Incarnation, was wholly human and wholly involved, yet saw life right to the depths - right into and through its darkness - with the terrible clarity of a divine perception; because he was himself inextricably trapped, yet knew better than anyone what was the nature of the trap. So, more than anyone, he could feel man's helplessness and his need of an unlimited tenderness,

Looking at it from this point of view, I want to say that there was no magic in the Redemption, no ritual sacrifice, no blood payment to a God. There was no miracle, except the miracle that is present and possible in every moment of our lives: the love that is offered by one to another and enables us to transcend our condition, to transform frustration into opportunity. But it is not surprising that the death of Jesus and the shedding of his blood became the symbol of the Redemption, for in the agony of his death he identified himself with every suffering human being and accepted the ultimate consequences of the redemptive life,

Jesus had to meet everywhere the primitive idea that all suffering was punishment for punishment for sin and he found it even among his disciples. Consider the story of the man who was blind from birth

As Jesus passed by, he saw a man who was blind from

birth. His disciples asked him: Master, who did sin, this

man or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered:

Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents.

Then follows puzzling statement:

He was born blind that the power of God might be manifest in him.

This at-first seems utter nonsense, and the New English Bible does not make it much better.

He was born blind that God’s power might be displayed

in curing him.

Taken at its face value this would mean that God arranged that such men should be born into the misery of blindness in order that he should later perform impressive conjuring tricks on them. But such a God would be a devil. It could not have meant that. Can there be any other interpretation than this? - that Jesus was saying: Why must you look for sin everywhere? You're obsessed with a mania for moral judgements. The simple fact here is that he’s a blind man, a man suffering as all men suffer. This is not a time for judgement or blame; it is an opportunity and a demand for the loving and healing power of God. Let's get on with it!

This is one of the most significant stories of the gospel - a key to the understanding of what Jesus was demanding in a radical transformation of outlook. If we read it thoughtfully we can see that when he talked about fulfilling the Law he didn’t mean just adding to the Law within its old framework, but the growth of a seed within the Law that would burst through the brittle and drying husk. That seed was love.

Now we must go on to examine what the love of Jesus is, and what it implies for us. I've already said something about mistaken or misdirected love, so we can’t say just love and leave it at that. It begins in compassion, in knowing and seeing the depths. It is not like a universal ointment applied to every sort of sore. It is unique and personal in every particular situation. To say that it begins in knowing is to say that it begins with what is true. It proceeds by reaching the needy person in depth and intimacy and giving him what he begins to realise he needs. It takes away the sense of isolation. All of you suffer in some measure as you grow up; have you noticed that suffering reaches its worst in a feeling of being cut of from others? that is especially true of hopelessness and depression. You are shut up and shut off within your mood. And nothing, in the long run, is more terrible than being isolated, unable to touch or communicate. The significance of intense physical or mental pain is greatly increased by the way it turns all our attention within ourselves in utter preoccupation and deadly isolation. No wonder Jesus cried: MyI God, my God; why hast thou forsaken me? Rarely can we break out of our isolation and our preoccupation. Love has to open the door from outside.

Nearly everyone is familiar with the expression: God is love. This is not saying everything about God, but it is saying a very great deal about our experience of God. I think It is a statement everyone can accept whether he be Christian, humanist, agnostic or atheist. The word God is very near to good, and for the atheist all we have to say in translation is that the greatest good in our lives is love. Love is what enables us, not to escape from our predicament but to remain in it and at the same time transcend it. Love casts out fear; it does not necessarily solve our difficulties or take away suffering but it releases our courage. Transcendence is another of those words that have been falsified by being given a dissociated "spiritual" meaning, as though to transcend a material situation is to get right away from it and beyond it. No, transcendence implies immanence; you can’t have the one without the other. To transcend a painful situation is to remain in it, to become even more deeply involved, but at the same time to have its whole aspect altered from fear to faith. So it will be seen that love, transcendence, release from fear, the achievement of faith, are all one in the redemptive experience that makes possible the abundant life here and now.

I often have to help people in trouble - you know that some are boys and girls in the school. But some that you know nothing about are people who come to me from outside; some are my personal friends, while others are strangers who have read my writings and get in touch with me because they think I can understand their predicament. Their stories are often agonizing and they humble me, for I know that I cannot take away their hurt and I am not wise enough to tell them- precisely what to do. Often I can only listen. But, strangely, they are grateful. To have someone to listen to them, especially someone who will not make Judgements, is to help them out of their isolation. It is a sharing of the burden. This listening, and the unhappy person’s knowledge that you now know the worst about him, brings you into a deeper intimacy. It is more than the act of confession in a church (at its usual level) for it is completely open, a laying bare of the heart without any defence or possibility of retreat.

This kind of experience illustrates a profound truth - that frustration and suffering are potentially the experiences that can bring human beings together into a creative and loving intimacy, just as, in the thought of many Christians, they are the experiences which bring us nearer to God.

I have said that the suffering people have to bear is in general out of proportion to the evil in them and the wrongs they have done. Your best intentions may lead you to disaster and when you act with all the wisdom you can muster you may still do harm. All the time this is happening, if not in your own life then in the life of people near you. This implies that redemption is required at every moment, not only in times of crisis. We must all live redemptively; and what will that mean? I have linked love with transcendance (sic), release from fear, the achievement of faith, the abundant (sic) of life. This should give the clue to redemptive living. It is an outpouring, of energy and interest as well as love, a giving of oneself to whatever one meets, whether it is a person in need, a social situation to be understood, a tree to be felled, a picture to be painted or a poem to be written. It is the opposite of laziness and self-absorption and self-admiration. It is being generous with all your interest and thought, all your capacity to understand, to act, and to make. It is not wild activity but appropriate activity, meeting the real need of the particular situation. It is not living against our nature, it is living with our nature, for – paradoxically - it is the nature of man that he should transcend his nature and surpass himself; and that brings joy in the midst of difficulty.

The difficulty of getting from one place to another is responsible for the greatest triumphs of engineering; the frightful diseases that have attacked mankind have challenged us to the brilliant achievements of surgery and medicine. We have obeyed the command of Jesus in discovering how to bring life out of death, for the man born blind can now be given his sight by the grafted cornea of a dead man who has bequeathed his eyes for this purpose. The fear and mystery of the limitless universe has stirred us to the greatest achievements of mathematics and astro-physics. Our spacial insignificance has yielded to an incredible outreach of scientific imagination. It is entirely in line with these tremendous achievements that our greatest spiritual and personal development should arise from the difficulties of our own nature, from our own waywardness and unworthiness, once we can be delivered from guilt and fear into a vision of creation. Creation and redemption are one.

I cannot believe that God ever planned that we should hurt ourselves and each other as we do, that we should be blind and stumble and fall headlong because we do not know where our feet are moving. But I do know that it is through the way we deal with our blindness and the way we recover from our disasters that the works of God are made manifest.

Kenneth C Barnes

Archive reference: PP KCB 3/7/3 document 02