Thursday 1 April 2021

Love and Sacrifice

In my previous post, I explored how I use the lens of love to evaluate theology (and explored different views of hell/heaven).

There are two passages I referred to that speak deeply to me, and today I'd like to explore the theme of love and sacrifice, using these passages as a focus.

"One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”

“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’  The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

“Well said, teacher,” the man replied. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him.  To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”

When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”
Mark 12:28-34

Jesus is not making up a new teaching here.  He is quoting from the familiar Jewish prayer - the Shema, and quoting words from Leviticus and Deuteronomy.  When Jesus said that he had not come to do away with the Law, but rather fulfill it, I believe he is making a point connected to this Greatest Commandments teaching.  The Law and Prophets exist for a purpose, and that purpose is to show God's people how to live as his representatives here on earth, and be a light to the nations.  However, the people were not being true to the covenant, and Jesus criticised the hypocrisy of the Teachers of the Law.  He quoted Isaiah 29:13: 

These people honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
They worship me in vain;
their teachings are merely human rules.

As mentioned in my previous blog, both Jesus and Paul explained how the law was fulfilled by loving our neighbours as ourselves.

In Mark's quote above, did you notice the words "To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices"?

This idea is not new to the New Testament.  Jesus himself quoted Hosea 6:6: "For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings."

Psalm 40, which is also quoted in Hebrews says: "Sacrifice and offering you did not desire - but my ears you have opened — burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not require."

It's my view that the system of sacrifices and offerings were instituted, not because God was like some pagan god who required appeasing by some form of sacrifice, but rather to establish rituals and practices that helped the people focus on their relationship with God (their covenant) and their obligations to love one another.  To remind themselves that acting in selfish ways, oppressing others, failing to live up to their calling as God's image-bearers grieved God, they gave their offerings and sacrifices.  

To think God somehow requires sacrifice and burnt offerings is to my mind, to fundamentally (irony noted) miss the point.  

One of my other favourite passages is from 1 John 4.  The whole letter is a spectacular essay on love.  

A common mistake is to think that when Jesus and other writers talk of "eternal life" that they mean "going to Heaven when we die."  NT Wright goes to great lengths to explain that this is a great misunderstanding of the Biblical message.  John's gospel tells us that eternal life is knowing Jesus.  And in 1 John 3, we read these words: "For this is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another." and "We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love each other. Anyone who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him."

Eternal life is clearly not a future destination if it resides within us.

But I would like to focus on a later passage that returns to the question of sacrifice and love.

"Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God.  Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.  Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.  This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.  This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.  Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.  No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world.  If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.

God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.  This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus.  There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

We love because he first loved us.  Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.  And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister."

1 John 4: 7-21

I think it's safe to say John cares a lot about love.  In those 4 short paragraphs, he mentions love almost 30 times!  

I have often referred to the short phrase "God is love" from this passage, because it speaks powerfully to me.  God is more than just loving, he is the source of all love.  

However, within this passage, we see the phrase "[God] sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins."  Those who believe that God required sacrifice in order to forgive will point to this verse as evidence.  It seems clear-cut.

And yet, to think that John is here making a theological teaching point that focuses on sacrifice is to miss all the context of what he is doing in this carefully crafted wording.  John begins with an echo of the greatest commandments - that we are to love each other, precisely because God IS love.  To know God is to know love.  As John says, we cannot claim to love God if we hate our brother or sister.  

He then uses the atoning sacrifice imagery, not to drive home a teaching about the atoning sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, but to talk about what love looks like in action.  

Firstly, note that John is saying God sent his Son INTO the world that we might live through him.  He is talking here about the incarnation, life and ministry, not merely his death.   In John 14 we have the beautiful words of Jesus, promising that by the Holy Spirit, he would come and be in us.  This echoes the idea of eternal life being both defined as knowing Jesus and God (John 17:3), and being in us (1 John 3: 15).

Remember, John is crafting an argument that we are to love each other.  He defines God as love and the source of love.  He then shows that love came into the world in the person of Jesus.  He came to give us life (note: this is not the same as coming to save us from hell).  Jesus himself told us this:  "I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full" (John 10:10)

John then says that Jesus was sent as an atoning sacrifice for our sins, but immediately goes on to say that just as God loved us, so we must love one another.  NT Wright translates the words as "Beloved, if that’s how God loved us, we ought to love one another in the same way."  John says something similar in 1 John 3:16, when he says that Jesus laid down his life for us and we ought to lay down our lives for others. 

I have always missed this subtle message, assuming that John was just giving an example of God's love and then telling us we had to love too, whereas it seems that John is implying that just as Jesus laid down his life for us, so we should lay down our lives for others, and just as God gave Jesus as an atoning sacrifice, so we should be an atoning sacrifice for each other.

In the Atonement sacrifice, the ritual symbolised covering over someone's death (substituting with an animal offering) and the sprinkling of the blood to symbolise cleaning away the indirect consequences of evil (purification).  It's a confusing ritual for 21st century readers, as it's so removed from our experience.  But these symbolic rituals would, in theory, compel people to become people of love and grace also.   The act symbolised the receiving of God's goodwill and favour towards us.  We then carry that forward into our relationship with each other.  This is now celebrated in the act of Communion.  

John is really driving home this point here - just as God loves us with grace and forgiveness, so we are to love others with grace and forgiveness.   Just as Jesus represents an offering of God to make us clean, so we are to offer ourselves for our brothers and sisters.  

The cross means many things to many people, and part of its beauty is that it speaks in different ways.  One thing I believe it does not do, is "appease God's wrath by offering a blood sacrifice in our place."  This is misunderstanding of prophetic words about wrath against God's people being revealed, which took place in this world as a consequence of sinful living and failing to be true to God's covenant - particularly the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70. 

When New Testament writers spoke of "coming wrath" it is easy to jump to futurist readings of this meaning some kind of end of the world judgement, rather than miss the end of the age meaning - the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple in the war with Rome (that Jesus predicted would take place within that generation - and it did, 40 years later).

However, God did not lovingly offer his own Son as a loving gift to lovingly protect us from his own wrath by killing him on a cross.  That is a twisting of the gospel.  When we say that an artist gave his life to a great masterpiece, or an aid worker gave her life to caring for others, this doesn't just mean that they died for it.  It means they lived for it.  To reduce Jesus to a sacrificial animal to avoid God's wrath is to thoroughly miss the point of Jesus.  He came to show us how to live.  And in that, he came to show us how to love.  

John is not writing a theology of atonement here.  He is using a symbol of God's loving grace and mercy, of Christ laying down his life (not just his death), to show us how we are to love each other.  God is love.  We must love one another, laying down our lives and just as Jesus, as God incarnate, came to reconcile mankind to himself, covering over any sin or unintended wrongdoing, so we are to do for each other.  In being reassured of God's goodwill and favour through the atoning sacrifice offering he makes for us willingly, we are to share that bond of love, forgiveness and mercy to each other.   To hate another, for whatever reason, be it their religion, race, opinions, or even theology, is to not know God.

I will finish with words from 1 Peter 4:7: 

"Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins."

There's a good video on Atonement and Sacrifice from the Bibe Project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_OlRWGLdnw