More heresy

Jesus did not die because his ‘Father’ decided to sacrifice him in order to save humanity. Such thinking turns God into an unfeeling monster and the antithesis of love. Loving fathers today do not send their sons to die. The biblical references to Jesus’ death as a sacrifice are part of that early church process of finding meaning from their existing cultural and historical metaphors. I think we need to be brave enough to say that many of those metaphors are no longer appropriate to our culture and time, and indeed are significant stumbling blocks in communicating the nature of the Christian God to our society.

One of the urgent tasks of the Church is to rewrite its liturgies. Anglican liturgy, for example, is riddled with notions of sin, sacrifice, and blood. Whether understood literally or metaphorically the language conveys a worldview that society by and large has long rejected. We no longer believe that people are born sinful. We no longer believe in a God who requires people to be sent to Hell because of their sin. We no longer believe that in order for people to get to Heaven they need the blood sacrifice of a righteous saviour. We no longer believe that when we sip the wine at communion we are drinking Jesus’ blood. We may want to keep some of the metaphorical understandings of this tradition but the likelihood of being misunderstood is huge.

Instead we need to bring the resources of our best poets and writers to the task of writing liturgies celebrating the love, joy, and grace of God made known in Jesus and our experience. We need to find ways of talking about our need to change and grow without labelling people as sinful or wicked. We need to find ways to learn from the past without sanctifying carte blanche the writings of ancient cultures. We need to find ways to proclaim the triumph of goodness without excusing the triumphalist practices of yesteryear. We need to find ways of talking about the cost of love without turning Jesus’ death into a primitive atoning blood sacrifice.