Good Mother Jesus

"Good Mother Jesus"--April 12, 2019

[Jesus said,] "Very truly, I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice; you will have pain, but your pain will turn into joy. When a woman is in labor, she has pain, because her hour has come. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world. So you have pain now; but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you." [John 16:20-22]

It's not all battles and divine accounting, after all.  The cross, that is.  Jesus says it is like a mother giving birth, who endures pain as the means of bringing forth life.  Jesus says, in other words, that he is the mother, who bears pain in order to bear us.

I must confess to you, perhaps until this very moment, I had never considered that this is one of the most helpful ways of understanding what the cross is all about. It is what theologians and academics would call a "theory of atonement"--a metaphor for offering an answer to the question, "What happened at the cross?"  And interestingly, it is an image that doesn't readily fit into the usual boxes or categories for explaining Jesus' death that make it into your standard Systematic Theology textbook--and yet, the more and more I think about it, the image of a mother giving birth solves a lot of the problems that the other "atonement theories" out there stumble over.

Here's what I mean.  Ask your average respectable religious professional why Jesus died, and chances are you'll get one of three answers. (I'm about to give some really, really broad brushstrokes here, about theological ideas that have been percolating for centuries, so forgive me for playing a bit fast and loose here.  If you are interested in a more nuanced conversation about these, I'll direct you to the series in the weekly podcast of which I am a part, "Crazy Faith Talk," but that's enough of a shameless promotion for now.)

One standard answer to "Why did Jesus die?" goes something like this: "Jesus died in order to pay the debt that human beings incurred against God by their sin.  An infinite debt could only be paid by God, but a human had to pay it, and so therefore, God had to become a human in order to satisfy the terms of this sin-debt."  To be honest, that model of what-happened-at-the-cross is so well-known and well-worn that a lot of the Christians I know have never even considered that there are other (biblical) ways of talking about the cross.  This model, often called "penal substitution"--as in, Jesus takes a punishment for a crime he didn't commit, or pays a debt on our behalf--has been kicked around for a very, very long time, and it has a certain logic to it.  The basic trouble you run into, though, if you push very hard on that metaphor, is that it can sound like God just capriciously demands a pound of flesh and doesn't care who pays, as long as the debt gets paid, or that God is subject to some sort of even higher universal laws or rules (or "deep magic" if you like) that require God to insist on payment of a debt instead of just forgiving the debt. And that leads into terribly unsatisfying conversations that pit traits of God against one another, like saying "God's holiness and justice require payment, but God's mercy allows someone else to make the payment for you," which honestly doesn't sound very merciful or just if you give it much thought.  I get that there are some ways this debt-payment metaphor can be helpful, but it raises at least as many issues as it resolves.

Another popular answer in church history to the "Why did Jesus die?" question is that Jesus' death is like the decisive victory in a battle against the powers of evil.  In this way of picturing it, we human beings are held captive (by the devil? by sin? by death?  maybe all of the above?), and Jesus delivers us from the clutches of evil by offering himself as the ransom paid to set us free from our adversary, and wins against evil and the grave like soldiers from the Trojan horse by bursting out of the grave.  Again, there is certainly biblical reason for this line of thought--Jesus talks about himself as a "ransom" in the Gospels, and the New Testament epistles run with that imagery, too (we have even spent some time with some of those passages in this devotional series this Lent, too).  But this battlefield/ransom metaphor also raises its own set of issues.  For one, it suggests that God is out-matched by the powers of evil and has to give into the demands of our captors by paying the ransom or going into battle.  That kind of makes it sound like God isn't really "in charge" of the universe, but is fighting a never-ending war against the side of evil, with an uncertain outcome.  Instead of saying that Jesus' death pays a debt owed to God like in the penal substitution picture, this model says that it is the powers of evil that hold all the cards and require payment--and then for God to give in and offer that payment in Jesus' death seems kind of like God legitimizes the claim evil has on us!  So again, while there is definitely language in the New Testament about the cross being like a cosmic battle between good and evil, or the paying of a ransom to a hostile adversary, that opens a whole other can of worms.

You'll also hear respectable religious people say that the cross of Christ is really just a supreme example of what love looks like--and when we see how Jesus loved us all the way to giving his life, we will be moved to love others and do good deeds ourselves, and that will give us the kickstart we need to be well-behaved enough to get into heaven.  And while it is true that Jesus' sees his own sacrifice at the cross as a pattern for his followers ("No greater love than to lay down one's life for one's friends..." and "If any would follow me, let them take up their cross...", for example), that leaves hanging the difficult question, "Ok, but did Jesus really have to actually die in order to teach me to be loving?" and, in fact, a lot of folks who head in this direction end up concluding that Jesus didn't really have to die, but just that he taught us to love each other a lot.  And to be honest, that makes the cross sound like sort of a random blip that just happened to go that way, rather than the conscious willful surrender of the Son of God.

But... what if what happened at the cross isn't primarily a transaction at all?  What if it's not about paying anybody off--neither God nor the devil--so much as it is about the willingness to endure pain in order to bring forth new life?  What if, in other words, as Jesus suggests here in John's gospel, that the cross is like the delivery table on which God bears a new creation?  What if the pain of the cross isn't a requirement for the sake of punishment or payment, but an organic part of bringing new life into the universe, even out of death?  

In that case, we don't have to go constructing a set of divine accounting rules that can explain how Jesus' death can be applied to other people, or why God's "system" requires death in the first place.  And neither do we have to come up with an explanation for why God has to make a ransom payment to death or the devil or what-have-you, rather than just snapping a divine finger to make the devil give us all up.  Maybe the cross is less about a transaction, as though Jesus were being bought and sold, and more like Jesus chooses to take on pain organically as the means of bringing forth life--our life.

And in that case, the good news in all of this is that there is no length Jesus was not willing to go to for our sake--and the pain doesn't last forever.  Jesus will bear the scars from the cross forever, and his disciples will have to endure the pain of losing their rabbi for a time--but the joy and the life that come through death will neither fade nor expire.  Jesus considers you worth it--worth the pain, worth the labor, worth the tears, worth the suffering--not because it is some kind of monetary transaction or accounting scheme, but because God is always in the business of bringing life out of nothingness, whether in the first moment of creation when the Spirit brooded over the chaos in the beginning, or when Jesus rises from the grave.

Maybe all the complicated diagrams and Latin jargon obscured what has always been really a love story--the love of a mother for her child, the love of God for a world waiting to be born anew.  Maybe the right picture on this day for what happened at the cross is good mother Jesus.

O Christ who bears pain in order to bear us into new life, we give you thanks for what you have endured, and we dare to step fully into the life you have birthed us into.