Grace Alone
Two Cents
Proper 15 The Sunday closest to August 17
Almighty God, you have given your only Son to be for us a
sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life: Give us
grace to receive thankfully the fruits of this redeeming work,
and to follow daily in the blessed steps of his most holy life;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns
with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life: Give us
grace to receive thankfully the fruits of this redeeming work,
and to follow daily in the blessed steps of his most holy life;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns
with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
Our prayerbook says that for celebrations of the Holy Eucharist throughout the week we use the lectionary propers from the prior Sunday. This makes sense, seeing that Sunday is the first day, starting a new set of propers (Collect, OT, Psalm, Epistle, Gospel) for the week. But for Bible study, my preference is to anticipate the upcoming Sunday’s propers by looking at them through the week leading up to the Sunday, with the idea that it enriches Sunday worship to do our homework: check out what is going to be read, and prepare.
Anyway ...
Looking at Proper 15B, and if lex orandi lex credendi, the collect for this coming Sunday does not do it for me. Many scholars say Paul’s theology, and therefore the theology of the Church, is of Jesus Christ as the representative human atoning sacrifice; it centers on God’s just wrath at the sinfulness of humans, wrath that must be satisfied (propitiated), and sin that must be wiped clean (expiated). And that this could only be accomplished in the style of Old Testament and earlier cultic sacrifice, that is, by the slaughter of a perfect, innocent living being, a lamb or a human. In the system of cultic sacrifice, sin is transferred onto the lamb or innocent child, who becomes sin; and its bloody death appeases God’s anger. Ultimately, that in the Christian system, in God’s justice and mercy, God sent Jesus Christ the Son to be the necessary sacrifice. The notion that God could simply forgive human sin is dismissed theologically on the grounds that such action would mean God is not just. And a notion that God may actually not be obsessed with our sin and demanding bloody satisfaction is not part of the equation at all.
Early fathers of the Church arrived at this theology, came to this conclusion in the centuries after Jesus as they struggled to rationalize Calvary. Reverence is due to Paul and those early fathers, and respect to scholars and theologians down through the centuries who have discussed and debated and theologized the sacrificial system, and what is gained by the sacrifice, and Paul’s understanding of Jesus’ place in the system. But a greater theological struggle is the question whether the Church’s one foundation is Jesus or Paul; and the necessity of propitiatory sacrifice does not seem to be the focus of Jesus himself who is God Incarnate and whose-only Word matters. Blood sacrifice to wipe out sin and appease an angry deity is foreign to our culture, our way of thinking, our values, our sense of moral decency, and our understanding of God who is Love and who takes little children in His arms and holds them. The ancient Canaanites, Israelites, Egyptians, Aztecs, Incas, Mayans, Sumerians, Mesopotamians, Chinese, Celts, Britons, ... we don’t think or believe their way about God. Though it have been native and natural for Paul in his era of temple sacrifice, it’s archaic for us, not at all quaint and, carried to extreme, horrifying. The theological problem is not the lovingkindness of the Son, but our misreading of the Father whose characteristic as revealed in Jesus is Grace, not avenging anger. God may be unchangeable (though in Holy Scripture, God is said to change God's mind from time to time), but our understanding of God is a work in process. The Church needs to see this and act or react accordingly -- as in fact, history and Reason, the Church actually does act/react deliberately though creepingly slow.
Composed for the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, the theologically medieval collect for Sunday is based on that theology of sacrifice, and needs to be not prayed but put gently, lovingly and quietly on the shelf with other historic pieces; or else reimagined to focus on Jesus as the divine example of godly human life. Just so:
Almighty God, you have given your only Son to be for us
the example of godly life: Give us grace to follow daily in
the blessed steps of his most holy life; through Jesus Christ
your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the
Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
the example of godly life: Give us grace to follow daily in
the blessed steps of his most holy life; through Jesus Christ
your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the
Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
TW+