Atonement. Justification. Wrath. These aren't words I use too much, I have to admit. They sound so impersonal, so legal, so…Old Testament. But I keep running into these terms again and again, especially in Paul's writings, and particularly that troublesome word, "justification." As we just heard, in Romans chapter five, Paul sets up a tidy little analogy for us, comparing Adam and Jesus: "Just as one man's trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man's act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all."

In all the passages I've just quoted, Paul is trying to answer a very basic question: How did -how does-Jesus save us? How did that past event bring about our present (and future) salvation? For my part, I can profess that Jesus is my Saviour, but can I explain how? Certainly, I can recite traditional formulae: "for us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven." "Jesus died on the cross for us." "We are redeemed by the blood of the Lamb." "I am justified through faith in Christ." But do we really understand what these slogans mean? Well, I for one am not up to the task of making sense of all these catchphrases, but perhaps we can come to a deeper understanding of one of them, so let us focus on what Paul means when he writes that Jesus' "free gift following many trespasses brings justification."

In Past Event and Present Salvation: The Christian Idea of Atonement (Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989), Paul S. Fiddes of Oxford University sums up our predicament quite nicely:

If we follow the apostle Paul in the preaching of faith, then we proclaim that we have been 'justified by God's grace as a gift' (Rom. 3:24); that is, we have been acquitted in God's own law court where we stand on trial…Somehow, because Jesus Christ was condemned as a criminal in a human law court, we have been declared to be innocent in God's sight. But in that 'somehow' there is vast room not only for mystery but also for misunderstanding. (p. 83)

Our challenge, then, is to respond adequately to the question: How could an innocent man's death be pleasing to God? Why would the injustice of executing the only perfect human being lead to the "justification" of every imperfect human being? Does this idea really make any sense at all?

For his part, Fiddes theorizes that the law court the apostle Paul had in mind was not the Roman model, but the Hebrew one, in which the judge is expected to put the accused in the right (thereby "justifying" him) or in the wrong (thereby "condemning" him). As he writes, "Now this Hebrew setting means that 'justification', while a legal term, is at root a matter of relationships. Hebrew law was concerned with the health of the covenant community, and so the appellant who was justified was actually being received back into fellowship with the community by the personal will of God…" (p. 87) In this reading, then, when Paul writes that God "justifies us," he means that God "accepts us" back into relationship, and since God accepts the unjust, "justification" and "forgiveness" are virtually interchangeable terms. Thus, as Fiddes writes,

to say that God 'justifies us' in atonement is to say that he acts to save us from the evil powers that oppress our lives and accuse us; he does this as a good and 'righteous' Judge who is full of compassion for his creatures. But when we recall that we have actually brought ourselves into our perilous situation by our own sin, we can see that once again a legal metaphor is being used to depict an act of God which goes far beyond mere legal categories. When we ask how God can accept transgressors into fellowship with him in this scandalous way, then Paul makes clear that it can only be through the cross of Jesus. Because Christ has died, God puts us in the right. But the revolutionary way that this legal term is being used, to break the very mould of law, means that we cannot directly extract a mechanism of atonement from the metaphor itself. Justification is the glorious, startling fact. The picture does not in itself explain how the cross of Christ achieves it for us. (p. 87-88)

Since Paul's language stops short of explaining how Christ's crucifixion brings about justification, theologians over the centuries have devised theories to fill in the gaps. One of the more influential theories is that of St. Anselm, a medieval Archbishop of Canterbury, who asserted that Christ payed a debt of honor due to God by humanity, which humanity could not pay due to humanity's sinfulness. Anselm's answer was grounded not so much in the biblical text, however, as it was in his own culture, where God was envisioned as a feudal overlord, and sin was nothing more or less than failing to give the overlord his due.

While Anselm's theory still has currency in some Christian communities today, it has become more and more difficult to square a feudal understanding of the order of the universe with the contemporary understanding of a universe governed more by Chaos Theory than by Natural Law. The longer theologians and preachers cling to the language of the law court or the feudal system, I'm afraid, the harder it will be for human beings to appropriate the meaning of Christ's death and resurrection for our lives. And though we can participate in the paschal mystery even without a profound intellectual understanding, it is unlikely that any theologizing will have an impact on the way we live our lives without some sort of narrative that makes sense to us in the here and now.

So, why should Jesus' death on the cross nearly two thousand years ago matter to us today? Or perhaps a better way of asking this question is: Does Jesus' death on the cross nearly two thousand years ago matter to you today?

I can't answer that question for you, of course, so I shall put myself on the hot seat. Does Jesus' death matter to me today? (Aside from the fact that without it, I wouldn't have the job I have, that is.) Yes, it does. It matters because my faith in Jesus' death and resurrection deeply affects my relationships with my fellow human beings, not just those close to me like my wife and family and friends and parishioners, but those whom I encounter at the supermarket and on the highway-but only as long as I remember who these human beings (all of us) are in God's sight: beloved, if often errant, children, whom God in Christ Jesus loved so much that he was willing to live and die as one of us. And more that that, Jesus lived not just as some Average Joe, but entered into the deepest, darkest abyss of human alienation and estrangement. For in his death, Jesus experienced the ultimate in broken relationships-his disciples and friends forsook him at the hour of his arrest; he was mocked and abused by all classes of humanity, as represented by the crowd, the Pharisees, the scribes, the Chief Priests, Herod's royal court and the Roman governor, with his freshly washed hands. Those few who wanted to stay near him at his death-the beloved disciple, his mother, and the other faithful women-even they are cut off from him, kept at bay by the centurions, only allowed to touch him after he was dead, thereby making themselves ritually unclean, cutting themselves off from the rest of the Jewish community, unable to eat the Passover meal.

These details, as recounted in the gospels, indicate that God's Son did not withhold himself from any human experience of brokenness. As Paul Fiddes writes, "Jesus so completely identifies himself with sinful human beings that he shares their experience of standing under God's verdict upon distorted human life. He feels himself abandoned not only by fellow men and women, but by God himself; he stands with the Godforsaken. He stands in death where he need not be-among those who trust in themselves and suffer the consequences. Using a biblical expression, we may say that he dies under the 'wrath' of God." (p. 91)

The good news is that in standing with the Godforsaken, the Son shows us that not even the Godforsaken are forsaken by God. Not even God's "wrath" can outweigh God's love. Despite all evidence to the contrary, even when we feel most Godforsaken, God has not forsaken us in his Son. This claim is at the very heart of the Gospel: that even those who feel themselves to be the farthest outcasts from communion with God are sought out by God for eternal communion, an eternal communion that begins in the here and now, and which has the power to transform all our broken relationships and heal all our wounds. This transformation of our relationships with each other and God through Christ brings that one unsurpassable act of divine love in human form out of the distant past and locates it in the present. The transforming grace of Christ, present in individual lives through the community of the Church, the body of Christ, draws us into union with God in the here-and-now in such a way that death loses its sting and we are vouchsafed that blessed hope of everlasting life with the One whose resurrection conquered sin and death. Call it justification, atonement, forgiveness, call it what you will. I call it Life, for that Life first called me.