Love

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Jesus was not the kind of revolutionary who would call for twelve legions of angels, sweep all his enemies away in a moment, and leave nothing to do thereafter. As we have seen throughout this book, the revolution he accomplished was the victory of a strange new power, the power of covenant love, a covenant love winning its victory not over suffering, but through suffering. This meant, inevitably, that the victory would have to be implemented in the same way, proceeding by the slow road of love rather than the quick road of sudden conquest. That is part of what the Sermon on the Mount was all about. Did we really imagine that, while Jesus would win his victory by suffering, self-giving love, we would implement that same victory by arrogant, self-aggrandizing force of arms? (Perhaps we did. After all, James and John, as close to Jesus as anyone, made exactly this mistake in Luke 9:54 and again in Mark 10:35–40. Perhaps even Jesus’s mother thought the same way; her great Magnificat, in Luke 1:46–55, sounds quite like a battle hymn.) Once you understand the kind of revolution Jesus was accomplishing, you understand why it would then go on being necessary for it to be implemented step by step, not all at one single sweep, and why those steps have to be, every one of them, steps of the same generous love that took Jesus to the cross. Love will always suffer. If the church tries to win victories either all in a rush or by steps taken in some other spirit, it may appear to succeed for a while. Think of the pomp and “glory” of the late medieval church. But the “victory” will be hollow and will leave all kinds of problems in its wake. I think many, if not most, Christians understand this instinctively, without needing to see the theological or biblical underpinnings. Such people do not need a book like this to explain it all to them. One might as well give someone a flashlight to go and see if the sun had risen. It is after all generous love, Jesus-shaped love, that draws people into the Christian family in the first place, not the complex crossword puzzles of subtle theologians. But what a book like this may be able to do is to explain to such people and to confused onlookers how the larger picture fits together, so as to avoid the risk that love itself may be subverted by other influences. In particular, it may explain how the mission of the church is organically and intimately related to the great events at the heart of the faith.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  That had been the view of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel—to say nothing of Ezra and Nehemiah, both of whom continued after the supposed “return from exile” to lament Israel’s sins and its consequent unredeemed, enslaved state. Thus, as long as Israel was still in bondage to hostile powers, what was needed was a new Exodus; but, because the cause of that bondage was Israel’s sins, what had to happen was for those sins to be dealt with. This combination of themes—the Passover victory, on the one hand, and the exile- ending “forgiveness of sins,” on the other—would then become characteristic of many strands in the New Testament. My argument in this book is that the combination goes right back to the Last Supper itself, the interpretative grid that Jesus himself chose and structured. And on this basis I will suggest that we can see at last how to rescue the central elements of early Christian “atonement” theology from their own pagan captivity. At the center of the whole picture we do not find a wrathful God bent on killing someone, demanding blood. Instead, we find the image—I use the word advisedly—of the covenant-keeping God who takes the full force of sin onto himself. This, I suggest, goes some way toward explaining the remarkable power that, as we saw at the start of this book, the story still retains. And it retains it as story more than as theory—especially when the various theories are detached from this story, not least from the ancient Jewish story in which it belongs, and relocated in different stories, images, illustrations, and the like, where their central themes can be subtly transformed to carry significantly different meanings. It retains its power particularly as acted story, as Jesus’s followers to this day “do this in memory of him.” But that brings us to the “words of institution.” This is where the theme of “end of exile” nests within and interprets the larger theme of the kingdom-bringing Passover. The words over the bread resonate out in several directions. “This is my body, which is given for you” (Luke 22:19; Matt. 26:26 and Mark 14:22 lack “which is given for you”; 1 Cor. 11:24 reads “which is for you”). It misses the point to ask whether Jesus is identifying himself with the crisp unleavened bread of the traditional meal or with the Passover lamb itself, or both, or something more.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The task is difficult. There are different ways of probing this mystery. On the theological level, which of the “theories” or “models” do we prefer, and how does it all “work”? On the sacramental level, baptism and the Eucharist have both proved controversial; is this because they are so closely linked to Jesus’s death? On the level of preaching and teaching, how can we best articulate the central gospel message, so that its impact comes from its original meaning rather than from dodgy illustrations that can easily distort the truth? And on the pastoral level, how can the truth of the cross be applied to the difficulties of real-life discipleship? The more we engage in any of these, let alone all four, the more we seem to be entering dangerous, contested territory. Things happen to distract us, to dismay us, to put us off track. I have observed this in my own work over many years and again in the writing of this book. I take this to imply that something really important is at stake. It is vital that we keep our nerve, say our prayers, and press forward. The aim, as in all theological and biblical exploration, is not to replace love with knowledge. Rather, it is to keep love focused upon its true object. We must not make the overwhelming experience of God’s love revealed in the cross of Jesus an excuse for mere muddle. As in a marriage, love doesn’t stand still. A passionately devoted young couple need to learn the long-term skills of mutual understanding, not to replace love, but to deepen it. It is of course better to hold on to love (whether that of God or of a spouse), even when we are confused, than to let go because we can’t understand it. But it is far better to address the confusions. It isn’t only faith that seeks understanding. Love ought to do the same; not of course in order to stop loving, but so that love may grow, mature, and bear fruit. Models and Doctrines So how did the story develop—the story, that is, of the ways in which the followers of Jesus have understood his death? Many books have been written on this topic alone, and I must here confine myself to a quick outline sketch. The great dogmatic disputes of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries focused on the questions of God, Jesus, and the Spirit. Their participants hammered out the official doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation. To be sure, they all believed that Jesus had “died for their sins,” and in sermons and longer writings they said many moving things about that death and what it meant. But it was never defined as such, never nailed down to one theory.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Imagine, if you will, a boy of about seven years old, alone for some reason in a quiet room, finding himself overwhelmed with the sense of God’s love revealed in the death of Jesus. I cannot now recall, sixty years later, what it was that reduced me to tears on that occasion. Growing up in a traditional middle-of-the- road Christian household, attending the local Anglican church (very undramatic by today’s standards), I was familiar with many prayers, hymns, and passages of scripture that might suddenly have “gotten through.” The old-fashioned language of the Authorized (King James) Version couldn’t stifle the simple but powerful statements: “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son” (John 3:16); “God commendeth his love for us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8); “The Son of God . . . loved me, and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20); “Neither death, nor life . . . nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38–39). And so on. And, in my tradition at least, there were the great hymns, like “My Song Is Love Unknown”: My song is love unknown, my Savior’s love to me, love to the loveless shown, that they might lovely be. O who am I, that for my sake my Lord should take frail flesh and die? Here might I stay and sing: no story so divine; never was love, dear King, never was grief like thine! This is my Friend, in whose sweet praise I all my days could gladly spend. 3 Then, less rich in either poetry or theology, but memorable nonetheless, was C. F. Alexander’s well-known hymn “There Is a Green Hill Far Away”: There is a green hill far away without 4 a city wall, where the dear Lord was crucified, who died to save us all. . . . O dearly, dearly has he loved, and we must love him too, and trust in his redeeming blood, and try his works to do. 5 On a different poetic plane altogether, there is John Henry Newman’s majestic “Praise to the Holiest in the Height,” which I knew as a hymn many years before I met it in Edward Elgar’s glorious setting in The Dream of Gerontius: O loving wisdom of our God! when all was sin and shame, a second Adam to the fight and to the rescue came. O wisest love! That flesh and blood, which did in Adam fail, should strive afresh against the foe, should strive and should prevail. . . . O generous love!

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  This famous chapter then climaxes with its most famous verse: And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. (13:13) There is a hierarchy of spiritual gifts, and the most important gift is love. The context of 1 Corinthians 12–14 gives this text an even richer meaning than when it is heard, as it most often is, apart from that context. First, the love of which Paul speaks is a spiritual gift, not simply an act of will, not something we decide to do, not simply good advice for couples and others. Rather, as a spiritual gift, love is the most important result (and evidence) of a Spirit transplant. As the primary fruit of the Spirit, it is also the criterion by which the other gifts are evaluated. Second, when this text is heard apart from its context, it often sentimentalizes, trivializes, and individualizes what Paul meant by love. It should not be reduced to a tribute in praise of love. Nor should its meaning be reduced to being nice, sensitive, thoughtful, faithful, and kind, even though those are fine qualities. And it should not be reduced to behavior in individual relationships, important as that is. Rather, for Paul, love in this text is radical shorthand for what life “in Christ” is like—life in the “new creation,” life “in the Spirit,” life animated by a Spirit transplant. As the primary fruit of a Spirit-filled life, love is about more than our relationships with individuals. For Paul, it had (for want of a better word) a social meaning as well. The social form of love for Paul was distributive justice and nonviolence, bread and peace. Paul’s vision of life “in Christ,” life in the “new creation,” did not mean, “Accept the imperial way of life with its oppression and violence, but practice love in your personal relationships.” To make the same point differently, people like Jesus and Paul were not executed for saying, “Love one another.” They were killed because their understanding of love meant more than being compassionate toward individuals, although it did include that. It also meant standing against the domination systems that ruled their world, and collaborating with the Spirit in the creation of a new way of life that stood in contrast to the normalcy of the wisdom of this world. Love and justice go together. Justice without love can be brutal, and love without justice can be banal. Love is the heart of justice, and justice is the social form of love. TWO WAYS OF LIFE: FLESH AND SPIRIT Paul’s letter to his conflicted community in Galatia provides another description of life “in Christ.” As in 1 Corinthians 13, the text emphasizes love as the primary quality of living by the Spirit:

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  For Paul, the cross revealed God’s passion, God’s will, for the world—a world different from the normalcy of “this world” of domination, injustice, and violence, all legitimated by the “wisdom of the world.” It also revealed the path of internal transformation, the path of becoming “in Christ” by dying and rising with Christ. And it revealed God’s character, God’s nature, as divine generosity, as love for all—the ungodly, sinners, us. In all of these ways, Paul saw salvific meanings, atoning significance, in Christ crucified and risen. RESURRECTION: GOD HAS RAISED JESUS We have already mentioned some of the meanings Paul saw in the resurrection of Jesus as we explored the word pairs “death and resurrection,” “dying and rising,” “crucified and risen.” Now we focus more specifically on the second word in that pair, the resurrection itself, Paul’s conviction that God had raised Jesus. What did he mean when he said this? What meaning did he see in it? Like “sacrifice,” “atonement,” and “redemption,” “resurrection” has a common meaning held by many Christians. For them, God raised Jesus from the dead by reanimating and transforming his corpse, leaving his tomb empty, and for a limited period of time he appeared to his followers in a way that he hasn’t since. The story of Jesus ascending into heaven, said by Acts to have occurred forty days after the resurrection, brought that special time to a close. Moreover, many believe (or think they are supposed to believe) that all of this was quite “physical”—by which we mean that the tomb really was empty, that Jesus appeared to his followers in a body that could be seen and touched, that he ate with them and even cooked breakfast for them. This, or something like this, is what most people think the resurrection of Jesus means. Some believe it, some don’t, and others puzzle about it. The scenario above is based on the gospels. More specifically, it is based on combining the quite different stories of Easter in the four gospels and reading them as literal-factual narratives. This is not the place for suggesting how these stories should be read (for this, see the final chapter of our The Last Week). Rather, we focus here on what Paul said. Recall that all of Paul’s genuine letters are earlier than any of the gospels and are thus the first written references to the resurrection. Our point is not that earlier is better, as if Paul should be taken more seriously than the gospels. Rather, our purpose is to see what Paul said about the resurrection of Jesus without presuming the gospel accounts.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  (Hos. 11:1) These texts are just a small sample, generated as much by the concordance as anything else, of a theme that runs throughout the scriptures. Equally important, if not more so, are the sustained expositions of the way in which the powerful new work of rescuing Israel from exile, of the new Exodus and all that would go with it, are the direct result of the unbreakable covenant commitment of YHWH to his people. Whether words like “love” occur, passages like these convey the reality with poetic power: See, the sovereign YHWH comes with might , and his arm rules for him; his reward is with him , and his recompense before him. He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms , and carry them in his bosom , and gently lead the mother sheep. (Isa. 40:10–11) But you, Israel, my servant , Jacob, whom I have chosen , the offspring of Abraham, my friend; you whom I took from the ends of the earth , and called from its farthest corners , saying to you, “You are my servant , I have chosen you and not cast you off”; do not fear, for I am with you , do not be afraid, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you , I will uphold you with my victorious right hand. (Isa. 41:8–10) It is out of this context that there emerges a new promise: the covenant love that YHWH has for Israel is to be extended to the nations. I am YHWH, I have called you in righteousness , I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people , a light to the nations , to open the eyes that are blind , to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon , from the prison those who sit in darkness. (Isa. 42:6–7) In other words, non-Jewish peoples too are to have their own Exodus! This is revolutionary indeed, and it transforms the exclusive note of the earlier passages about the divine love. It now appears that this love is not only the divine love for Israel, but the divine love through Israel, resulting in the worldwide appeal of Isaiah 55: Ho, everyone who thirsts , come to the waters; and you that have no money , come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. . . . Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Objection 2: Further, Gregory reckons fasting together with these three, as stated in the Decretals (xiii, Q. ii, Cap. 22): “The souls of the departed are released in four ways, either by the offerings of priests, or the alms of their friends, or the prayers of the saints, or the fasting of their kinsfolk.” Therefore the three mentioned above are insufficiently reckoned by Augustine (De Cura pro Mort. xviii). Objection 3: Further, Baptism is the greatest of the sacraments, especially as regards its effect. Therefore Baptism and other sacraments ought to be offered for the departed equally with or more than the Sacrament of the altar. Objection 4: Further, this would seem to follow from the words of 1 Cor. 15:29, “If the dead rise not again at all, why are they then baptized for them?” Therefore Baptism avails as suffrage for the dead. Objection 5: Further, in different Masses there is the same Sacrifice of the altar. If, therefore, sacrifice, and not the Mass, be reckoned among the suffrages, it would seem that the effect would be the same whatever Mass be said for a deceased person, whether in honor of the Blessed Virgin or of the Holy Ghost, or any other. Yet this seems contrary to the ordinance of the Church which has appointed a special Mass for the dead. Objection 6: Further, the Damascene (Serm.: De his qui in fide dormierunt) teaches that candles and oil should be offered for the dead. Therefore not only the offering of the sacrifice of the altar, but also other offerings should be reckoned among suffrages for the dead. I answer that, The suffrages of the living profit the dead in so far as the latter are united to the living in charity, and in so far as the intention of the living is directed to the dead. Consequently those whose works are by nature best adapted to assist the dead, which pertain chiefly to the communication of charity, or to the directing of one’s intention to another person. Now the sacrament of the Eucharist belongs chiefly to charity, since it is the sacrament of ecclesiastical unity, inasmuch as it contains Him in Whom the whole Church is united and incorporated, namely Christ: wherefore the Eucharist is as it were the origin and bond of charity. Again, chief among the effects of charity is the work of almsgiving: wherefore on the part of charity these two, namely the sacrifice of the Church and almsgiving are the chief suffrages for the dead. But on the part of the intention directed to the dead the chief suffrage is prayer, because prayer by its very nature implies relation not only to the person who prays, even as other works do, but more directly still to that which we pray for. Hence these three are reckoned the principal means of succoring the dead, although we must allow that any other goods whatsoever that are done out of charity for the dead are profitable to them.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The first half of 5:21 does indeed make it clear, however, that at the heart of the gospel is the innocent Jesus dying the death of the guilty. Here we drill down to bedrock once more. “The Messiah did not know sin, but God made him to be sin on our behalf” (5:21a). At this point we are very close to Galatians 3:13 and indeed to the entire theme we observed in the narrative of Luke. Jesus was innocent, yet he died the death of the guilty. But notice what overall narrative frames this statement. It is not the quasi-pagan narrative of an angry or capricious divinity and an accidental victim. It is the story of love, covenant love, faithful love, reconciling love. Messianic love. It is the story of the victory of that love, because that self-giving love turns out to have a power of a totally different sort from any other power known in the world (which is why Paul is happy to say that he is strong when he is weak). But here at last we begin to discover why it has that all-conquering power. If the enslaving powers are to be overthrown, they must be robbed of their power base; and their power base is, as we saw, the fact that humans hand over power to them by worshipping them instead of worshipping the Creator, by the idolatry and consequent distortion of life that can be lumped together as “sin.” Once that sin has been dealt with, the power of the idols is broken; once the Messiah has been “made sin for us,” the way is open for the ministry of reconciliation to fan out in all directions. Inside the Passover-like victory over the powers is the end-of-exile dealing with sin; and the way sin is dealt with is by the appropriate substitution of the one who alone is the true representative. The one bore the sin of the many. The innocent died in the place of the guilty. This only makes sense within the narrative of love, of new Exodus, of end of exile—of Jesus. Put it into another narrative, and it becomes a dark, pagan horror. Put it back where it belongs, and it speaks of a compelling love. “The Messiah’s love makes us press on.” That is the radical application of the cross to the apostolic life. Philippians A passage from one of the letters Paul wrote from prison, Philippians, may be brought in at this point. The famous poem in Philippians 2 pivots on the crucifixion: each of the two halves of the poem consists of three three-line stanzas, and the line in the middle, as it were, holds its arms out in both directions, making shocking and revolutionary sense: Who, though in God’s form, did not Regard his equality with God As something he ought to exploit. Instead, he emptied himself, And received the form of a slave, Being born in the likeness of humans. And then, having human appearance,

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  That he, who smote in Man for man the foe, the double agony in Man for man should undergo. And in the garden secretly, and on the cross on high, should teach his brethren, and inspire to suffer and to die. 6 And then there was the best known of all Good Friday hymns, at least in my tradition: Isaac Watts’s great meditation on Galatians 6:14, “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”: When I survey the wondrous Cross on which the Prince of Glory died, my richest gain I count but loss, and pour contempt on all my pride. . . . Were the whole realm of nature mine, that were an offering far too small; love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all. 7 I had sung all these and many others over and over and knew at least some by heart. The message was reinforced by the simple Anglican liturgy I heard every Sunday, in which so many prayers ended with words like “through the love of our Savior, Jesus Christ” or “through the merits and death of Jesus Christ our Lord.” I would soon come to know by heart, through hearing it so often, the majestic yet intimate words of Thomas Cranmer’s prayer at the heart of the Communion service: Almighty God, who of thy tender mercy toward mankind didst give thy Son, our Savior Jesus Christ, to suffer death upon the Cross for our redemption; who made there, by his one oblation of himself once offered, a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. The love of God and the death of Jesus. That is what it’s all about. But, as with the stories I mentioned earlier, none of these hymns or prayers really explains how it “works.” Cranmer’s complex phrases, resonant but cumbersome, picking their cautious way through the minefields of sixteenth-century controversies, point to particular interpretations, but you’d need a crash course in medieval theology to figure out exactly what was meant. It was easier, certainly for me as a boy, to cling to the idea of a “tender mercy” that had given an extraordinary and utterly expensive “gift.” The hymns were and remain wonderfully evocative rather than explanatory. Even the scriptural passages I quoted a moment ago don’t really explain why we should see the death of Jesus as a divine act at all, let alone an act of love. They simply hold on to it as a reality, as the reality, the healing and revitalizing truth that consoles and comforts and challenges and consoles again. The love of God and the death of Jesus—that combination was enough to reduce me to tears all those years ago and can still do the same today.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  In the same way, millions around the world take part, day by day and week by week, in the simple but profound ceremony of sharing bread and wine that Jesus himself instituted less than twenty-four hours before his death. He seems to have seen it as a way for his followers to find the meaning of that death welling up inside them, transforming them, and giving them a sense of his presence and love. You don’t have to have a theory in your head, all worked out in neat logical categories, for all this to happen. The question “Why?” is important. But we ask it because we observe the reality. I found this out for myself long before I was old enough to know the words “theory” and “reality” or why I should care about the difference. Imagine, if you will, a boy of about seven years old, alone for some reason in a quiet room, finding himself overwhelmed with the sense of God’s love revealed in the death of Jesus. I cannot now recall, sixty years later, what it was that reduced me to tears on that occasion. Growing up in a traditional middle-of-the-road Christian household, attending the local Anglican church (very undramatic by today’s standards), I was familiar with many prayers, hymns, and passages of scripture that might suddenly have “gotten through.” The old-fashioned language of the Authorized (King James) Version couldn’t stifle the simple but powerful statements: “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son” (John 3:16); “God commendeth his love for us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8); “The Son of God . . . loved me, and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20); “Neither death, nor life . . . nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38–39). And so on. And, in my tradition at least, there were the great hymns, like “My Song Is Love Unknown”: My song is love unknown , my Savior’s love to me , love to the loveless shown , that they might lovely be. O who am I , that for my sake my Lord should take frail flesh and die? Here might I stay and sing: no story so divine; never was love, dear King , never was grief like thine! This is my Friend , in whose sweet praise I all my days could gladly spend. 3 Then, less rich in either poetry or theology, but memorable nonetheless, was C. F.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Since the unity of the church has not until comparatively recently been a topic of apparent urgency in modern Western Christianity, this passage has been read as though it is about something else, perhaps about the mechanism of “salvation.” But Paul’s emphasis is on the fact that the Messiah has one family, not two, and that to deny this is to deny the gospel itself, to suggest that the Messiah did not need to be crucified. To make this point, Paul takes himself as the example of what happens when someone comes to be “in the Messiah.” He is not describing “his own experience” as though it was special or as though it set a standard of “spiritual experience” that others ought to imitate. He is describing what is true of himself, as a Jew who has come to believe that Jesus is Israel’s Messiah, in order to make it clear to Peter and anyone else listening, and now also to the Galatians as they hear this letter, that the Messiah’s death and resurrection have the effect of putting to death all earlier identities as belonging to the “present evil age” and of creating a new identity in which all previous identities are left behind: Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with the Messiah. I am, however, alive—but it isn’t me any longer; it’s the Messiah who lives in me. And the life I do still live in the flesh, I live within the faithfulness of the son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (2:19–20) We should not miss the strong resonance in the final decisive and climactic phrase of the first phrase of Galatians 1:4: “who gave himself for our sins.” Nor should we miss the equally emphatic sequel: if one could belong to God’s people simply by observing the Jewish law—as Peter was implying by his behavior and as the Galatians would be implying if they were to get circumcised—then the Messiah would not have needed to die (2:21). Paul’s whole logic is working outward from the central messianic events. If Jesus has been raised from the dead, then he really is God’s Messiah (Rom.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  That is where it should remain. Take it out of that story, as I have argued already, and we will tell instead a quasi-pagan story, separating the death of Jesus from the love of the creator God. That has happened often enough, despite the fact that here Paul explicitly rules it out. It was, he insists, God’s purpose to allow the Torah to heap up Sin in this way; it was God’s son, his own second self, who was sent in the likeness of sinful flesh. It was God’s love that was demonstrated in action, as Paul insisted in 5:8 and reaffirms in 8:31–39. It is, after all, no demonstration of love if I send someone else to do the necessary but horrible task in my place. That would demonstrate, if anything, a callous or even cynical manipulation. For the death of Jesus to be an expression—the ultimate expression—of the divine love, that covenant love that as we saw lay at the heart of so many ancient Israelite expressions of hope for covenant rescue and renewal, we would need to say, and Paul does say, that in the sending of the son the creator and covenant God is sending his own very self. Ultimately we have to choose between a proto-trinitarian framework for understanding Paul’s view of Jesus’s death and a quasi-pagan one. The church has often found itself lapsing into the latter. Romans brings us back sharply to the former. Even when theologians and preachers have seen this danger and have insisted that what was achieved on the cross was the direct result of the Father’s love, when the goal is Platonized (“going to heaven”) and the human role is moralized (“good and bad behavior”), the structure of the implicit story will still run in the wrong direction. Two other elements of this passage make their distinctive contributions. First, Paul describes Jesus’s death as “a sin offering.” This may seem strange. Why mention this particular sacrifice, one of many different sacrifices in Leviticus and Numbers, at this moment? It would be a mistake, as I hinted earlier, to think that the animal presented as a sin offering was being punished for the sins of the worshipper. That is not the point. The point is that in the Bible the “sin offering” is, again and again, the particular sacrifice that has to do with sins that the Israelite performed either unwillingly (not intending to do them) or unwittingly (intending to do them but not realizing that they were sinful). And Paul has analyzed the actions of the “I” in 7:13–20 in such a way as to place Israel under the Torah in exactly that position. “I don’t understand what I do” (v.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  We met weekly for a few months in an irregular contractual arrangement. “Psychotherapy,” an observer might have said, for I entered her name in my professional appointment book and she sat in the patient’s chair for the ritual fifty minutes. Yet our roles were always blurred. The question of fees, for example, never arose. From the very beginning I knew this was no ordinary professional contract and found myself reluctant to mention money in her presence—it would have been vulgar. And not only money but other such tasteless issues as carnality, marital adjustment, or social relationships. Life, death, spirituality, peace, transcendence: those were the topics we discussed; those were Paula’s only concerns. Mostly we talked about death. Each week four of us, not two, met in my office—Paula and I, her death and my own. She became my courtesan of death: she introduced me to it, taught me how to think about it, even to befriend it. I came to understand that death has had a bad press. Though there is little joy to be found in it, still death is not a monstrous evil that drags us off to some unimaginably terrible place. I learned to demythologize death, to see it for what it is—an event, a part of life, the end of further possibilities. “It’s a neutral event,” Paula said, “which we’ve learned to color with fear.” Every week Paula entered my office, flashed the broad smile I adored, reached into her large straw bag, lifted her journal to her lap, and shared her reflections and dreams of the past week. I listened hard and tried to respond appropriately. Whenever I voiced doubts about whether I was being helpful, she seemed puzzled; then, after a moment’s pause, she smiled as if to reassure me and turned again to her journal. Together we relived her entire encounter with cancer: the initial shock and disbelief, the mutilation of her body, her gradual acceptance, her getting used to saying, “I have cancer.” She described her husband’s loving care and that of close friends. I could easily understand that: it was hard not to love Paula. (Of course I never declared my love until much later, at a time when she was not to believe me.)

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Then, like the previous passage, it speaks of God’s “agency” in the death of Jesus: “God put [Jesus] forward as a sacrifice of atonement.” Again, the language should not be literalized, as if God willed the death of Jesus. Rather, the language of divine agency here emphasizes the theme of God’s grace: God provided the sacrifice. That is how much God loves us. As in the previous passage, the death of Jesus is a parable of God’s grace, a revelation of God’s character as love. Finally, we come to the phrase “a sacrifice of atonement by his blood.” If it does not mean substitutionary atonement, what does it mean? Did Jesus sacrifice his life? Yes. He was willing to be crucified (the words “by his blood” point to execution) because of his passion—his passion for God and for a different kind of world, the world referred to in the gospels as the kingdom of God. Did Paul think he died as a substitute? No. Did Paul think his death on a cross had atoning significance? Yes. It was about at-one-ment in the ways described in this chapter. In short, Paul’s language of Jesus dying for others and as a sacrifice reveals both the love of Christ and the love of God—the character and passion of both. Christ’s love and passion led to the cross—and in that we see both his love and the love of God. So also the cross, understood as God sacrificing “his own Son” for the sake of the world, is a revelation of God’s love, a parable of God’s character and passion. Within this framework, the cross is a revelation of divine generosity—of God’s grace and what we will call in Chapter 6 God’s distributive justice, God’s grace freely available to all. We are now in a position to see why substitutionary sacrifice is not only bad history and bad anthropology, but also bad theology. What does it say about God’s nature or character—about what God is like? At its heart is the notion that God is a lawgiver and judge who demands payment for sin. It emphasizes God’s wrath. God’s wrath needs to be appeased, placated, satisfied—choose another verb if you wish, but the need is the same. It suggests that God required the death of Jesus, that it was God’s will, God’s plan, that Jesus be killed. Ponder what all of this suggests about the character of God, what God is like. Strict parent? Exacting judge? Demanding monarch? It turns the message of divine generosity, of grace, of God’s character as love, on its head. It is difficult—we would say impossible—to reconcile substitutionary atonement with the radical Paul’s ways of speaking about God as known to him in Jesus, his crucified and risen Lord.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  On the other hand, the great renown of her beauty and worth had won to Sicily, as elsewhither, and not without great delight nor in vain had it reached the ears of Gerbino; nay, it had inflamed him with love of her, no less than that which she herself had conceived for him. Wherefore, desiring beyond measure to see her, against he should find a colourable occasion of having his grandfather's leave to go to Tunis, he charged his every friend who went thither to make known to her, as best he might, his secret and great love and bring him news of her. This was very dexterously done by one of them, who, under pretence of carrying her women's trinkets to view, as do merchants, throughly discovered Gerbino's passion to her and avouched the prince and all that was his to be at her commandment. The princess received the messenger and the message with a glad flavour and answering that she burnt with like love for the prince, sent him one of her most precious jewels in token thereof. This Gerbino received with the utmost joy wherewith one can receive whatsoever precious thing and wrote to her once and again by the same messenger, sending her the most costly gifts and holding certain treaties[237] with her, whereby they should have seen and touched one another, had fortune but allowed it. [Footnote 237: Or, in modern parlance, "laying certain plans."]

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  This is why I have said that the real danger in expounding the meaning of Jesus’s death is to collapse it into a kind of pagan scenario in which an angry God is pacified by taking out his wrath on Jesus. The first Christians did not use the language of “Trinity,” but at the heart of what they believed about Jesus and his death, they affirmed, explained, insisted on, and turned into brilliant poetry the insight that what happened on the cross was the self-expression of the love that made the world. Colossians A passage from another “prison letter” that is vital for our purposes is Colossians 2:13–15: In the same way, though you were dead in legal offenses, and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with Jesus, forgiving us all our offenses. He blotted out the handwriting that was against us, opposing us with its legal demands. He took it right out of the way, by nailing it to the cross. He stripped the rulers and authorities of their armor, and displayed them contemptuously to public view, celebrating his triumph over them in him. This is of course deliberately ironic. What seemed to be happening as Jesus of Nazareth hung in agony on the cross was that the “rulers and authorities” were celebrating their triumph over him, having stripped him of his clothes and held him up to public contempt. No, insists Paul, once you learn the meaning of the gospel, you have to see everything inside out. We already heard the cryptic hint in 1 Corinthians 2:8, where the “rulers” wouldn’t have executed Jesus if they had understood who he was and what the result would be. Here the point is spelled out far more graphically. If we ask Paul what had happened when Jesus died—if we bring to him our question of what had changed by six o’clock on that evening, what was different about the world, what was now true that hadn’t been true twenty-four hours earlier—I think this is one of the primary things he would have said, that the rulers, the powers, had been defeated. When Paul speaks of the “rulers and authorities,” he means both the visible rulers, the Herods, the Caesars, the governors, and the priests, and the “invisible” rulers, the dark powers that stand behind them and operate through them. By the time Jesus’s body was taken down from the cross, Paul believed, these “rulers and authorities” had been stripped, shamed, and defeated.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Both these opinions are true up to a certain point. Because the act of charity can be considered in two ways. First, as an act by itself: and thus it falls under the precept of the law which specially prescribes it, viz. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God,” and “Thou shalt love thy neighbor.” In this sense, the first opinion is true. Because it is not impossible to observe this precept which regards the act of charity; since man can dispose himself to possess charity, and when he possesses it, he can use it. Secondly, the act of charity can be considered as being the mode of the acts of the other virtues, i.e. inasmuch as the acts of the other virtues are ordained to charity, which is “the end of the commandment,” as stated in 1 Tim. i, 5: for it has been said above ([2094]Q[12], A[4]) that the intention of the end is a formal mode of the act ordained to that end. In this sense the second opinion is true in saying that the mode of charity does not fall under the precept, that is to say that this commandment, “Honor thy father,” does not mean that a man must honor his father from charity, but merely that he must honor him. Wherefore he that honors his father, yet has not charity, does not break this precept: although he does break the precept concerning the act of charity, for which reason he deserves to be punished. Reply to Objection 1: Our Lord did not say, “If thou wilt enter into life, keep one commandment”; but “keep” all “the commandments”: among which is included the commandment concerning the love of God and our neighbor. Reply to Objection 2: The precept of charity contains the injunction that God should be loved from our whole heart, which means that all things would be referred to God. Consequently man cannot fulfil the precept of charity, unless he also refer all things to God. Wherefore he that honors his father and mother, is bound to honor them from charity, not in virtue of the precept, “Honor thy father and mother,” but in virtue of the precept, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart.” And since these are two affirmative precepts, not binding for all times, they can be binding, each one at a different time: so that it may happen that a man fulfils the precept of honoring his father and mother, without at the same time breaking the precept concerning the omission of the mode of charity. Reply to Objection 3: Man cannot fulfil all the precepts of the law, unless he fulfil the precept of charity, which is impossible without charity. Consequently it is not possible, as Pelagius maintained, for man to fulfil the law without grace.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  As with the poetry of Philippians 2, so with the dense and polemical argument of Colossians 2: the fact that its message can be compressed into a few sentences, complete with rhetorical flourishes, must mean that this line of thought was already a frequent theme in the early church. When Jesus was crucified, the “powers” lost their power, because sin itself had been defeated and sinners forgiven. Once Jesus had chosen to do what he did at Passover time, joining the idea of a new or ultimate “Exodus” together with the idea that this was the time for the real “return from exile,” the forgiveness of sins, and linking them together via passages like Isaiah 52 and 53, the stage was set. The new Exodus was accomplished through the forgiveness of sins, and forgiveness of sins was accomplished by the Messiah as the living and dying embodiment of the one true God, standing in the place of sinners and taking the full weight of their plight upon himself. Paul has already said as much in the poem earlier in the letter: In him all the Fullness was glad to dwell And through him to reconcile all to himself, Making peace by the blood of his cross. (1:19–20) He repeats the point in 2:9: “In him . . . all the full measure of divinity has taken up bodily residence.” This is in fact Temple language, but the point for our present purposes is that all that Paul ascribes to Jesus and his death in 2:13–15 is to be seen as the work of the one God himself. Here again the implicitly trinitarian structure of early Christian thought is all-important. Take that away, and the slide back toward some kind of pagan formulation has begun. * * * There are many other things one might say about the death of Jesus in the letters of Paul. I have argued elsewhere, for instance, that the little Letter to Philemon, though it does not mention the death of Jesus specifically, exemplifies its meaning, which for Paul focused on the “ministry of reconciliation.” Paul extends one arm to Philemon and the other to Onesimus and brings them together within his own love for them both, insisting to Philemon that if Onesimus has wronged him in any way he, Paul, will make it good. That looks to me like a practical application of the cross. Philemon functions as a small signpost to Paul’s largest and most important letter, one that has always featured prominently in any discussion of the meaning of Jesus’s death: the Letter to the Romans. This demands a deep breath and a fresh start. 12 The Death of Jesus in Paul’s Letter to the Romans The New Exodus

• From White Oleander (1999)

  She said she’d received offers to teach, to publish her autobiography, to marry an ice-cream millionaire and pose for Playboy, and she was going to accept them all. Paul offered me a falafel, I shook my head. Suddenly, I wasn’t hungry anymore. “Save it for later,” he said, and dropped the bag by the side of the bed. His rich brown eyes asked every question. He didn’t have to say a word. I rested my head in the crook of his shoulder and gazed at the squares of blue TV light shining through the frost blossoms on our window from the windows just across the way. I tried to imagine what she was feeling right now. In Los Angeles it was noon. A bright sunny February, it looked from the picture. I imagined her in a hotel room, courtesy Susan D. Valeris, some luxury suite full of flowers from well-wishers, waking up on fresh sheets. She would have her bath in a double-wide tub, and write a poem overlooking the winter roses. Then she might take a few interviews, or rent a white convertible for a spin down the beach, where she’d pick up a young man with clear eyes and sand in his hair, and make love to him until he wept with the beauty of it. What else would you do when you were acquitted of murder? It was too much to imagine her tempering her joy with a moment of grief, a moment for the knowledge of what her triumph had cost. I couldn’t expect that from her. But I had seen her remorse, and it had nothing to do with Barry or anyone else, it was a gift offered despite a price she had had no way to estimate then, it could have been heavy as mourning, final as a tomb. No matter how much she had damaged me or how flawed she was, how violently mistaken, my mother loved me, unquestionably. I thought of her, facing a court of law without the pawn formation of my lies. The queen stripped bare, she had mastered the end game on her own. Paul rolled a Drum cigarette, the shreds like hair as he lifted them from the bag, tore the shag from the ends, lit it with a match scraped under the box that served as our end table. “You want to go call her?” We couldn’t afford a phone. Oskar Schein let us use his. “Too cold.” He smoked, the ashtray resting on his chest. I reached over and took a puff, handed it back. We had come such a long way together, Paul and I. From the apartment on St. Marks to the squat in South London, an uninsulated barge in Amsterdam, now Senefelderstrasse. I wished we knew someone in Italy, or Greece. I hadn’t been warm since I left L.A. “Do you ever want to go home?” I asked Paul. He brushed an ash from my face.