53 Sermon Illustrations on Punishment

The Very Reverend Dr. Jeffrey Philip Hywel John believes that the church’s traditional understanding of the cross of Christ is both “repulsive” and “insane.” His comments on the cross and atonement ignited a firestorm in Great Britain and the controversy has now spread to America as well. Anglicanism does not seem to have whatever it takes to deal with heretics these days, and so the church simply leaves them in places of influence, such as Dr. John’s position as Dean of St. Albans.

As a report published in THE TELEGRAPH [London] makes clear, the controversy over his latest comments came even before his message was broadcast on the BBC:

The Very Rev Jeffrey John, who had to withdraw before taking up an appointment as bishop of Reading in 2003 after it emerged he was in a long-term homosexual relationship, is set to ignite a row over one of the most fundamental tenets of Christian belief.

Clergy who preach this Easter that Christ was sent to earth to die in atonement for the sins of mankind are “making God sound like a psychopath”, he will say.

In a BBC Radio 4 show, Mr John, who is now Dean of St Albans, urges a revision of the traditional explanation, known as “penal substitution.”

A look at Dr. John’s message will reveal that he does not call for a revision of the penal substitutionary understanding of the atonement. Instead, he calls for its repudiation. Here he describes what he was taught as a child:

The explanation I was given went something like this. God was very angry with us for our sins, and because he is a just God, our sin had to be punished. But instead of punishing us he sent his Son, Jesus, as a substitute to suffer and die in our place. The blood of Jesus paid the price of our sins, and because of him God stopped being angry with us. In other words, Jesus took the rap, and we got forgiven, provided we said we believed in him.

In other words, he was taught the biblical understanding of the cross and its significance. Now, this is the very understanding he describes as “insane.” In his words:

Well, I don’t know about you, but even at the age of ten I thought this explanation was pretty repulsive as well as nonsensical. What sort of God was this, getting so angry with the world and the people he created, and then, to calm himself down, demanding the blood of his own Son? And anyway, why should God forgive us through punishing somebody else? It was worse than illogical, it was insane. It made God sound like a psychopath. If any human being behaved like this we’d say they were a monster.

Well, I haven’t changed my mind since. That explanation of the cross just doesn’t work, though sadly it’s one that’s still all too often preached. It just doesn’t make sense to talk about a nice Jesus down here, placating the wrath of a nasty, angry Father God in heaven. Christians believe Jesus is God incarnate. As he said, ‘Whoever sees me has seen the Father’. Jesus is what God is: he is the one who shows us God’s nature. And the most basic truth about God’s nature is that He is Love, not wrath and punishment.

So Dr. John will now discard the idea that Jesus died on the cross as a substitutionary sacrifice, and will invent a meaning for the cross more in line with his own theological prejudices.

What Dr. John repudiates is precisely what the Bible teaches. The Bible does not merely assert that Christ died on the cross for our sins -- it goes on to explain why this substitutionary death was necessary. In Romans 3, the Apostle Paul explains that God put forth Jesus on the cross as a propitiatory sacrifice for our sins. God’s love is demonstrated in the fact that, even as his own righteousness demanded a perfect sacrifice for sin, He determined to send the Son as that perfect sacrifice. In Paul’s words, this means that God is both just AND the justifier. He rightly DEMANDED an acceptable sacrifice in order to satisfy His wrath, but He also PROVIDED that same sacrifice.

This same understanding of the cross is taught by Jesus as He told the disciples of his impending death FOR sinners. It is the logic of the link between the sacrifices of the Old Testament and the sacrifice of the very Son of God, the foundation of the new covenant. This is the teaching of the Apostles on the day of Pentecost and of the entire book of Hebrews.

There are really only two options available for explaining what the Son of God was accomplishing on that cross. The first option is that taught by the church for centuries -- that the meaning of the cross is objective, revealing God’s objective satisfaction in accepting the obedience of the Son, even unto death on a cross, as the payment for sin. This is what Dr. John now explicitly rejects.

The second option is to define the meaning of the cross in essentially subjective terms, arguing that Christ dies in order to effect a change in us, rather than in God. This is a foundational teaching of Protestant liberalism, but it creeps into far too many evangelical pulpits as well.

Here is how Dr. John describes the meaning of the cross:

On the cross God absorbs into himself our fallenness and its consequences and offers us a new relationship. God shows he knows what it’s like to be the loser; God hurts and weeps and bleeds and dies. It’s a mystery we can hardly glimpse, let alone grasp; and if there is an answer to the problem of suffering, perhaps it’s one for the heart, not the reason. Because the answer God’s given is simply himself; to show that, so far from inflicting suffering as a punishment, he bears our griefs and shares our sorrow. From Good Friday on, God is no longer “God up there”, inscrutably allotting rewards and retributions. On the Cross, even more than in the crib, he is Immanuel, God down here, God with us.

The ground of our salvation is the substitutionary atonement accomplished by Christ. Our response in faith to Christ is essential to our experience of salvation, but the work of our salvation is fully accomplished by Christ.

What will Dr. John do with Paul’s explanation of the Gospel and the meaning of the cross? Well, probably something like what he does with Paul’s teachings on homosexuality. It takes no genius to detect a pattern here. Dr. John, who entered into a homosexual civil union last year, obviously disregards the Apostle Paul’s very clear teachings on homosexuality. What would keep him from doing the same with an atonement theology he finds to be “insane?” Obviously, the answer to that question is “nothing.”

He explicitly rejects the wrath of God. His authority for doing so is Julian of Norwich, who wrote, “For I saw that there is no manner of wrath in God, neither for short time nor for long;-for in sooth, if God be wroth for an instant, we should never have life nor place nor being.”

The only obstacle to accepting that argument is the Bible. As represented in that quotation, Julian of Norwich denies what the Bible unquestionably declares -- the God will pour out His wrath upon sin.

Writing in THE GUARDIAN [London], Giles Fraser throws his lot in with Dr. John. In his words, “For, once again, what [John] has been saying is nothing other than a truth known by most people in the pews: that the idea of God murdering his son for the salvation of the world is barbaric and morally indefensible. It turns Christianity into “cosmic child abuse”.

We are left with an unavoidable choice. We must stand with the Apostle Paul in seeing the cross as the place where God is shown to be both “just AND the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.” Or, we must stand with Dr. John and Mr. Fraser in describing the New Testament’s teaching of the cross as “insane” and a form of “cosmic child abuse.” On this question there is no middle ground.

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FOR FURTHER REFLECTION:

No model or theory of the atonement can exhaust all the biblical materials on the glory of the cross. We must insist that the penal substitutionary understanding of the cross is central and essential, but that does not mean that we deny that other models can extend and enrich our understanding of the cross.

In an age when boosting self-esteem is seen as the answer to every problem, the idea of physically punishing oneself to expiate guilt is a notion that borders on the medieval.

But just in time for Ash Wednesday and the Lenten season of penance, new research shows that some form of “mortification of the flesh“ -- the old-fashioned term for inflicting physical discomfort for spiritual growth -- can in fact alleviate feelings of guilt.

The old Christian ascetics knew it, and now social scientists have some proof that it’s true -- and some explanation as to why that’s so.

“One reason may be that the experience of physical pain alleviates feelings of guilt associated with immoral behavior,” Brock Bastian writes in an article titled “Cleansing the Soul by Hurting the Flesh,” which appears in the latest edition of the journal Psychological Science.

Bastian and his colleagues at the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland in Australia divided 62 volunteers into three groups and asked two of the groups to write about an occasion when they “rejected or socially excluded another person” -- in other words, when they did something they felt bad about. The third group wrote about a neutral “everyday interaction [they] had with another person yesterday.”

All completed a questionnaire that tested for levels of guilt. Then one group that wrote about something they felt guilty for immersed their hand into a bucket of ice water for as long as they could (it hurts -- try it) while members of the second group that wrote about treating someone badly immersed a hand in a nice, warm bath. The third “control” group -- the folks who didn’t write about being a jerk and didn’t feel especially guilty -- also got the ice water treatment.

Afterward they all rated how painful it was and also how guilty they felt after it was over.

The verdict: those people who had written about rejecting someone not only left their hands in the ice water longer and reported more pain, but they also emerged feeling half as much guilt as those who got the warm water treatment.

In short, Bastian argues, we want to give meaning to pain, to portray it as a comprehensible part of a cosmic balance sheet or a means of achieving justice so that suffering is not pointless; indeed, the Latin word for pain is poena, which means “penalty.”

“Understood this way, pain may be perceived as repayment for sin in three ways,” he writes.

“First, pain is the embodiment of atonement. Just as physical cleansing washes away sin...physical pain is experienced as a penalty, and paying that penalty reestablishes moral purity. Second, subjecting oneself to pain communicates remorse to others (including God) and signals that one has paid for one’s sins, and this removes the threat of external punishment. Third, tolerating the punishment of pain is a test of one’s virtue, reaffirming one’s positive identity to oneself and others.”

Now maybe you don’t have a guilty conscience. Or maybe you recoil from the thought of flagellating yourself everyday like that spooky albino monk from “The Da Vinci Code” who actually did have something to feel guilty about. (Though it turns out the late Pope John Paul II did something similar, and he is up for sainthood. Go figure.)

But Bastian’s research does indicate that engaging in some form of physical self-denial during the 40 days of Lent might be beneficial to easing normal guilt, and that today’s milder forms of mortification -- giving up chocolate or going on a carbon fast (reducing energy consumption) or even making Ash Wednesday a “spa day,” as one pastor is doing -- may not be enough.

On the other hand, an earlier paper on the same topic, by Rob Nelissen and Marcel Zeelenberg at Tilburg University in The Netherlands, also identified what it called “the Dobby effect” -- named after the self-punishing house elf from the “Harry Potter” series. Poor Dobby felt guilty for disobeying his (albeit evil) masters and could not make amends, and hence continually abused himself.

While Nelissen and Zeelenberg also showed that people tend to alleviate guilt by punishing themselves, they found that they take that option only when they are not able to directly repair their relationship with the person they believe they have hurt.

That may explain why people use general rituals of self-denial -- fasting or a stone in the shoe or a hair shirt in more extreme cases -- if they can’t or won’t bring themselves to apologize directly to the offended person and why Lenten penance is being adapted for wider social causes, like climate change or world hunger, in which there is a no individual person to whom we can say, “I’m sorry.”

“[H]elping someone else...does not repair your relationship with the victim,” Nelissen writes. “I think that by self-punishing we in fact try to send a signal of remorse to our victim to let him or her know we still care about the relationship, even though we are unable at present to make amends directly.”

Nothing wrong with a little mortification, then, as long as we don’t go around broadcasting our virtue like “the hypocrites,” as Jesus warned.

And as long as we don’t take it too far. The Catholic Church defines a “fast day” as having just one full meal, and exempts children under 13 and seniors over 65, and anyone who could not physically tolerate such a regimen. That’s not too onerous, and is probably good for us given the nation’s epidemic of obesity.

Simple, clear rituals of physical penance are also less likely to deteriorate into an overemphasis on personal guilt and expiation, which is criticized by traditional Christianity as “scrupulosity,” and is diagnosed by psychiatry as an obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Indeed, while guilt is so often dismissed as the unjust product of manipulative religions -- Catholic guilt, Jewish guilt, Puritan guilt, you name it -- Sigmund Freud and his disciples saw guilt as a fact of the human condition. And guilt can be good in motivating conscientious people to make amends to victims, if possible, or to the wider community, or to God, or all three.

The key is to do something about guilt rather than just going around banging our head against furniture. After all, who wants to be Dobby?