Reaching for Liberation – Part 5 “The Crux of the Matter” or “Jesus Died BECAUSE of Sin”

This brings us to the crux - pun intended - of the questions I am wrestling with in this series of reflections (and just in time for Holy Week!). If the central meaning of the cross, i.e. Jesus' death, has to do with overcoming sin and creating salvation, what is the nature of this connection?? In what ways are sin and Jesus' death related? And in what sense does death give rise to hope and salvation? It is the way these three – sin, death, salvation - come together in Ellacuria's re-framing that intrigued me the most in reading his article, and that opened up a new and liberating way for my understanding of faith.

An important foundational point for Ellacuria is the insistence that theology be related to real life. In the tradtional approach the God-required/God-ordained death of Jesus, humankind's intangible sinful nature, and the resulting salvation to a life in heaven seem somehow detached from human life, a sort of mystical overlay on reality. To this Ellacuria counters: “A faith apart from history, a faith apart from historic events, whether in the life of Jesus or in the life of humankind is not a Christian faith.” The cross, he argues, must not be about “an expiatory masochism of a spiritualizing sort, but the discovery of something real in history.”

In support of this he points to the way in which the gospels came to be written. It is not that the disciples or even Jesus understood from the outset the direction and purpose of his life. Meaning and understanding came afterwards. It is in experiencing the presence of the Living One that the disciples are led back to reflect on their Teacher's life and to begin making sense of his death. It is “the resurrection that points back toward the crucifixion,” writes Ellacuria. Contrary to the traditional viewpoint, Jesus did not come into this world with the goal or purpose of dying. And while his death is connected to sin, the connection is not some mystical-sacrifical taking upon himself of sin or the punishment for sin. Rather, his death comes as the historical consequence of the life he led.

As I developed in greater detail in my previous post,¹ sin expresses itself and is experienced in the real world as destructive power. It stands as antithesis to the Reign of God proclaimed by Jesus. What he announced - glad tidings to the poor, liberty to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom for the oppressed - stood out in stark contrast to the experience of political oppression, poverty, imprisonment and poverty-related disease suffered by many of the common folks of his day, the pueblo, to use a helpful Spanish word. His was an historically rooted proclamation, relevant to the concrete daily life of real people, especially the poor. As long as he was seen as just one more pseudo-messianic figure talking about other-worldly or unattainable ideals (as much of traditional Christianity has finally made him out to be) he could be ignored. But when he began gaining a growing number of followers and when it became clear that his preaching challenged the power structures of his day, he became a threat and was seen as an enemy of those who benefitted from the way things were.

It is clear from the gospels that Jesus eventually understood that his life and teaching would lead to his own death (see, for example, Matthew 16:13-21; esp v 21), at which point he could have chosen to back down. But his message of hope was clear: God desires and calls us to imagine and engage in the struggle (the lucha) to create a different kind of world, one where all share in the abundance of the earth, where there is true community, forgiveness and sharing, where there is true and comprehensive peace among all. Proclaiming and living this message of hope was his mission, and he stuck with it, regardless of the consequences to which it would lead. And so, confronting the power structures of his world would eventually lead to his death at the hands of those who felt threatened by his message and the impact it was having. 

Understanding faith as truly historically rooted leads us to the recognition that Jesus did not die for our sins, but because of sin. His death came as a consequence of the vision he proclaimed and the life he lived challenging the power structures and those who held the reigns of power of his day.  His death was for a cause, and the cause was a grounded vision and a historically active and strategic commitment to creating a more just world - especially for those placed at the margins by the political, economic, social, and cultural-religious power structures of his day.

---------------------------

1 See Searching for Liberation – Part 4: “So What About Sin?” at http://spiritandpraxis.blogspot.com/2015/03/reaching-for-liberation-part-4-so-what.html

Reaching for Liberation – Part 4 “So What about Sin?”

This is the fourth of six posts in which I draw on an article by liberation theologian, Ignacio Ellacuria, to reflect on and seek to re-frame the connected themes of sin, Jesus' death, and salvation.

-------------------------------------

Another area that Ellacuria helps reframe is the understanding of sin. Traditionally veiwed as a universal human malaise, sin has also been understood primarily in individual, personal terms. Passed on from generation to generation ever since Adam and Eve's original sin, it is understood that every human person is sinful by nature and, arising from this sinful nature, are the inevitable immoral and sinful acts that characterize every human life. From this perspective the consequences of sin - death and separation from God – are understood at the individual and personal level and so also, similarly, the understanding and benefits of salvation.¹

By contrast and in keeping with a broader theological development within liberation theology, Ellacuria emphasizes instead the structural character of sin. This approach, while acknowledging the human experience of brokenness, sees the impact and responsibility of this brokenness less at the individual level and more on the collective plane. And so, for example, the human propensity of greed for power ends up expressing itself in nations going to war. Or as another example, the human insecurity that is greed for material and financial wealth results in the legislation of laws enabling the exploitation of workers or even the condoning of slavery; or on a different key it leads to the exploitation of the earth's natural resources to the disregard for the impact this will have on other species and on the generations of our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.

And so, although not denying the reality of individual or personal moral failures, the approach taken by Ellacuria places emphasis on human brokenness at large, the ways it ends up being embodied in the very structures of society. And it emphasizes the negative impact, the injustice, this sinful character at the structural level creates in the lives of individuals, communities and of whole societies.

The town where I live is economically and, to some extent still, racially segregated. Historically there were town laws which prevented African Americans from buying homes in the “white part of town" and whites were discouraged from living in the “black part of town" – and no one did. Legislated city boundaries meant that much of the “black part of town” lay outside the city limits and so received no

The landfill was built at the edge of the "black part of town."

city services like water, sewer, garbage pick-up, etc. Schools in the “black part of town" were significantly under-funded, in contrast to the schools located in the “white part of town”. Some years back the county negotiated the creation of a large landfill at the edge of the “black part of town”. Poor families in the vicinity were lured into supporting this plan with the promise of receiving a few thousand dollars each. Of course the creation of the landfill meant that property values in the “black part of town” plummeted. Once the landfill became operational, local water supplies, which still in large part were drawn from wells, became contaminated. And, although families had been promised that there would be signficant benefits and no negative impacts from the landfill, it was the local poor families and their children who had to put up with the toxic stench on hot, windless Florida days. These are examples of sinfulness, the reality of human evil and brokennes, embeded and expressed structurally in the political, economic, and social realities of a local community.

The flip side of this coin is that when there is resistance to the impact of unjust structures, those in positions of power and who benefit from the structural set-up use the power available to them to crush the resistance. And so, as we have witnessed in the news over the last few months, when the folks in Ferguson, Missouri came out to peacefully and legally protest a culture of racial profiling and oppression by local authorities, they were confronted with tear gas and military-style (war-making) machinery and weapons. Sinful structures, once entrenched, use all the might available to them to block change!

In the extreme case, unjust structures are defended at the price of human life. Because of their active opposition to the violent oppression being carried out against rural poor communities by government forces in El Salvador (supported, by the way, by U.S. funding and training), on November 16, 1989 Ignacio Ellacuria, the other Jesuits in his community, along with their house-keeper and her dautgher were savagely murdered. Another example is Lutheran pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was imprisoned and on April 9, 1945 was executed by hanging for his efforts against Hitler and Nazism. Yes, when unjust power structures are challenged or threatened, they are capable of going to any extreme to protect the status quo.

-----------------------------------

In the next post we will look at the question of the Jesus' death and how his (and all death) is related to sin.

______________

1  For greater elaboration on this traditional view see the second post in this series. http://spiritandpraxis.blogspot.com/2015/02/reaching-for-liberation-part-2-sin.html