“Christ Died for Our Sins”: What does that mean?

Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

“Ask Andrew” is an annual opportunity for Knox members to ask question that might make for good sermons. Here’s the first one for 2024.

Ask Andrew: “Christ Died for Our Sins.” What does that mean?

Scriptures: Leviticus 4:13-21 Romans 5:6-11

Original question: “How do I explain to my non-believing neighbour what it means when the church says ‘Christ died for our sins’?”

This isn’t the first Ask Andrew question that came in this year but it fits well into the Easter Season, so I’m taking it on first. Thank you for your willingness to discuss matters of faith with people outside the church!

I’m afraid I’m not going to produce a pithy answer, nothing that’ll fit in a sound bite or go on a t-shirt, because this phrase has been around since the very beginning, while the world around it has changed profoundly.

There are three approaches that are common in churches these days. In more Progressive churches this is a topic that doesn’t get discussed much because it comes with so much theological baggage which is a bit cowardly, I’m sorry to say.

Another approach is in the Roman Catholic church today and others with similar theologies. This expression has become fraught with feelings of guilt. There is an emphasis on the suffering of Jesus and a sense that the crucifixion is all our fault; that every time we do something wrong, we add to the sufferings of Christ. I know one Anglican priest who, cynically, calls this “making Baby Jesus cry”.

This is a widely held understanding that should be confronted because I believe it is a twisting of what it all originally meant.

The third approach tends to happen in Evangelical churches which focus on trying to save souls: “All have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God” and in their theology the death of Jesus on the Cross is the action of grace that we need to personally accept so it can be applied to the debt of sin we owe to God in order to have that debt wiped out.

Both of these theologies assume that God is very rigid, that the laws handed down in the books of Moses are inexorable and that the only way to get right with the perfect Creator is to have someone sinless, someone perfect, intervene for us.

And more to the point, since those laws demanded blood sacrifices, Jesus dying on the cross became the ultimate blood sacrifice, satisfying once and for all the demands of the law.

Our Leviticus reading gives an example of that law and it is particular to the sacrifice of atonement where the whole nation has done something against God, maybe even something unintentional, and the sacrifice was made to lead the people to forgiveness.

That offering was called a Holocaust offering: a burnt offering where the whole animal was consumed by fire; most offerings of animals involved burning the fatty bits with the priests eating the meat.

The thinking behind this was common to the whole Mediterranean. In Pagan places, like Greece and Rome, the idea was that you shared a meal with the gods. The god got the bit that went up in smoke and the people got the rest. This is the “meat offered to idols” that Paul referred to. The Pagans considered this a kind of communion, a divine sharing, and almost all meat meals were eaten as sacrifices so that the divine spark of life in the animal killed was not wasted. Fish and other seafood didn’t count: they didn’t breathe air, so their spark of life wasn’t divine.

The holocaust style of offering, which Pagans also did, was very costly. No humans got to benefit from the meat and it was a way of giving the god in question absolutely everything in the sacrifice. It was a way of demonstrating how serious you were. Jewish sacrifices didn’t believe in eating with God but they did believe in letting the Priests and their families eat most of the meat.

When it came to atonement for sins (those behaviours that broke the relationship with the divine) they took the same approach and offered up every last scrap to God.

Traditional theologies have managed to hold onto that rigid vision of God where God has to be appeased by blood sacrifice and a lot of world cultures have bought into this. My own Heathen ancestors offered a lot of blood sacrifices to Odin and other gods, including sacrificing humans, either slaves or chosen by lot.

But if you really read what Paul and others are saying when they say “Christ died for our sins”, they mean totally the opposite: they are telling us that God doesn’t want this kind of bloody, rigid and judgmental relationship. This is a message of liberation – freedom from that endless cycle of unreachable standards of perfection, of constant guilt and the threat of Hell.

Jesus wasn’t the first one to preach this kind of new relationship. Our call to worship is a small section of Psalm 51 that rejects blood sacrifices in favour of a good relationship between us and God where we acknowledge that our creator has a divine perspective that is worth following.

It bothers me that so many people have taken this message of love and freedom and turned it into a bludgeon which can be used to guilt people into obedience, or terrify people into believing a particular theology.

And our modern culture is more and more open to a very bloody understanding of justice. “Someone must pay for this” is a popular sentiment which goes directly against the message of Christianity. The message of Jesus is not about irresponsibility; obviously our understanding that Jesus died for our sins, or as we express it symbolically in baptism where we die with Christ, and are raised with Christ; none of that is intended to let us be irresponsible.

Jesus was all about us learning to love each other and the motivation of love should be more powerful than any law or set of rules or threat of punishments.

“Christ died for our sins” is an expression that tells us that we are free to love God and each other without a rigid structure of laws that can become a barrier to a real relationship.

That whole social structure of 2000 years ago, in which blood sacrifices were a part of life that everyone took for granted without question, ended as Christianity became dominant. The idea that “Christ died for our sins” was at the core of that transformation and it literally changed the world.

Like I said, that explanation won’t fit on a t-shirt, at least not in a font size that anyone could read politely, but I hope it gives you some words to share with your unbelieving neighbour to make it clear that it’s NOT about guilt; it’s NOT about an altar call to save your soul.

It’s about a relationship with God that breaks us out of the strictures of laws and gives us the freedom to love God and each other as the basis for our life of faith.

Amen.