Jesus Christ died for us. This piece sets out some of the logic of this basic Christian confession. The Son performs a complete act of reciprocity. He supplies the work and effort that it costs.
1. He bears the cost in terms of the debt of being that others have not paid and supplied us. He hears our prayers and comes to bail us out and takes us out of their power. He pays them off to release us, and he pays us off to release them from us. He pays both parties in his own stock, the only hard currency.
2. He pays it in terms of the destruction (battle) of the predatory logic of the enemy economy by which the unrighteous exercise a parasitic power over us. The enemy, his rationality and currency is scattered and never spoken of again.
3. He pays the price in terms of the honour that must be done to all sides in the court of the public assembly. He has done so publicly, to the satisfaction of all. All voices now praise his act of reciprocity, justice and generosity. All those held captive in his train must confess themselves satisfied. He either closes their mouths (binding them) or leaving them full of praise (loosed).
He bails us out. But more than that, he gives us his own proper action, the action of bailing one another out and covering for one another. He gave them the outcome of his action, and finally he gave them the action itself, transforming them from victims to subjects with a proper subordinate creaturely, priestly and redemptive action.
The work of the Son is received by the Father with an approval made public by the resurrection. The Son has taken us over and bought us out. He died for our sins and he came to give his life as a ransom for many. In battle he broke our rebellion, separating us from it, putting himself between us and it, and like a pack animal carried its consequences to a place from which they could not reach us. He came to give his life as a ransom for many. We die ‘for’, that is to say as a result of our sins. Our deficiencies catch up with us eventually. But not being under the same logic, he is impervious to our deficiencies. He can be overwhelmed by nothing. He gave his life, that is to say, he gave himself entirely, to the labour of extricating people from the consequences of their actions. He finished those actions for them, supplying endings to these actions that no one else could. What we promised but could not deliver, he delivered. We have taken one another’s lives and frittered them by making huge unsustainable claims in a pyramid selling of promises that cannot possibly be made good on. But the Son can call down the funds with pay people off and bail people out. He could placate all the others, to whom much or everything had been left unpaid. He can release me from all the promises I have made to you but been unable to deliver on. He can release me from you, and you from me.
Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures.
The righteous did this for the unrighteous, the valuable for the worthless, the functioning for defunct, the active for the passive. He bought us up, out, he bought us up, our worthless shares for his good stock, at par. He bought them with his blood. He can extend his stock without diluting because the Spirit can extend himself without being divided. He bought all the smaller firms out with his own stock issue, making their shareholders holders of his stock. They now hold their wealth in him. Those who took the deal hold everything they had in this new stock, while those who held out against the deal are left with nothing.
Jesus bears the fighting and resistance which is the gentile mode of the world. Whose blood flows? The statements ‘It is by his wounds that you are healed’, and ‘We have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins’ have different intentions: their middle terms have to be supplied. We need two accounts. His blood flowed for the healing of the nations. But this blood does not flow from wounds opened by the blows of the nations. Jesus judged the nations. The gentiles are punished. Though the blow delivered by God, it is struck by each against all. The gentiles become the punishment of God to each other. They have to drink from their own cup. But this takes place in the idiom of the blood of only one of their number, one of the nations elect for this purpose – Israel. Her blood runs, and therefore their blood has run. The gentiles are let, and Israel is the blood that flows out. All the blood shed by the gentiles is pointless suffering from the wounds they inflict on each other. Yet Israel's king really suffers in that his people, those he regards as his own substance, are wounded. He bears them and is covered in their blood. But because he has determined that they belong to him, their blood is his blood. Because it is his determination to drive them to atonement through this crisis, it must be laid to his account, yet he did not shed it. He is wounded because those who are his fight him and each other, and bleed. He is not wounded because they inflict wounds on him: they have no means of touching him. Death inflicts injuries on Jesus that the resurrection demonstrates have no duration or lasting reality. Yet their wounds are healed and lacks are supplied by him, in the form of his own substance – his blood. But this blood does not come from his wounds. It is the opponent that receives the wound that is fatal, and whose blood runs. The wounds are returned to the wounder. God redeems his people from Egypt but does not have to pay Egypt back an amount of some neutral substance (blood). God pays Egypt back in Egypt's currency, that of violence and fury. God refuses and returns this currency. The medium of this atonement is the whole economy of man, which is commandeered, seized and given a new function within the eschatological economy of God.
Jesus and the Father are one and together in the work of the cross. For this reason it is a mistake to understand that death dealt finally with Jesus on the cross. On the cross Jesus called death together and deathed it. The cross extracted death from the world and balled it together into a place of no extension. The crucifixion is one event with two agents. We crucified him and God raised him. The cross is our act transformed by God into God's act with us and against us – resurrection. There are not two acts involving two agents here and so there is no problem of how the second agent engages and refers to the first act. It is not us, alone and by ourselves, that make a first act. Our rebellion does not construct some real position we succeed in holding against God. Even our rebellion is contained and co-opted, and made to serve no other future and hypostasis than resurrection. His resurrection is his being with men, albeit that this being-with sets mankind permanently under the canopy of the cross. The resurrection is not a moving away from the cross but is the vanishing of the sinful hypostasis that contained and secured us and the appearance of the Son who was always ahead of us. It was the coming together of Man with God.
Our crucifixion of him was not an act we succeeded in exerting over him by ourselves. The crucifixion was not our sole act that made God's act of resurrection possible. Rather, resurrection is what becomes of our act of crucifying him. The cross – our attack on God – is not the first act that sets us up as autonomous beings who have sent God away. Rather this death is just the sum of the deviations that represent the gentile mode. God has protected us from the consequences of our acts, but in the cross God no longer holds back. He lets us have the consequences of all our acts. We are punished by the return of all the violence we released into the world. He unites us with our act. It is not the act that we did alone, but our act with him, and thus his and our single co-work.. Crucifixion of us, in the form of the crucifixion of our one representative, is the form in which resurrection comes to us.
Everything that the pagans do amounts to grief, decay, waste, fruitless suffering. They want what will never come. It is therefore bitter and pointless. Christ’s suffering consisted in refusing and returning to them the projects of the gentiles. Their designs shatter on Christ. He retrieves the gentiles and bears them to that other set of designs which God has for them. Paul’s own pre-conversion life consisted of avoiding suffering the gentiles. Now Paul understands that it is God's will precisely that Israel bears and suffers the gentiles. This realisation becomes a hermeneutic of the cross. From the very beginning of God's history with Israel, God had borne Israel, and borne her against her own resistance. He bore her not so that she should suffer a gentile fate, but that by re-birth Israel should be delivered from the gentile hypostasis. God has suffered and waited and been patient, not so this state should continue and be ratified, but so that it should come to an end and Israel be elect and released from slavery to the gentile mode. The cross is therefore two sorts of suffering. It is the suffering of the gentiles, which is without purpose, and which God refuses. And it is the suffering of God which is patient, merciful and purposeful. Apart from God we are subjected to pointless, fruitless suffering – the problem identified by theodicy. Such suffering has no time and no end. But the suffering of God is the patient and purposeful waiting that redeems a people from futility. Since they are not their own but God's, the suffering of Christians is not fruitless but God's purposeful suffering and labouring by which the world is borne into new life. The purposeless gentile mode will pay.
The resurrection was the crucifixion of the many by the One. It took the form of the crucifixion of one by the many. The crucifixion and resurrection of that one without the many made this many the dead he was raised from. The many have been corralled by the death that his resurrection has imposed upon them. Their death is now not at all their death, but entirely his death, the death that holds – not him – but those he has imposed it on. Now they can be taught and slowly be supplied, by the Spirit, with the resurrection. It can be supplied by the one who has risen from them and is therefore able to be with them, without their sin and death. The resurrected one is the Lord, the Spirit, the true and faithful servant who will not waste his talents or lose a single member of the flock he has gathered. He has worked, and his work is united with its harvest. He has paid.
The new action given to the new people. Man does not have being – but being is what he will have. Being is the acting – of God. The attention God pays to man holds man (in being). God gives man a new acting (ie being). Man does not have a mind – but a mind is what man will have. Mind is the work of God who makes sense of man, and gives man sense, in terms of the sense of God.Man does not have freedom – but freedom is what man will have. Freedom is the work of God who draws man into increasing freedom, progressively leaving behind the comforts of a shallow will for a deeper will. Man is being taught discrimination and taste.
God is judge. But God does not intend to be alone in exercising judgement and authority. He intends that we also come to learn this action and exercise it with him and under him. He intends that we come to find his action good, to be informed by it and come to share it. The purpose of his judging is that he brings us up into the office and work of judges. God gives us an action. It is an action that is intrinsically his and which will always remain his, yet which he does not will to be his such that it is not also ours. This is the action of servanthood and leadership. This is action is given, or rather loaned to us (only) as long as we exercise it with God and under him. In the event that we do not discover its proper use, God takes it away from us again.
God intends to admit new members to the council and assembly of heaven. This assembly will then govern a combined kingdom of heaven and earth, in which we will be not divine, but for the first time properly human, creatures made holy. This assembly is gathered as an earthly ecclesia that inducts its members into the skill of judging. Part of the skill of judging is the skill of advocacy, the office of defence counsel, that puts the case for mercy and judgment. The saints are trainee judges who must be taught the skills of entering a plea, interceding, prayer. They must learn to argue on behalf of those who are not yet holy that a little more time is needed, and on behalf of the oppressed to argue that their release come now. They must be able to say ‘Have mercy on us – give us a little more time’, and ‘Come Lord Jesus – give no more time to the oppressors’. These advocates must be able to say which plea is at any time appropriate. The new Christian action is that of the members of the assembly that God gathers around himself.
The people of the world will come to this assembly of saints for justice. Their training for this role starts as the exercise of self-government of the Church. Right-judging and right-doing is the proper action of the new people. It involves coaching them in the action of right speech and public speech. They see God judges rightly and they say so: they learn to praise God for the generosity and finesse of his practice of justice. The Christian community is being trained up to a range of offices that serve a single end. The singleness of this end, and the oneness of this assembly, offends the separation of powers that under the modern constitution are understood to be incompatible. Leadership of the project of the formation of a people is the proper work of the Christian community. The Church must model the lead that the state must give to the people, and model the openness of public political discourse. It does not long to take away the task of ruling from the state, to do it better, but always to encourage leadership, on such a broad definition, to grow in confidence and competence.