Trifle

So I answered a couple more questions from the box yesterday.

1. If Jesus died to pay for our sins, who did he pay? Great question, but with a problem. Firstly, we use the word "pay" in different ways - I go to a shop to buy a Mars Bar. To get the Mars Bar I have to pay the shopkeeper, who then gives me my chocolate. Or - the people of Zimbabwe are paying for greed of their leaders. In one, there's a transaction; in the other there's not, but people are still paying.

Interesting fact: Nowhere, not once, not anywhere in the New Testament in all the verses about what happened on the cross does it say "Jesus paid for our sins". The NT does not create the problem of somebody needing to be paid, because it doesn't use this language. So why do we?

The best I can come up with is a Trifle.

If you are not British, you might be wondering why I am thinking of "something unimportant" when trying to describe such a weighty matter; but if you are British, on seeing that word the first thing that flashed through your mind was something akin to the picture at the top of this post. That's my point.

A trifle can be something insignificant - or a Great British dessert. It depends on your perspective.

I think that we get the "Jesus paid for my sins" theology because of the word Redemption. And for Gentiles in St Paul's day, they would hear this word and maybe think of the slave market, and of somebody having their freedom bought back. A price had to be paid - and yes, someone had to be paid. Of course, in salvation terms, we are using a metaphor, and it's never too healthy to push metaphors too far - they break. If this is the right picture for Redemption, we need to stop before someone gets paid, or we end up wondering is it the Devil? Or a schizophrenic God? It's a picture to help us understand a truth! Don't force the detail!

Hmm. Trifle. I wonder if I'm talking about a dessert here & you are still thinking "something unimportant"?

I wonder if we are stuck in the slave market, where our Reformation forefathers insisted we should be, when in fact the wonderfully Jewish St Paul was at the Passover feast? For Redemption for a Jew was all about Passover - and just as the people of Zimbawe are paying for their leaders' greed, so at that feast lambs were slaughtered to figuratively pay for the sins of the people. Sin caused death. Sacrifice. During worship. They weren't "paying God", but sin had a price - and in these deaths there was prefigured a time when one would come who would bear the true price of all that had been done in dividing humanity from its Creator as the Son felt seperated from his Father.

You tell me: I'd love to get this right!

2: What does Sooty eat & is he a Christian? Clearly a harder issue, I replied that in our Family service of three weeks' ago I fed Sooty Kit Kats. I did not know his usual diet. And was he a Christian?

People are Christians. Or not. But a heaven that just has people has no place in my Bible - the one I read of there has animals and gardens and rivers and lots of feasting and parties. God promises the redemption of the whole of Creation, and so I think we will be wonderfully surprised by the life we find there.

And for a different take on this - Camillofan had a great post recently. Read it!