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As a child, I learned to dread the weeks leading up to Easter vacation, for at my evangelical Christian school this nearly always meant it was time for a guest speaker. Often this guest was an energetic youth pastor who spent the hour telling us in detail what kind of torture Jesus experienced on the cross. We were told how the thorns drove into his head. We got the straight skinny on how the whip tore his flesh revealing the bone beneath. We were educated about how the nails didn’t go through his palm, but that the weight of his body hung painfully against the bones of his wrists. And then--then we were told that it was ALL OUR FAULT.
Lest you think that this was just one error in judgment committed by enthusiastic man in times gone by, rest assured that this is still common practice. Just this month a friend of mine posted on her Facebook page that her elementary-aged son was told by a guest speaker, “If there’s one thing I want you to remember from our talk today, it’s that you killed Jesus.” This was a K-5 assembly. He said this to kindergarteners. And this is not an isolated incident. Certainly the uncanny popularity of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ with it’s voyeuristic violence attests to the draw that this kind of message still has for many religious people today.
In all sincerity, if that works for that’s fine. If guilt over the violence meted out to Jesus thousands of years ago motivates you to live more peacefully, more holistically, and with more shalom in the here-and-now, that’s great. But if it does not – if the violence and the gore, the accusation and the guilt makes you queasy, or dissatisfied, or a little bit pissy--join the club.
What you are experiencing is intuitive dissonance. This kind of dissonance often arrives within your being before the vocabulary to describe it gets delivered. This knowing before naming can make it seem less real or less true, but it’s not the case. For years, maybe even for decades, I intuitive knew that this approach to the story of Jesus’ life, death, and continued influence did not work for me. I instinctively reached for another answer, but I did not know what is was called. The theory of non-violent atonement. That’s the phrase I was looking for. Those are the words on the tip of your tongue.
The Guardian’s religion columnist and Oxford lecturer Giles Fraser has a knack for putting theological terms into the vernacular. In his article Easter’s Hawks and Doves he does just that, as he discusses two main ways to approach the Easter story. The “you killed Jesus approach,” he calls the way of the Hawk. In his terminology this way of understanding Easter “is structured around the notion of retribution…[That] Sin must be paid for with blood, just as crime must be paid for by punishment.” This is the Old Testament standard of blood sacrifice, summed up in the phrase “an eye for an eye, a tooth for tooth.”
But, Fraser offers, there is another way of understanding this story, and that is the way of the Dove. The Easter of the Dove is not built around the idea of retribution, but around the concept of reconciliation and forgiveness. This is non-violent atonement. As international pastor Chad Rimmer points out in his post From Good Friday: What can we say about violence and our hope for redemption, non-violent atonement focuses not on the violence of Christ on the cross, but on the words of Christ from the cross--the most famous of which are “forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Rimmer suggests that on Good Friday:
“Our meditation for this night is not on the redemptive violence done to our Lord, for there is no such thing. Violence can never be redemptive, but it can be reconciled. And through this gate of death, Jesus shows us how…shows us an image of real power to transform our grief, suffering and sinfulness, [turning] the violence we endure and the violence we commit into possibilities for hope and new life.”
In this approach, we can embrace the words of Jesus, which as Cambridge University Chaplin Maggi Dawn points out were not:
“An eye for an eye?” No, says Jesus, that’s won’t do any more. Turn the other cheek. Step away from violent retribution, not just by limiting it to violence in
