Jesus instead of us

A German bomber, which was bound for London, had been damaged by the local air defences. The engines were malfunctioning and the crew elected to turn back before reaching London and bomb Brighton instead. I wish to draw your attention to that word ‘instead’ (more accurately, ‘in-the-stead of’).

In the spring of 1941, a specific part of London’s commercial and economic buildings were to be destroyed together with people that happened to be in the way. When the bomber changed course, those particular buildings and people probably survived the night. In Brighton, however, buildings and people were to suffer the dangers from which London had been spared. Brighton suffered in-the-stead of London; we can even say Brighton was substituted for London.

Substitutionary death

In the Bible, there is the recurring theme of substitutionary death: an innocent party being offered in-the-stead of the guilty. In the millennia before Jesus, God taught the Jewish people that they might atone for their wrong-doings by following a sacrificial system. This involved the slaying of perfect specimens of goats and lambs as a substitute for their own far-from-innocent lives; lives that were in peril. Actually, God was not really pleased with such sacrifices but it was his way to get the people used to the idea of an innocent life atoning for those living careless and Godless lives.

The final substitute

A month ago, Christians celebrated Easter, recalling how the innocent Jesus was killed and his life-blood drained away. This event is what the whole sacrificial system had been leading up to.

At the end of the age, there will be a reckoning, a judgement with a penalty to pay. We may choose to disbelieve such a thing, or hope that we will pass muster by our own merits. The wisest thing, however, is to consider Jesus: his sacrificial death followed by his rising from the dead. One New Testament writer says that Jesus, ‘the righteous one’ died for unrighteous people in order to bring them to God. Another says about Jesus that he, the only ‘just one’, died for the unjust ones.

To make a positive response to this, we can turn about so that we face towards God. Then we may receive, in an act of trust, what Jesus has done in our stead.

God isn't aloof to our sufferings

Eighty five years ago on the night of 9^th April, Germany bombed Birmingham with nearly 240 aircraft. One bomber was brought down by the air defences. As the aircraft descended earthwards, bits of burning wreckage fell away causing a row of houses to catch fire resulting in the death of 75-year-old Sarah Davies and three-year-old Anthony Smith.

Now out of control, the German bomber plunged to the ground careering into the rear of two adjacent houses both of which were occupied. In the one, Amy Hanson and her daughter Doreen were killed, while next door a family of five were also killed. These were Doris Smart and her two schoolboy sons Albert and Brian plus brother-in-law Alfred Smart and his infant son Malcolm.

Just names on a grave stone

I mentioned these by name to personalise them, for each will have had their own life-story, which would have been precious to them, even the two 3-year-olds, Malcolm and Anthony. Doreen Hanson was to have been married in a fortnight’s time. Yet it is a fact of life that, 85 years on, they are just names on a once respected but now grimy and overrun grave.

As with current wars, people of all ages are losing their lives which were precious to them. Each will have had their own back-story of hopes and fears.

How can we make any sense of it all? The easiest thing is to not try and simply turn our minds to something more pleasant. When the questions persist, however, are we going to resort to speaking of fate, chance or luck?

A man of sorrows and well acquainted with grief

Fundamentally, our pain and that of the world is one of estrangement from the God who made us but He isn’t aloof to all of this suffering. In the person of his son Jesus, God identified with us and immersed himself in our life-experiences, even being described as a man of sorrows and well acquainted with grief. He willingly subjected himself to the evils of humanity, which culminated in his being crucified by men.

This self-sacrifice of Jesus is the means of our reconciliation to God. As Jesus identified with us, so we are urged to identify with him and enter into the family of God. This is both difficult and easy. Difficult because we have a natural reluctance and easy because all that’s required is to turn towards God and trust Jesus (i.e. repent and believe).

Imaging God

We sometimes speak of someone having a vivid imagination or the opposite, having no imagination at all! The word imagination and image are closely linked.

 In Judaeo-Christian teaching the second of the Ten Commandments forbids making a representation of God in the form of an image (also called an idol). But why? Well, religious idols fall so far short of the reality that is God our creator ,they can only dishonour him. How would Shakespeare have reacted if his literary works were attributed to a five-year old schoolboy’s doodling!

Simply human inventions

In the Jewish Scriptures, God is emphatic that his own people must not form images of God, which was a thing the surrounding nations did for their gods. Such images are the product of the worshipper’s own imagination and therefore are simply human inventions.

All of this may sound totally irrelevant to how each of us conducts our daily lives and pursues our spiritual well-being. Yet, in conversations, I hear people say things like, ‘My God wouldn’t do such-and-such’ or ‘I can’t believe in a God as portrayed in some parts of the Bible; my God isn’t a God of wrath.’ I recall a lyric in a song that says, ‘I like to think of God as…’. Can you see what’s going on here? Such people are using their mental abilities to form their own imaginings of God. These human constructs inevitably fall far short of the power, magnificence and wonder of God that his unfathomable creation reveals to us.

One true image

There is, however, an image that does have God’s full approval. When the first Christian missionaries ventured into the non-Jewish (Gentile) countries of the Mediterranean, they announced Jesus as being the image of God. When they came across Jews living in these pagan lands, they said to them, Jesus ‘is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being’.

You and I don’t have the capacity to imagine the unimaginable, so God has shown himself to us in a way that we can comprehend. He did this by taking on the form and nature of a man. No longer do we need to guess what God is like, nor, along with John Lennon, simply imagine.

Jesus is the very image of God and as he said to his first disciples, ‘he who has seen me has seen (God) the Father’.