The utterly strange claim of Christ making it his fault and not ours!

A central part of what Christians acknowledge is that we, as human beings, often fall very short of even our limited understandings and capacities of how we should love others. Nevertheless, recognising fully the latter problem gets us to the very Christian claim concerning what Jesus has done for us as Christ our saviour. By serving us and sacrificing himself, because of his love for us, he identifies with and even becomes our flawed selves, as he takes onto himself the burden of human imperfection through his death on the cross. So, Paul states in 2 Corinthians, 5:21: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

However, when we become too familiar with this orthodoxy we often underestimate the mysteriousness and utter strangeness of this claim about Jesus. Put another way, then, God becomes a person and then assumes the blame for what we have done wrong, making our weaknesses his fault and not ours! Of course, there is no justification in heaven or earth for this misplaced blame but, for Christians, this proclamation is God’s loving response to our flawed natures and the most extreme and radical version of his love toward us. As a result of him taking the blame, Jesus, as he was dying on the cross, experienced the ultimate rupture and disconnection with the God he calls father and so becomes completely abandoned and alone, crying out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46).

So where does his love take us? First, we would do well to admit, that because of what happens to us in the world, we often also experience the feeling of being forsaken. The circumstances of many of our lives frequently seem to bear witness to us being abandoned. On one level then, Jesus as a man making this cry is not unusual or incomprehensible, even given the terrible circumstances of being tortured to death while nailed to a cross. What is unusual and much harder to comprehend, is the implications of this cry, given the other claim from Christians, that the Word had become flesh, in the person of Jesus, which means that he is God (also see John 1:1-14, and my post 7^th February 2014). Second, what follows is that God, by loving us first, has willfully torn himself apart in order for us to be reconciled with him! He has, through assuming the blame for our wrongdoing, become disconnected from himself, in order to deal with the disconnection between our flawed selves and his perfection as a loving God. Moreover, when he makes it his fault, and not ours, he also makes us, unjustifiably, perfect in the process and so wholly and completely reconciled to him. He has, in short, saved us from ourselves!

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