Redemption 3

I have been working with a very early and very material Hebrew model of redemption. My two examples are land belonging to Israel, i.e., belonging to God, and members of the nation of Israel, who belong, by definition, to God as well. When land strays outside the nation by being bought by a Gentile, it must be “redeemed” because it belongs to God and it is not right that it “belong” to anyone outside the covenant community. This means it must be purchased and returned, by the way, not that it may be “taken” because it belongs to the wrong person. Similarly, a member of one of the tribes of Israel may not belong to another in perpetuity, because he belongs to God and whoever bought him “owns” God’s property.

Reflecting on this arrangement, I wrote a post called Redemption: It’s not about you” and in that post I said I was going to try to push that model as deep into the New Testament as I could. In that effort, I should say right here at the beginning, I have been aided in every way by Bill Teague, who has shared this project with me. We did, however, run into just the kind of trouble we expected in the New Testament.

Here’s one. In the first model, the payer, the payment, and the receiver of the payment are all nicely distinct. Not so in the New Testament. Following the sacrificial model of Israel, Jesus is the payment, the “lamb that was slain.” In one way of looking at it, we may say that Jesus is also the payer. We might say that he paid with his own life, the price that we were justly obligated to pay. That sounds right. On the other hand, it sounds right, too, to say that God was the payer, giving up “his only-begotten son.” This squares with Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac who was the only apparent means by which God could make good on his promise to Abraham that Abraham’s descendants would be numerous beyond counting.

Since this sacrifice was vicarious, it was not a sacrifice that we would expect to achieve a change in the status of Jesus. And it was vicarious not only for a person—as Sydney Carton was for Charles Darnay in A Tale of Two Cities—but vicarious for a category of persons, as if, for instance Carton’s death paid the debt of all French aristocrats.[1] For me, however theologically necessary it is, it is the application to a category of people that is most uncongenial. It is that use I need to work at.

So Jesus’ death would, following the model, achieve a change in status for us, those for whom the sacrifice was made. This doesn’t fit the “redeemed from slavery” model very well, I’m afraid. The nature of our “enslavement” is quite abstract, by comparison to the slavery of the Israelite who was to be redeemed. Similarly, the “freedom,” consequent on the payment is abstract by comparison. The hardest question would be who, in the New Testament model, receives the payment which frees the category of people who are thus “redeemed” from slavery? That is my next concern, but I want to touch on another matter first.

The Israelite sacrificial model, by which a person brings an animal to be sacrificed as a way of dealing with his own guilt is more abstract than the slavery model. The wrongdoer has an obligation to the one he has wronged—I’m not going to deal with that here—and also a guilt before God, whom he has defrauded. The sacrifice annuls the guilt and puts him back in right relationship with God. The guilt of the wrongdoer and his full restoration to right standing with God are both abstract, but the other parts are all there. There is a payer and a price and a receiver of the price. And there is a condition before and a condition after, although they are established doctrinally, rather than socially, as slavery would be.

In the New Testament model, one of the really knotty questions is “Who receives the sacrifice?” The answer I would like to pursue here is, “The Strong Man.” To do this, you have to catch up a little to who the devil had become by the time of Jesus. He was no longer the prosecuting attorney of Job, but thoroughly evil and wholly antagonistic to God. He is “the Enemy” with a capital E. On the other hand, when testing Jesus, he takes Jesus up to a high place and shows him all the kingdoms of our world and offers them to Jesus. These kingdoms belong to the Devil so he can rightfully offer them.

And when Jesus is asked how he can do all the signs that marked his ministry, he said that if you have the strength first to bind the strong man, you can despoil his house at your leisure. All three synoptic gospels have that. See Matthew 12, Mark 3, and Luke 11. The “despoiling” Jesus was talking about look pretty good to us: the blind see, the lame walk, the demon-possessed are freed, and so on. So the logic says that all those previous conditions—the blindness and the lameness and the possession—were things that were “owned” by the Devil and when Jesus overcame the Devil, he was free to distribute the Devil’s “goods.” So it looks as if a case can be made that “the strong man” is the Devil.

Further, Jesus acted with authority, not just with power. The demons Jesus cast out knew he outranked them and outranked their master as well so when he commanded them to come out, they came out. Underlying the gospel narratives is the idea that there is an evil “spirit” or an evil “presence” behind our troubles. We may think of the demon of our sickness or the demon of a violent storm, for instance. When Jesus healed the sick and when he commanded the storm, he was, again, distributing the loot from the mansion of “the Strong Man.”

Postulating an agent of this sort—active and identifiable in the synoptic tradition—gives us a candidate for “the recipient of the payment.” This is someone who, like the slaveholder of the first and most physical metaphor, can receive payment and allow the slave to go free. In Jesus ministry, we see that Jesus overcame this “Being” and distributed wholeness and health as a sign that the Kingdom of God was already beginning. Jesus dominance, in other words, insured vicarious benefits.

In Jesus's death, the Strong Man triumphs. Or, as we Christians would say, "appears to triumph." The payment is made and received. Again, the benefits are vicarious, but this time they have to do with establishing a vital and unending clearing of our guilt before God. It is fully in the Israelite sacrificial tradition, in which God receives the sacrifice and treats Israel as pure. In this scenario, the Strong Man receives the sacrifice, and God declares all “in him,” all those who trust that this sacrifice is effective and sufficient, are pure.

Let me note, in conclusion, that this is not entirely satisfying. My project was to push the physical model of redemption deep into the fundamental transaction that the New Testament presumes. That means, ultimately, finding someone who a) is capable of receiving the ransom and b) is forced, by receiving it to release his claim on us. So, as a result of the payment, we who were slaves, are freed.

The hardest part for me is conceiving of a Devil who can play this role. But I think it wasn’t all that hard for Matthew, Mark, and Luke. I think it wasn’t that hard for Jesus. So maybe I just ought to work at it harder. Besides, you do get something for all this work. You may now look at a scripture as familiar as faded wallpaper—something like “God made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that we might be made the righteousness of God in him”—and say, “Look at that! That’s really intriguing. What can it mean?”

[1] I learned, in making sure I had the right meaning for vicarious, that it is the adjective form of vicar. So, in the sacrificial model, Christ is the vicar—representing us—and in Catholic theology, the Pope is the vicar, representing Christ.