If Easter wasn’t a Debt Payment, then what was it?

“He made him who did not know sin to be sin for our sake,
so that through him we might become
the righteousness of God.”
              2 Corinthians 5:21

Jesus, Mushrooms & the Divine Metamorphosis of Easter

“Scientists have identified more than 120 enzymes in the tissues of mushroom-forming fungi. These enzymes can break down toxic chemicals, including cancer-causing hydrocarbons found in oil … In one test, researchers inoculated diesel-contaminated soil with oyster mushrooms and found that they reduced the concentration of toxic hydrocarbons from a dangerous 10,000 parts per million to just 200 parts per million over a 16-week period. The remediated soil was so clean that regulators approved it for use in landscaping along highways.” – Resilience.Org

Something incredibly meaningful happened – I believe – a change, a divine metamorphosis; one substance becoming another, one form of energy becoming another, when this particular child of God who we celebrate at Easter, Jesus of Nazareth, was tortured and died.

His transformational ability – I believe – was like the incredible catalytic power of fungi, which we now know can take toxins into itself and absorb their energy; creating clean, fertile soil from what was once cancerous and deadly.

“Christ redeemed us from that self-defeating cursed life by absorbing it completely into himself …
That is what happened when Jesus was nailed to the cross: He became a curse, and at the same time dissolved the curse.”  Galatians 3:13

For me, the death of Jesus is not about penal substitutionary atonement – in other words – Jesus taking the punishment of all humankind so that God could forgive us. The word penal here would imply that someone needed to be punished in order for God to be able to welcome us home to our true selves.

I don’t believe that is true, but to be honest, I’m not really sure. I don’t know if the Universe had a Cosmic Debt that needed to be paid off before we could be forgiven, because I don’t think I know enough about the fabric of the cosmos to make such a judgment.

But, I think the more likely case was a transformation, not a transaction. A cellular-level change in human-divine substance, rather than a debt payment. I hope that makes sense. I don’t think God needed a certain amount of blood to make the tally even up. I think that God chose to forgive us, despite our sin. After all, that’s what forgiveness is: to set someone free from their debt, without payment.

I do, however, believe that Jesus “paid for our sins”, but in a much deeper way than just a blood exchange. He became our death.

All I can truly know of this particular death, is what it has meant to me.

At one point in my life, I was in a great deal of anguish because of abuse that I had been the victim of. Abuse that had wounded my soul so deeply that I felt an intense and unrelenting hatred for my abuser. And, I was also aware that my abuser (who had once been my close friend) because of their actions inflicted upon me, lived with a great deal of shame and regret. Which in turn disabled them from forgiving themselves, becoming healthy, or moving on.

This festering wound was very damaging to the lives of those around them; as well as those around me.

“The wages of sin are death” … or in other words, when you abuse someone, both the abused and abuser naturally end up in a hellish state of agony.

In the middle of this torment I said to God, “This pain is killing me … and it’s also killing the one who hurt me! How can either of us find any relief here?”

In response, God didn’t annihilate my pain. He didn’t wipe it out like the extinction-event of the Great Flood in Genesis. He didn’t erase it or make it disappear.

Nor did he avoid it. He didn’t use the “cause and effect” model: the transactional law of sin and punishment by which the Hebrews lived. They sinned, and then they sacrificed an animal to atone for their sin, so in effect, the animal took the punishment for them.

He didn’t say to me, “Yes, a sin has been committed here, but now it’s been paid for by the death of Jesus, through blood … so we’re all good, you can just move on. Debt paid. Done and done.”

No. Something much deeper happened.

I told God, “This pain is killing me. I hate it and I don’t want to feel it anymore. In fact, I want my abuser to die for what they did to me; that’s how deep my hatred for this pain goes. But, the thing is … I know they already are! They’re crushed under the weight of this shame. How can either of us ever be free?!”

And in response God replied, “I know.”

“I know this is killing you. I know because I died too. I died from this … and I am suffering this … with you … as you are suffering in it right now.”

“God and the suffering of the world are inseparably interwoven” – James Finley

My Faithful God of Loss:

Although my childhood had been deeply steeped in Christianity, by the time I reached this season of brokenness – in my late thirties – I had long since stopped believing that my religious tradition was the only valid way to have a faith journey. I was very open to other spiritual paths.

However, in this time of grief, I found that I needed the God of my youth. That is … the God who knew suffering. The God who understood this kind of heartache. The son of God whose best friends had betrayed him. The son of man, who overnight, had lost everything.

I needed the spiritual comfort, not of a higher conscious plane, nor a sublime divine experience, but of the God of loss. I wasn’t floating on clouds, and I didn’t want to be. I was in hell, and God held me there.

He who knew the depths of suffering, held me there.

I don’t know if I even believed in any kind of resurrection at this point, and I wasn’t much interested in trying. In fact, it would take years before I could even allow myself to think about the possibility of rebirth.

I needed the God who knew grief, because I wasn’t done with grieving, and grief was most certainly not done with me; not for a long time. I needed the God-Human; the one who understood pain – no other kind of spiritual guide would do. And in my personal jail cell of deep depression and gut-wrenching heartbreak, he was my comfort, my closest friend and my counselor through the dark night of my soul.

I can’t explain the mystery of the cross any more than this: God in Jesus, became my death for me. And in doing so, brought me out with him into life again. My death and my resurrection are intimately tied to that of the Human One.

I don’t think it was just a symbol of death and resurrection he gave us, nor just a path to follow, it was both of these and more. I think he made a way through it, and he walks ahead of us, and with us, and behind us, through the tunnels of death. Whatever that death may be for you personally.

I believe in the transformational energy of Christ’s body broken for us, across time.

Bearing One Another’s Deaths:

“Similarly a shaman could draw the evil out by lying under the patient
and then pulling the disease into their own body where it could be destroyed.”
          – Being and Becoming Ute, the story of an American Indian People, Sondra G. Jones

And when I heard this response from God … “I died too, I died for this, with you” … the reason I could accept this answer so readily was because I knew … if my child were suffering, I would fully engage with them in their pain too.

If my loved one were suffering from a sickness, a depression, a grief, or from withdrawals from addiction, and I knew the only way for them to be well was to go through it – then I would wrap my body around theirs and lovingly absorb every bit of pain, every shaking agony, every atom of grief.

If I could … if I knew how …I would become their addiction. I would become their sickness and I would absorb it in myself. I would take the brunt of the blow; the hit of death for them. This was how it felt to me. My loving heavenly Mother wrapped herself around me, and daily absorbed the shockwave of my wrecking ball of grief.

I would do it with my child. I would do it for them. But both these words … with and for … imply separateness, and I don’t think God was separate, or is separate from us in our deaths. So the word we need to use is become. God became death for us, that we might become life with God.

God became the alcoholic, the drunk driver, the murderer, the adulterer. He took death and made a way through it … transformed it from a dead end, into a passageway of life.

This absorption, this transformation of energy may sound too magical to be true and … it is!

And yet, it isn’t.

It is as magical and yet as commonplace as the sunlight, which – through plants – becomes food in your belly and electrical signals in your brain. As miraculous as the mushrooms who transform polluted soil, or the carrion birds who digest disease in their guts, “saving” us daily from rabies and bubonic plague. It is as divine as the unfathomable peace which can arrive with a moment of prayer, or an embrace from a loved one. Yet as common as the oxygen which the trees freely give us in every breath. As regular as sunrise and as miraculous as the birth of a child. It is as incomprehensibly loving as everything else the Creator does – in and through creation.

It is nothing less than the very shape and nature of Reality.

Perhaps it is the complete “un-tame-able-ness” of this divine gift which has made humans so eager to control it. It seems we may have mistakenly been trying to use a transactional relationship with God – often through blood sacrifice – as a way to coerce this already given phenomena of transformational life, again and again since the dawn of humankind.

Why Blood Sacrifice?

For a season of my life, I worked as a gardener and although (I think) I already understood the universal principle of life from death, working with the soil daily brought this law home to me in a much more real and tangible way.

If you are ever asked to plant a garden in a patch of wasteland; land which has become dry, infertile, barren. The only way you’ll be able to bring fertility and nutrition back to that soil – to make it a birthplace of new life again – will be to bury something dead and decaying within it. That’s what “fertile – izer” is: manure, compost, dead and decaying plant and animal matter.

Organic life, broken for us, so we can have new life. Sound familiar?

I even know one master gardener, who, when tasked with growing an unusually difficult tree found some road kill – a dead animal – and lovingly buried it at the foot of her sapling so that the nutrients from its decaying body could bring life to the roots of the new plant.

Death is what creates fertility within the soil. The rich nutrition-filled soil of Earth which feeds us daily, and the spiritual soil of our inner lives. Working with nature has taught me that death is not an end, but a pathway.

And perhaps this innate knowledge can give us some much-needed insight into our own ancestral religious practices. Why were all humankind’s earliest attempts at spirituality based around blood sacrifice?

Could it be because we instinctively knew, through our relationship with the seasons, that for new life to come,
something would have to die?

Unfortunately – it seems – we took this gut knowledge, this first-sight instinct, and weltered it through the lens of our small immature egos. We pictured gods who were fickle and prideful like ourselves; spirits who would need to be appeased, or bargained with, in order to send rain, or fertility, or victory over others.

Like many other ancient peoples, the Hebrews instituted blood ritual at the center of their cultural law. I can’t help but think that transactional “scape-goating” must have been a necessary step in humanity’s spiritual evolution, because in our immaturity we often seem to need someone or something to take the blame, until we can grow deep enough, wide enough, courageous enough to know God – and therefore ourselves – as freely loving. Freely forgiving.

A deeper understanding however, of the laws of forgiveness must always have been within us, waiting to be seen. Even the most famous Hebrew poet, David, when he had committed adultery and murder, cried out to God in a prayer of repentance,

“You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you take no pleasure in burnt offerings. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.”

His soul, it seemed, understood that the “thing that would have to die” (and be transformed and reborn) was not a sheep or a bird, but the jealousy and pride which lived in his inner being. The very motives which had caused him to murder and steal (a wife) in the first place. Could this be why he was named a man after God’s own heart; because he understood the very heart of the matter?

Transactional blood sacrifice was a “cause and effect” model of righteousness, but if an animal took the punishment for you, what real change would that bring? Blood sacrifice might excuse you from punishment, but then the “sin” could then be committed again and again until there are no animals left to take our blame.

Quite honestly that is almost exactly what is happening in the world today, as nature bears the brunt of our greed, abuse and neglect.

Only transformational inner change can really save us in the end.

Although I myself was raised with a transactional understanding of the cross of Jesus – a debt payment theology – the explanation always felt a little lacking to me. It didn’t quite feel wrong; just not quite the full picture. As if there was a deeper gold, an intuited metaphysical miracle lying unexplained just beneath its surface.

It wasn’t until I had an actual debt owed to me … my soul, stolen through violation … a devastating loss … one I couldn’t possibly recover on my own … that I realized the unfathomable depths, the extent to which God had “paid for me” to be free.

And so perhaps, if there is a Cosmic Debt which needs to be settled, then this was it: the cost it took to teach humanity forgiveness. The forgiveness of ourselves, and of one another. The cost of walking into hell with us and walking us back out alive. Perhaps this was the price because only love this large could balance out the incredible imbalance of separation and un-love in our broken world.

There were many times during my recovery when I would imagine vengeance, or perhaps – what we might call – justice. I would fantasize about my abuser being beaten, bloodied, in pain. But every time I allowed my mind to go there, all I saw at the end of that fantastical scenario was two people – me and my perpetrator – now both wrecked. Our souls lacerated, beaten to shreds, but still … no healing for anyone.

Vengeance or so called “justice” couldn’t possibly “pay the price”; the debt, the reversal from agony, back toward normality, that my soul was owed.

No, only pure, uncoerced, given love could possibly be enough to “pay for”- to heal – what was done to me. It wasn’t a reversal I needed, back to my previous “unabused” self. It was a way through! A way on, into life, and only Love, writ large, could pay a price big enough to lead me there.

Once I realized the price which had been paid for my freedom, the parting words of Jesus to his best friends began to make sense to me:

“Take, eat, this is my body, broken for you.”

Suddenly I recognized that with this instruction Jesus wasn’t introducing a new or novel spirituality, he wasn’t asking us to depart from our earthly, human, spiritual selves. But rather, he was affirming and fulfilling the fundamental shape of all Reality – both natural and supernatural.

He was echoing the ever-cyclical voice, the incredibly generous mantra of every living thing.

Every living thing which is broken down to become the life source for another. Every plant, all flesh, grown from the elements of light, water and soil. Taken in, taken apart, digested; new energy produced. And not only what we eat and drink, but every physical gift around us is the life of another “broken for you”.

The trail you walk every morning, the woods where you weep when you need to process your grief. The mountain you stare at when you need to find peace. The ocean you surf in, the moon which commands the cycles of your life. Every “thing” in this cosmos was born from “a breaking”. Born from an explosion, from a cosmic storm. Every “thing” we see and eat and drink and breathe and love has died in one form, and been reborn in another, in order to serve us, as it does right now!

“Everything we put in our mouths, everything that allows us to live, is the gift of another life.”
             – Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

Even your mother who birthed you, your father who worked long days to provide for you. “Here is my body broken for you”.

This call echoes from every Love we’ve ever known; because every Love is a part of the Great Love, which is offered fully for us, all the time. Completely miraculous and completely commonplace.

The Human One was echoing this complete “giveness” – but he was also elevating our understanding by asking us to consciously follow him into this choice: to commit ourselves in trust to the death and resurrection process. He was asking us to follow him in knowing peace, even in the face of death. To drink it with him and swallow it down to its end, allowing our spirits to be transformed, overcoming death, not by denial or avoidance but through the ever-given-pattern of Resurrection and Life.

​​Why do I believe that Jesus absorbed “sin” rather than erased it with a penal debt-payment? Because the​ evolutionary inner empowerment to overcome is a fundamental pattern I see in all of creation. As deadly​ pathogens – physical, emotional, mental and spiritual – evolve, so too does our ability to absorb and overcome​ them. We overcome disease through immunity, addiction through community, trauma through therapy,​ violation through forgiveness – and even pollution through fungi!

In every facet of creation “Life” is not a destroyer, but an overcomer, a reconciler, a reintegrater, a​ forgiver, a re-birther. Energy does not disappear but is transformed; and the Human One – to me – is the prime,​ the embodiment and the ​fulfillment of this pattern for us.

“ … everything on this planet lives by the constant sacrifice of the nearest star. Every blade of grass, every tree, every bush, every microscopic algae on this planet is a resurrected form of the Sun’s energy. I capture that energy by consuming other things that have died … One day I will die and my atoms will go back to giving life to something else … The universe itself exists in an eternal pattern of life, death and resurrection … it seems poetically appropriate that the Source of all would have left this divine signature on the fabric of reality. In Jesus I hope for more than just a God with a face or a uniquely gifted moral teacher. I hope for a resurrection that will one day reach every corner of the universe.”
– Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves

In parting, let me just add this: these words are only my story … my list of experiences and my understanding of the cross of Jesus. They’re not a finished conclusion, just a piece of an ever-unfolding mystery; one that has brought me much fullness and life. Your understanding of the cross doesn’t need to be the same as mine. In fact I hope it isn’t. I hope you have glimpsed secrets which are only yours to share! For centuries our religious institutions have demanded final conclusions from us, but there is an almighty freedom in allowing ourselves to not know; allowing Life to unfold itself within us … lovingly, slowly and increasingly throughout the years.