Now we reach the very heart of the creed, its center. We are going to speak tonight of the doctrine of redemption.

The reason why these words are the core of the Christian faith is because everything is seen in the life of the Church through the eyes or the window of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. We believe everything that we believe about Christ (e.g., all the things said about Him thus far in the creed) because He was crucified and rose. It is in the crucified, buried and risen Lord that we understand that the One born of the Virgin Mary is God from all eternity.

Please note that there is nothing said in the creed about the life and teachings of Jesus. We move right from His incarnation and birth to His crucifixion. It is only through the experience of Christians in every age of the One who was born of the Virgin Mary, suffered crucifixion and was buried and rose from the dead that even His life and His teachings have any meaning. That’s why in the early Church the very first thing that was proclaimed – the "kerygma," the core of the doctrine - is that Jesus Christ who died and was buried is risen from the dead. As we heard in the very first class, St. Paul wrote,

When we ask, "For what purpose did Christ come into the world?" the most basic answer that our faith gives is that Jesus Christ came to die for us.

Tonight we will use four icons that express the greatest mysteries or climaxes in the life of our Lord Jesus Christ. The first is the icon of the Nativity of Christ.

What’s being made here is a theological, spiritual statement. The icon does not attempt to be a realistic portrait in any way. It attempts to show the meaning of the subject. Here we see Mary giving birth to Christ in a stable cave that’s shown to be in the heart of this mountain (as if it were the center of the earth), in the darkness. What’s being shown here is this descent of the God of Light, the God who is all, into the smallness of our life in this world to which he comes out of love.

The thing we’ll focus on tonight is that the infant Jesus, shown in the very center, is laid in a manger which upon close examination looks like a little coffin. The swaddling clothes that He is wrapped in make him look like a little corpse. This iconographic statement says that Jesus, who did not have to die, who is the opposite of death, came in order to die. This is the exact opposite of our situation. Our destiny in God’s plan for us was that we should not die. But because of sin, the minute we come into the world we’re under the sentence of death. We have to die, there’s no escape from it. Jesus comes into the world to die, even though He doesn’t have to. It’s the reverse of our situation. That’s the precise reason why He came, to reverse our situation.

Often in the Church we speak of this descent of Christ (His condescension). He who is God takes upon Himself human existence and condescends, bows down, takes the form of a slave, pours Himself out for us. Here we see the icon of the baptism of Christ.

The baptism of Christ is the crucial turning pint of His life on earth. Up until this time, until age 30, more than 90% of His life, Jesus did not say or do much. He does not appear publicly until the time has come. And when the time comes the first thing that He does is He goes to His cousin, John the Baptist, and as an act of condescension is baptized with the sinners. John the Baptist points Him out with a sacrificial statement. He calls Him, "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world."

The icon of the baptism of Christ shows Jesus (Who descended in His nativity to take our flesh), go down into the waters. When He comes up out of the water the first thing He does is He goes into the dessert and is tempted by the Devil. He takes upon Himself the sin of the world, carrying it upon His shoulders. At the beginning of His public ministry, He who took upon Himself our flesh, at His baptism takes upon Himself our sins. Most especially in His baptism is seen the saying of the Apostle Paul, "He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us" (2Cor. 5:21).

The next icon is known as, "The Extreme Humility."

This icon shows Christ standing in a tomb, dead. Here, the Lord Jesus Christ, who has taken upon Himself our flesh and our sins, takes upon Himself our cursedness and our death – the ultimate expression of our alienation from God. We who were created not to die have become prisoners of death and Christ enters into our state.

Jesus sees the human beings, created to share the immortal life of God, instead stinking and corrupt. And He in His death unites Himself to this cursedness and death. This is the ultimate descent of Christ.

The continuation is seen in what is known as the icon of the Resurrection.

It is a spiritual statement that shows Christ descending into death, breaking down the gates of Hades and chaining the Devil. With His hands He lifts Adam and Eve out of their graves, as we sing in the Church the great Paschal hymn, "Christ is risen from the dead trampling down death by death ands upon those in the tombs bestowing life." Here the radiant Christ, who is life, descends into the state of death in order to turn it upside down (or as C. S. Lewis says, to make death work backwards).

Christ, who is the Life, goes into that state of being which in the Old Testament is described as the bottomless pit and He makes Himself into the bottom of the pit. The pit isn’t bottomless any more. Death is transformed from emptiness into the means though which those who belong to Christ pass into the eternal life and communion of the Father for which they were created.

All of this that is described in what Christ did through His birth, sufferings, death, and resurrection is summed up in what we would call "redemption," or even a wider word, "salvation." Redemption and salvation are not used identically in the Orthodox Church. It is important that when the creed says that Jesus Christ was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate and suffered and was buried, we understand what that accomplishes for our redemption and our salvation.

This is, first of all, an historical statement. The entire destiny of the whole universe was determined by what happened in one particular period in about 33 A.D. In that one week in late March, at the Passover of that year, on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, occurred the salvation, the redemption of the world. It occurred in time, it occurred in history. Those days are the fulcrum upon which the entire universe rests. Our faith is not in some sort of abstract happening that took place in the, "long ago and far away." An essential difference between the myths of other world religions and the Christian faith is that the defining event of Christianity took place at a specific place, at a specific time in history.

This is not a mere repetition. When we say that Christ was crucified under Pilate we are saying, first of all, what was done to Him - and what was done to Him not simply by the decision of Pontius Pilate, but of the leaders, the priests, the scribes, the Pharisees of his own people who reject Him. They rejected him despite the fact that everything that has gone on in their history, in the self-revelation of God, was to lead them to this day when their Savior would come and the promise made by God to Abraham would be kept. Yet the Gospel tells us that they loved the darkness rather than the light. Through the hatred of the Jewish leaders Jesus is hand delivered to Pilate, handed over to the Gentiles, as He said He would be (having predicted three times in the Gospel His own coming suffering, death, and resurrection). There was a part of Pilate that was attracted to Jesus. He looked for ways to set Him free but he was too weak, too afraid to do it. We have the chosen people of the Old Covenant, for whom the Lord, "I AM," is their only King, whose King is standing in their midst incarnate, scream out to the Roman governor, "We have no king but Caesar."

And so as a result of the rejection of His own people and the giving in to that rejection by the governing authority, we have what is described in Orthodox theology as, "the second fall." The fall of the first parents in the Garden of Eden is succeeded by a second fall, the refusal of the people whom God has chosen to Himself to accept their Savior, who is God Himself incarnate in their midst, and to hand Him over to death because of disbelief, hatred, and fear for the loss of their power.

Then we go on to say that Jesus suffered. The offering of Christ for the sake of the world is to be understood as a voluntary offering. The suffering and death of Jesus, His passion, took place because He willed for it to be so. Jesus is not a passive victim. The tragedy of His rejection is real and all the terrible consequences of it are real. But far beyond that, what makes the sacrifice of Christ something that transcends the tragedy is that Christ is Who He is and He offers Himself voluntarily.

Jesus speaks frequently throughout the Gospel of, "His hour." Frequently attempts are made on Jesus’ life. The first time is very early on in His public ministry.

And again …..

When, finally, they do take Him on Holy Thursday night, in the Garden of Gethsemane, he says…..

Jesus offers Himself voluntarily unto death. No one, including the Father, demanded it of Him. The Son of God, as the only One who has entered this world in human flesh who does not have to die, unlike the whole rest of the human race, freely chooses to do so in order that the power of death over the human race might be broken.

In instituting the Holy Eucharist Jesus said, "This is my body which is broken for you. This is my blood which is shed ….." Before the hands of those who are determined to kill Him even touch Him, He already voluntarily (by an act of His divine freedom) hands Himself over to death. In the Divine Liturgy we say , "On the night in which He was given up, or rather, gave Himself up for the life of the world ….."

Before His betrayal in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus again becomes identified with the sin of the world in a most direct way.

Before the hands of those who will torture and kill begin to drain the blood from his body

He already does it Himself. By taking upon Himself the sinfulness and cursedness of the world His blood begins to flow by no human hand.

What does it mean that Jesus Christ, Son of God made man, suffers? Some people think that because Jesus is God He could not really suffer. On the contrary, because Christ is God His capacity to suffer in the flesh is infinite.

If we reduce the sufferings of Christ to merely that which we can perceive on the human level it does not immediately appear to us that they are greater than the sufferings of anyone else. Yet we would say through the eyes of our faith that Jesus Christ suffers infinitely more than any human being ever did or ever will because Jesus Christ’s capacity for suffering is a divine capacity. In Jesus Christ, the person of God the Word is united to the human nature precisely so that the person of God the Word can suffer and die voluntarily, take upon Himself the consequences of all the evil and cursedness and death of the world. It is impossible for us to imagine the agony that causes even His blood vessels to burst and cause the bloody sweat.

Jesus on the cross, cries out with a loud voice, the Gospels tell us, the words, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" This is a question that is asked in the 22^nd Psalm. The Gospels on purpose quote the Liturgical Hebrew.

Jesus prays from the cross in the liturgical language of the Psalms. And we need to read part of that Psalm so that we understand what was foretold long ago by King David (about 1,000 years before it happened). Jesus voluntarily dying, nailed to the cross, prays, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" and the Psalm which He begins continues…

We must realize that that expression, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me," is not an expression of despair. The 22^nd Psalm continually expresses confidence and trust in God, even in the midst of agony of forsakenness and death.

Imagine King David writing this 1,000 years before the crucifixion – they have pierced My hands and feet, they have divided my clothing among them. The Gospel tells us that all of this is being fulfilled. Even Jesus praying it from the cross is expressing the depths of the agony that He suffers but also expressing trust in God His Father, by whom He is never forsaken. Jesus is never alone, the Father is always with Him. Not even for a second or for the tiniest part of a second is Jesus without the Father, because for Jesus to be without the Father He would cease to be God and that cannot be.

Psalms 22 continues……

The One who asks in the beginning the question, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" in this Psalm answers the question that He is not forsaken.

So when we hear Jesus speak these words from the cross we understand two things – first of all, the depth of His suffering. He who is life is being united with death. He who is goodness is being identified with sin. He who is the blessing is now the curse. And He who is life descends into death so that He might become the means by which the power of death over the human race is broken.

Salvation is a very big topic – it can’t be reduced to any one of these four things. Rather, all of them have to be considered together.

Jesus promised that we would know the Truth and the Truth would make us free. It was promised in the Prophets that when the Messiah came everyone would be taught by God directly. Jesus Christ is the Truth and teaches the Truth about the meaning of life, about the relationship between God and man. So, the first aspect of salvation is to see in Jesus the truth, to know the Truth, to be freed from the delusion of falsehood. Jesus is the One in whom the fullness of divinity dwells bodily. He promises before His death that He would send the Holy Spirit and that the Holy Spirit would confirm them in the Truth.

Similarly, Christ shows us what it is to be truly human. Jesus Christ in His humanity, perfectly obedient to God the Father, heals the disobedience by which all the members of the human race have departed from God the Father. Christ becomes the new King of the human race, the new head of the new humanity, the father of the world to come. He leads humanity back to the path of obedience to God. By freeing man from falsehood and restoring him to the knowledge of the Truth, Christ delivers us from error and darkness.

"To redeem" is to pay the ransom price for the slave so that he can have his freedom. The certificate of freedom was called the certificate of manumission. A freed slave had to have this certificate to prove his freedom. The hymns of the Church express it very beautifully – Christ, taking the pen of the cross, dips that pen in His own divine blood and signs the certificate of freedom for the whole human race. We are ransomed from slavery to sin, death, and the Devil. We are reconciled with God – there is atonement. Christ offers Himself as the perfect sacrifice of redemption.

What is sacrifice? It is a means by which the human being expresses his acknowledgement that his life comes from someone else, that it is not his own. The sacrificial offering takes the place of one’s self. The person offering the sacrifice says to God, "I realize that my life is not my own but comes from you." A river of sacrificial blood runs through the Old Testament life of Israel to show that the relationship between God and Israel is one of life and death. The New Testament testifies that without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness for sins. When Christ voluntarily pours out His own innocent, divine blood, a reconciliation takes place.

Now we come to the heart of matter for this lesson. To whom is the sacrifice of Christ offered? The historic faith of the Church in this regard varies sharply from that of modern, Western Christianity. We begin answering the question, "To whom is the sacrifice of Christ offered?" by saying to whom it is not offered.

Some have said that the sacrifice of Jesus is offered to the Devil (the prince of this world to whom we have sold ourselves into bondage through sin) to free us from his dominion. Much more commonly, it is held that Jesus offers Himself as a sacrifice in repayment to God the Father whose righteous anger toward the human race must be satisfied. That understanding, and the effects that proceed from it, are one of the most crucial differences between Orthodox Christianity and non-orthodox Christianity. Orthodox Christianity emphatically teaches that Christ’s obedient offering of Himself is not in any sense a satisfaction payment to the Father who demands such satisfaction because of the sins of the human race.

This medieval idea ("the satisfaction theory") is based on an understanding that the relationship between God and humanity is essentially a legal one – characterized by man’s obligation to obey the holy and righteous God – to conform to His goodness. It begins with the premise that God is infinite, immeasurable. Therefore, when man sins against God, His infinite goodness is offended or violated. God is just and His justice (which almost seems to operate independently from God’s mercy) must be satisfied. The sins of the human race require just punishment. Because there is no human being capable of being infinitely punished by God, God sends his own infinite Son and punishes Him in our place. This punishment satisfies the righteous, just anger of God.

What is the Orthodox view? St. Gregory the Theologian in the fourth century wrote the following in his second Easter Oration.

So, the sacrifice is not offered to the Devil, and the sacrifice is not offered to the God the Father as satisfaction to turn away His wrath (but, rather, is a voluntary offering of obedience by the Son, not demanded by the Father). To the contrary, God the Father is the One who so loves the world that He gives His only begotten Son. God the Father participates in the offering of the sacrifice of the Son. God the Father is the One who is imaged in the story about the prodigal son as the One who kills the fatted calf (an image of God the Father freely giving out of love and mercy). This is exactly the opposite of saying that God the Father demands for the satisfaction of His justice a perfect being to punish in His wrath. It is not the wrath of God that endures forever; it is the mercy of God that endures forever. It is not the justice of God that operates independently of His mercy. The justice and wrath of God are manifestations in time of His mercy.

The mercy of God is consistently expressed though out the entire Old Testament, even in the midst of expressions of God’s wrath when His people are unfaithful. God is grieved to His heart because of the sinfulness of men.

Even in what might be called the most blood curdling threats that are made in the Old Testament (e.g., what’s described in the end of the book of Deuteronomy as to what’s going to happen to the chosen people if they are unfaithful) they always end with the promise of God’s mercy. In all of the words of the prophets where the people are warned what’s going to happen – Jerusalem is going to be overthrown, the people are going to go into exile, they are going to lose the temple, they are going to lose all of the outward signs of God’s favor – always in the end, in every single one of the prophets, the promise is given of His mercy.

In the Orthodox understanding and experience of God, God is the merciful One who does everything possible, including the ultimate act of sending His only begotten Son, who freely offers Himself out of love as the perfect sacrifice.

And so, how are we to answer that question, "To whom or to what is it offered?" The question is best answered in a great liturgy of the Church, in the Eucharistic Prayer of the Liturgy of St. Basil.

The sacrifice of Christ is not made to a "who" - it’s made to a "what." Christ offers Himself up in sacrifice to the condition that fallen man has become imprisoned in. Man has become cursed and sinful and dead. And so Christ, who is blessed and sinless and the Life, offers Himself up freely so that what is His can become available to the human race whom He loves. And in that the price is paid and the reconciliation and the atonement are made possible.

Jesus makes it possible for the communion between God and man to be restored. That is what redemption is. Salvation, in its entirety, is the actual restoring of that communion (its actualization) in the life of each person who is a member of His body and His Church. So, what Jesus makes possible through His redemptive sacrifice, when it is actually realized in the life of each person in the Church – that is salvation. And it requires cooperation and the desire until the end of life to model one’s self after the image of Christ. It’s not just having some sort of anger turned away, having some sort of debt paid and then one doesn’t have to do anything.

When we talk about what does it mean to be justified, how is the righteousness of God imputed to us (Romans), is it by faith or is it by works? Strictly speaking it’s by neither – it’s by Christ. We are not justified by an act of faith. An act of faith, after all, is just another good work, is it not? We are justified by Christ Himself, who dies for us, who rises for us, in whose death and resurrection communion with the Father has been restored. And as our faith becomes His faith, as our life becomes His life, as we the Christians (little Christs) grow in the image of the one Lord, then salvation is realized and justification bears its fruits.

As we said when speaking of the incarnation, it would not be possible for communion between the Holy Trinity and the human race to be restored as long as death had power over the human race. Jesus destroys the power of death not from the outside, but by getting inside it – by dying Himself. And by Jesus Himself dying, death is emptied out. The prayer of the Church pictures death as a ravenous appetite.

Jesus transforms death from being the state of alienation between God and man to the means by which, though His own death, we are united to God. Death, that is the curse over the human race, because God Himself goes into it from the inside ("trampling down death by death"), becomes the means of life through the death of Jesus. In His suffering and death, Christ consecrates suffering and death, making them into the path to Him, the path to holiness.

4. Salvation makes possible the deification of man

In salvation: 1) truth is made available; 2) redemption from sin and death is made available; 3) suffering and death are transformed into the means to life; and 4) the life is the life of God Himself.

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Often in conversations with Christians of other traditions I find myself explaining the Orthodox view of sin. For most Western Christians, sin is a matter of doing bad things, which create a debt to God, and which somebody has to pay off. They believe that Jesus paid the debt for our sins on the Cross-paid the Father, that is, so we would not longer bear the penalty. The central argument between Protestants and Catholics has to do with whether "Jesus paid it all" (as Protestants would say) or whether, even though the Cross is sufficient, humans are still obligated (as Catholics would say) to add their own sacrifices as well.

Orthodox, of course, have a completely different understanding of Christ's saving work. We hold to the view of the early church, that "God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself." Our sins made us captives of Death, and God in Christ went into Hades to set us free. The penalty of sin is not a debt we owe the Father; it is the soul-death that is the immediate and inevitable consequence of sin. We need healing and rescue, not someone to step in and square the bill. The early Christians always saw the Father pursuing and loving every sinner, doing everything to bring us back, not waiting with arms folded for a debt to be paid. When the Prodigal Son came home, the Father didn't say, "I'd love to take you back, but who's going to pay this Visa bill?"

This was the common view for the first thousand years of Christianity, until Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury at the time of the Great Schism, offered an alternative view. Anselm believed that God could not merely forgive us, because our sins constituted an objective wrong in the universe. It could not be made right without payment. No human could pay such a huge debt, but Jesus' blood was more than sufficient to pay it, which gave Jesus a "claim" on God the Father. "If the Son chose to make over the claim He had on God to man, could the Father justly forbid Him doing so, or refuse to man what the Son willed to give him?"

We would say that Western Christians, Protestant and Catholic, have mixed up two Scriptural concepts: "sacrifice/offering" and "ransom/payment." Jesus couldn't have paid the "ransom" for our sins to the Father; you pay a ransom to a kidnapper, and the Father wasn't holding us hostage. No, it was the Evil One who had captured us, due to our voluntary involvement in sin. It cost Jesus his blood to enter Hades and set us free. That's the payment, or ransom, but it obviously isn't paid *to* the Father. Yet it is a sacrifice or offering to the Father, as a brave soldier might offer a dangerous act of courage to his beloved General.

If I haven't lost you yet, I'd like to take this one step further. As I said, I often have this conversation with other Christians, and make the point that sin is not infraction, but infection; sin makes us sick. The Christian life is one of healing and restoration; it’s not merely about paying a debt.

It recently occurred to me that this difference between Western and Eastern Christianity explains something else I hadn't noticed till now: that Orthodoxy doesn't spend a lot of time worrying about the problem of evil. The question of why bad things happen is a major one in the West; it seems to refute the assertion that God is good and loves us. If he's all powerful and loves us completely, why does he let bad things happen? I expect that this lingering image of a God who is reluctant to forgive, waiting to be paid, feeds a suspicion that maybe he *doesn't* really love us.

I think the Orthodox view of sin as illness, rather than rule-breaking, answers this. There is evil in the world because of the pollution of our sins. Our selfishness and cruelty don't merely hurt those around us, but contribute to setting the world off-balance, out of tune. It has a corporate nature. Anyone can observe that life isn't fair; bad things happen to "good" people. But even good people contribute some sin to the mix, and we all suffer the consequences of the world's mutual sin.

The radio humorist Garrison Keillor used an image for this that has always remained in my mind. He told a story about a man considering adultery, who contemplated how one act of betrayal can unbalance an entire community: "I saw that we all depend on each other. I saw that although I thought my sins could be secret, that they would be no more secret than an earthquake. All these houses and all these families, my infidelity will somehow shake them. It will pollute the drinking water. It will make noxious gases come out of the ventilators in the elementary school. When we scream in senseless anger, blocks away a little girl we do not know spills a bowl of gravy all over a white tablecloth."

What we Orthodox keep in mind, and Western Christians often forget, is the presence of the Evil One. In Anselm's theory of the Atonement, there's no Devil. The whole transaction is between us, the Father, and Jesus (and when the Devil is ignored, he has a field day). But Orthodox know who our true enemy is, and we cling to the Lord Jesus as our deliverer. When we see evil in the world, we know immediately that "an enemy has done this" (Matthew 13:28). We're not surprised that life is unfair and that "good" people suffer; when we see innocent suffering, we know that our own sins helped cause it, by helping to unbalance the world and make a climate of injustice possible. The Evil One loves to see the innocent suffer, and the fact that such events grieve and trouble us delights him all the more. This is in fact one of the ways we bear the burden of our sins: that we must feel the wrenching pain of seeing innocence suffer, and know that we helped make it happen. Western Christians, on the other hand, who see sin as a private debt between an individual and God, and who forget the presence of the Evil One, can't figure out how God could let an innocent person suffer, and are left with the chilly thought of questioning the goodness of God.

"Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" (Romans 7:24-25). We do not trust in our own strength to get out of this mess, but rely entirely on the power of Jesus Christ, who has "trampled down death by death." Day by day growing in grace, we can contribute to the world's healing, by forgiving our enemies, loving those who hate us, and overcoming evil with good. The first place it needs to be overcome, we know, is in our hearts.