Cole J. Banning

As preached at the Advent Vespers service at St. Thomas' Episcopal Church in Glassboro, NJ on the evening of Tuesday, December 19, 2023.

Psalm 126
Deuteronomy 30:11-14
Hebrews 10:35-11:1
Mathew 25:9-14

Some of you might remember that I gave a sermon on this Gospel passage this past spring, for the second Sunday of Easter. And I’m glad that I did, because if I didn’t I would be tempted to give the sermon I gave then tonight. But that sermon was an Easter sermon, and this–this is an Advent sermon.

To look at this passage about St. Thomas and the disciples in the upper room through an Advent lens, we need to put ourselves in the sandals of the disciples in the wake of the Crucifixion, to put aside our preconceptions and understandings shaped by two thousand years of Christian tradition and theology.

The death of Jesus would have been shocking to His disciples, in the way that the sudden and unexpected death of a close friend is always shocking. But it would not have been paradigm-shifting, at least not in the way we might think.

It is not at all clear that any of the disciples, let alone all of them, truly understood Jesus’ fully divine nature. The first explicit mention of Jesus as God in the Gospels--indeed, the only truly explicit mention in the entire Bible--is in our Gospel reading this evening, after the Resurrection, when St. Thomas addresses Jesus as “My Lord and my God” (Jn 20:28).

So if the apostles were shocked, it was not so much that Jesus died on the Cross. They understood perfectly well that if you nail a human to a cross and leave them upon it, that person will die within days. Indeed, they understood that all humans die eventually. If the apostles were shocked at Jesus’ death, it was not that Jesus died, but that God let Jesus die.

Scripture makes clear that the disciples did understand, if imperfectly, that Jesus was both the promised Messiah and the Son of God. They knew that Jesus was the Savior sent by God to liberate and save the oppressed people of Israel. That Jesus’ revolutionary movement seemingly ended in defeat with a death upon the cross would have seemed to them to indicate the ineffectualness of God. It was only with the appearance of the Risen Christ that the fullness of God’s plan was finally made known to the disciples–first to the women, then to the other disciples, and then to St. Thomas.

Of course, we have the benefit of hindsight. The Church clarified long ago her Christological and Trinitarian doctrines, and so we do understand (albeit still imperfectly, if possibly not quite so imperfectly) and receive as essential doctrine that Jesus was and is God, fully divine and fully human, of one being with the Father and part of the indivisible Godhead which is the Holy Trinity.

For us, with the benefit of hindsight, the truly paradigm-shifting event is neither the Crucifixion nor the Resurrection but the Incarnation. (Remember, this is an Advent sermon.) The shocking fact is not that Jesus died, or even that Jesus rose again on the third day; it’s that Christ made himself vulnerable to death by becoming incarnate of Mary His mother, the God-bearer, and became human. Christ’s giving of himself for us (Gal 2:20) did not happen on the Cross, at least not primarily: it happened in the creche, with the first gasping breath of the baby Jesus.

In the creche Christ enters into our human condition, making Himself vulnerable to pain, suffering, and death, and on the Cross He actually suffers in a way which is immediate, real, and extreme. He experiences not only being human, but the very worst of that which it entails. The Cross, then, makes explicit what was already implicit in the creche.

When St. John writes that “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son” (Jn 3:16) the evangelist is not referring to the Crucifixion alone, but to the Incarnation, to the 33-year-long event of the incarnate God living in the world. God the Father sent Christ into the world--not out of the world, but into!--that the world might be saved through him (Jn 3:17).

Just as Jesus almost certainly was not born on the 25th of December, St. Thomas probably didn’t die on the 21st of December, the date upon which we commemorate him. But when, back in the 9th century, the shortest day and longest night was chosen for his feast day, I think those who made that choice were onto something. The feast of St. Thomas signals that the long wait of Advent is coming to a close, that soon we will be celebrating the great feast of the Incarnation which is Christmas.

In many ways, our lives in the 21st century parallel the experience of St. Thomas in the upper room. Christ is already Risen, has already won the victory over death and sin. Scripture and sacred tradition testify this to us just as the other disciples did to Thomas. And yet, we and Thomas understandably remain skeptical. We yearn for the moment when the completion of Jesus’ victory will be made fully manifest to us.

And so we wait, an Advent people. We remember his death, we proclaim his resurrection, we await his coming in glory. None of us know the day or hour of when Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead. But our celebration of Christmas at the close of the Advent season is an expression of our belief that our waiting is not in vain, that one day we will face our Lord and Savior face to face, flesh to flesh, just as St. Thomas did. We stand at our watchposts, as the prophet Habakkuk puts it in our first reading. “For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come.”

Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. Amen.

It's been a while since I've posted an entry in my "What I Want From an Atonement Theology" series, but I have not forgotten it! I'm still very interested in articulating just what I'd like to see in a theology of atonement, and then perhaps thinking about just how a theology might manage to fill those requirements.

And one of the important--I was tempted to say "most important," but really all of the criteria I specified at the beginning of this project are pretty critically important--requirements which I have for an atonement theology is that it treat the Incarnation not merely as a necessary prerequisite for the Cross, but recognize that "Incarnation is redemption."

You might remember that I actually preached on this in my sermon for the Feast of the Holy Name:

[There is] a tendency we sometime see in some parts of Christianity to view the Incarnation as a mere prerequisite to the Cross, something God had to do in order to accomplish the plan of salvation just as it might be necessary for a high school student to take Algebra I before she can take Algebra II. Roger Olson speaks of it as a “rescue mission”: “its only purpose being to get God the Son onto the cross to change God’s attitude toward us from wrath to love. This,” Olson says, “does not take the truth of the incarnation seriously enough.”

I contrasted this with a Franciscan understanding of the Incarnation as articulated by Fr. Richard Rohr:

For Francis and the early Franciscans, "incarnation was already redemption," and the feast of Christmas said that God was saying yes to humanity in the enfleshment of his Son in our midst. If that were true, then all questions of inherent dignity, worthiness, and belovedness were resolved once and forever—and for everything that was human, material, physical, and in the whole of creation. That's why Francis liked animals and nature, praising the sun, moon, and stars, like some New Ager from California. It was all good and chosen and beautiful if God came among us "as Emmanuel" (Isaiah 7:14).

What are the implications of this understanding of the Incarnation as "already redemption" on how we view the Atonement? What happens when we view the Cross through the lens of the Incarnation instead of vice versa?

Jesus' death was an inevitable consequence of the Christ becoming human, of sharing our mortal nature. Whether it was at 33 years old on the Cross, or as an elderly person on a deathbed, Jesus was always going to die. That's part and parcel of being human, an inescapable result of the kenotic process described in the early Christian hymn quoted by St. Paul in his letter to the Phillipians:

Christ, though in the image of God,
didn't deem equality with God
something to be clung to--
but instead became completely empty
and took on the image of oppressed humankind:
born into the human condition,
found in the likeness of a human being.
Jesus was thus humbled--
obediently accepting death, even death on a cross! (2:6-8, The Inclusive Bible)

By emptying Christself and becoming human, Christ doomed Christself to death. So it seems to me that the question of the Cross is: in what ways, if any, does Jesus' violent death on a cross accomplish something that a death in bed from natural causes at age 90 would not have? I think the hymn above implies an answer in its phrase "death, even death on a cross!" Crucifixion is, in a sense, the sine qua non of deaths, dramatically underscoring what it means to be mortal, to be subject to suffering and ultimately to death. Jesus' experience on the Cross was what every human being faces in death, only more so. "Jesus' cry from the cross—'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'—shows that in the crucifixion, God experienced the most human of all feelings: the absence of God. In so doing, God bridged the gap that sin had caused between us," writes Tony Jones, explicating the view of the atonement held by theologian Jürgen Moltman.

In The Crucified God, Moltman writes--quoted by Tony Jones here--that it is on the Cross that Christ takes upon Christself "the eternal death of the godless and the godforsaken, so that all the godless and godforsaken can experience communion" with the Christ. That's the sort of insight that I think a theology of the atonement has to take into account if it is to properly understand the Cross in light of the Incarnation, rather than simply understanding the Incarnation in light of the Cross, as has been lamentably more common within Western Christianity.

Recently, I took a train up to New Brunswick to attend a young adult retreat hosted by the Diocese of New Jersey. There's a lot I could say about the event: I had a blast, came away renewed, and we did a lot of great hashing-out of the notion of original sin during the Ask-a-Priest period (in response to a young woman's question about the RCC doctrine of the Immaculate Conception) that ties into thoughts I've been thinking in such a way as to merit a post of its own. (Of course, at this point the topics which merit posts are legion, and the actual posts, not so much.) But for the moment to want to write a bit about a subject which came up during our lunch conversation.
In contrast to that sort of transhumanism, I'm thinking of a sort of "weak transhumanism," something more along the terms of Donna Harroway's cyborg feminism--a "Cyborg Christianity," if you will--in which, rather than allowing us to transcend our humanity and escape our human bodies, technology allows us to dissolve the dualism between our selves and our bodies and more fully, rather than less, live out our embodied humanity.