Give up "Retributive Justice" for Lent

Subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | YouTube

Our church's tradition on Palm Sunday, beginning Holy Week's re-telling of the last days of Jesus' life, is to talk about the Cross. This year, Vince talks about the way Jesus' death on the Cross can help free us from cycles of revenge and retribution, and encourages us to give up the popular American belief known as Penal Substitutionary Atonement.

SPEAKER NOTES

Give up Retributive Justice for Lent

Story

• So my wife and I have been doing these Lent mealtime prayers with our kids the last couple years during these 40 days of Lent that lead up to Easter
• (the church has been releasing these every Sunday of Lent again this year to help you pray with family or friends or roommates, in a way that feels accessible, because praying with other people can be awesome, but can be awkward if you don’t have models that work)
• I remember two years ago... One of the prayers has a reading about revenge, so the encouragement for parents is to ask: do you know what revenge is?
• And so we talked about that for a while, giving examples that would make sense to kids — it’s really hard if someone takes your toy to choose not to hit them.
• We brought it back to one of our themes from kids church “God can help us stop our mad from hurting others”
• It was a fine conversation with our kids, as usual full of interruptions, but fine… didn’t feel life changing, but you know glad we did it
• So about a week or so after this, we had some transition at home from one thing to another and one of our kids is dragging their feet — like a normal kid
• But the two of us were stressed in this moment, and made one of those short term decisions you regret afterward to take them physically and move them to the next thing, and we were too hurried and rough doing it, and they were very upset about it
• And then, I’ll never forget this… they get real quiet and say:
  • “you did revenge to me”
• Immediately, that broke our intensity
• We wanted to cry and laugh at the same time. Because of their brilliant application
• We apologized. We praised them for the insight and agreed, yes that wasn’t okay, we didn’t stop our made from hurting them.
• And then, softened from the experience, we actually got somewhere talking calmly about the issue of dragging their feet
• We marveled later at the cuteness but also the significance of this moment to the ethical forming of our children.
• They get it! They get revenge!
• Today’s message is about how important that is!
• And the way I want to explore revenge is by talking about what we talk about every year on Palm Sunday, this last Sunday of Lent:
  • Jesus’ death on a Cross,
  • which Christians will mark this Friday, Good Friday

Context

• Our church’s observance of Lent is a play on the traditional practice of “giving up something for Lent” like chocolate
  • But it’s “give up unhelpful and incomplete beliefs for Lent”
  • (And don’t go back to them)
• In our survey asking what people in our community wanted us to address this Lent, one thing that came up was:
  • talk about Jesus’ death on the cross,
  • specifically, one respondent said I know we have talked about this every Lent and many times at church, but it would help me to talk about it again
• They are absolutely right! We have taught on this a lot over the years, and it is good to talk about it again and again.
• Because the way the Cross is popularly talked about in America is extremely confusing,
  • and that confusion can muddy the waters for our understandings really easily because it's so pervasive.

Unhelpful

• The popular view of the Cross is confusing because:
  • Jesus teaches revenge is bad and forgiveness is good,
  • but then Jesus’ death on the Cross, this pinnacle of Jesus’ story, is painted as a cosmic version of “revenge” and celebrates it!
    • God requires retribution for human sin, as you may have heard the story told.
    • So revenge is bad, except for God. Then revenge is good?
  • In theology, this view is referred to as PSA (not public service announcement but) ==“penal substitutionary atonement”==
    • Penal means “court of law” — courts of law are about settling matters retributively
      • Finding the punishment that fits a violator’s crime.
      • Getting a victim the retribution they deserve.
    • This says: we are violators of cosmic Law — sinners!
      • So God is a victim deserving retribution.
      • And for the crime of human sin, the punishment that fits is death.
    • But Jesus substitutes himself for us violators,
      • so we don’t have to die for our sin —
      • And Jesus suffering our punishment is enough for God’s need for retribution, so now God can love us again
    • That’s Penal Substitutionary Atonement.
      • It says that God’s justice requires Retribution, and Jesus’ death is that retribution.
• I’m saying very clearly from the start: I’m not a fan.
  • This is our unhelpful belief for today that I’m encouraging us to give up for Lent
  • From my view, Jesus’ death on the Cross is NOT about satisfying a divine need for revenge. And retribution is not justice.
  • Many are shocked to discover PSA is only about 500 years old as an idea,
    • so this is NOT what the writers of the New Testament had in mind 2000 years ago when they wrote about Jesus’ death.
    • And this is NOT what the first fifteen hundred years of Christians had in mind either when they wrote liturgies and hymns and poetry singing of Christ’s sacrifice.
  • If you have rejected the story PSA invites you into, you haven’t actually rejected Christianity, you’ve just rejected one theory within Christianity from the last 500 years.

Incomplete

• What’s crucial from my perspective though is that: even beyond religion there is plenty of attachment to the idea that revenge and retribution is necessary for justice
• All we have to do is look at Liam Neeson’s career
  • (==image==)
• In all seriousness though, (==image off==)
  • It is worrying that we valorize revenge in pop culture
  • And that America is by far the most incarcerated nation in the history of the world (1.8 million people were in prisons in America at the end of 2023)
  • Wider American culture is just as wedded to the retribution and “court of law” mindset as PSA;
  • But, while PSA is unhelpfully obsessed with our identity as violators, who have to pay retribution
  • In response to that, wider American culture today shifts the focus to us as victims, who are owed retribution.
• In a lot of ways, this is huge progress!
  • Therapy is less stigmatized than ever before, because we’ve learned to see everyone is wounded in some way or another
  • Or we much more readily see and call out power abuse by authorities
  • We get an expanded moral vision,
  • beyond personal purity
  • less individualistic
  • more about social responsibility and protecting the weak
• BUT, all that said, this is what I’m calling this week’s ==better but still incomplete belief==
  • Because while a focus on us as victims is better than a focus on us as violators
  • It’s still retribution that is in charge… it’s just moved offices
    • From a retributive God up in the sky
    • To retributive human beings down here on earth
  • When we use the word “justice” in everyday conversation today, like “justice was served”, or “I want justice”
    • There’s so often a retributive assumption behind it:
    • “someone has to feel it” in order for a victim to get psychological closure
• The bigger dangers here are
  1. Anyone aggrieved learns to call themselves a victim
     • even privileged white men like me, which is often wildly inappropriate,
     • but if retribution is our only model, we are stoking that flame not putting it out
     • that will always be the politics we play — fighting over who is a bigger victim
  2. We learn to use our victimness as a weapon
     • In a culture driven by retribution, a victim doesn’t need healing or restoration, they need revenge
     • This is the cycle of today’s victims becoming tomorrow’s violators
• This is how we have gotten a right wing nationalist Israeli government and army committing unspeakable atrocities right now on Palestinian citizens, and proud of it
  • They have taken their victimness and turned it into a weapon,
  • Anti-semitism is real and it should grieve and convict us, especially within Christianity!
  • But the right wing party in power in Israel isn’t looking for healing and restoration, they’re looking for revenge
  • Any violence on their part is justified, says such right wing nationalism, because of what’s been done to them in history
  • That’s retribution’s logic: if you feel like a victim, anything goes.
  • Hamas can certainly be called guilty of that logic in the past too.
  • Victims are radicalized and become violators, who create more victims, who then are in danger of being radicalized and becoming violators.
  • And on and on.
• That’s the ceiling of our better but still incomplete belief that focuses on victims rather than violators but doesn’t rethink retribution.
  • Cycles of revenge will continue if we don’t expose retribution as the great enemy
  • The letter to the Ephesians in the Bible phrases it: “our struggle is NOT against flesh and blood; but spiritual principalities and powers” — the greater-than-human systemic injustices and cultural lies that keep us captive to cycles like retribution and revenge
  • For the record, many of our Jewish neighbors see this same wisdom! The right wing party in power in Israel does not speak for all Jews in the world!

Alternative

• So the alternative belief I want to encourage us to put our trust in this week is, as I promised, a return back to Jesus’ death on a Cross, - but not as PSA - as something different, as something that can stir us with hope and inspiration, not guilt trips us

  • It begins with the inverse story of PSA:
    • Jesus died not because God demands blood and retribution
    • But because humanity so often demands blood and retribution
    • We project that on to God
    • But in Jesus’ death, ==the God of self-sacrificial love== enters into our broken retributive demands,
      • our rivalry and revenge
      • our blameshifting,
      • our scapegoating,
    • not to glorify them, but to expose them
      • Because they hide
      • They hide behind reasonable sounding justifications that a little controlled violence of our own can save or heal us from violence done to us
      • We can’t see the brokenness in that until it’s exposed,
      • until we have eyes to see and ears to hear
      • I can totally affirm from this perspective: “Jesus died for my sins”
        • but I mean the inverse of PSA when I say that
        • God never needed that
        • we think we need it: that’s why Jesus dies
  • If you’ve had PSA ingrained in you from a young age it can be hard to unsee in the Bible God being “behind” the crucifixion
    • the thought that God didn’t need Jesus to die might even sound blasphemous to you,
    • but it’s actually said multiple times in the Gospels that the Roman Empire (and the puppet Jewish leaders it installed) are responsible for Jesus’ death, not God
    • And that’s such good news! We don’t need to be afraid of God. God doesn’t need retribution or violence to love us.
  • Throughout the Bible, there is definitely retribution language that is celebrated and projected on to God; there’s no use pretending that’s not there;
  • BUT simultaneously there is what has been called “the voice of the scapegoat”
    • and this is the voice that grows and grows to a culmination in Jesus’ story
    • Jesus seemed to understand the risks of his ministry and message that challenged the domination and violence of the Empire of his time
    • He seemed to understand he might be scapegoated

• And he courageously embraces that,

  • Because who are usually the scapegoats of our societies? Those most marginalized, those least able to fight back.
  • Jesus says to those locked in the retribution mind set: if you need “someone to feel it”, I won’t let you scapegoat the most vulnerable. Scapegoat me, instead.
  • Self-Sacrificial Love

• And then, here’s the kicker, dying on a Cross, the innocent scapegoat Jesus… what does he pray?

  Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they are doing.

  • Still Jesus has compassion, still Jesus sees that those killing him are wrapped up in age-old lies about retribution hidden and justified throughout history,
  • and so he forgives them.
  • What is that?!
    • This is the most rattling part of Good Friday to me.
    • I put myself in this story, and I kind of want comeuppance. I want Jesus to be Liam Neeson. I don’t want retribution to be exposed; I want to be the one owed it!
    • But Jesus has tapped something deep here about how retribution will never satisfy.
    • And so he refuses to use his victimness as a weapon.
    • This is the essence of the self-sacrifice Jesus models.

Encouragement as we look to Good Friday:

• Self-sacrifice, on these terms, is not the opposite of self-care. ==Self-sacrifice is the opposite of others-sacrifice.==
  • Self-care vs self-sacrifice is an important conversation and we talk about that a lot here,
  • But in this case it’s self-sacrifice vs others-sacrifice we’re talking about
  • Our culture is less practiced at this conversation
• But we need to talk about it…
  • Because there is no one among us who can, with ethical perfection, skate around the reality that society or conflict or human nature will sometimes present us with horrible lose-lose situations:
    • Where we have to choose:
    • Who are you going to sacrifice? Yourself or someone else?
    • Not even Jesus skates around that, so certainly we can’t.
  • Life will sometimes present us with these situations.
    • Where there is no easy out. It’s just too messy.
    • It isn’t just an individual choice of push myself or don’t push myself. It’s a choice between carry a weight or shift that weight on to someone else’s shoulders to make me feel better in the short term. 
  • We focus on Jesus’ death on the Cross this Friday because of the inevitability of this,
  • and we call it Good Friday, not because Jesus is a good or necessary version of retribution, but because Jesus shows us the opposite of retribution:
  • self-sacrifice rather than others-sacrifice:
  • Self-sacrifice means refusing to use our victimness as a weapon.
  • Laying down that supposed right that retribution tells us we have
• How exactly this plays out for each of us is going to be different, depending on our identities, our stories, our realities
  • If you are systemically marginalized in our culture, for your race or gender or sexuality or bodily ability, God’s call to you to choose self-sacrifice rather than others-sacrifice is going to be different than God’s call to me, a person with a lot of privilege
  • But, in each of our unique circumstances, everyone, inevitably, will face lose-lose situations
    • That leave us with a choice:
    • Sacrifice others or sacrifice yourself?
    • Retribution or the way of Jesus?

Ending

Here’s the reason to choose the way of Jesus… ==visual off==

• What we gain access to when we do is an unexpected back door into the psychological closure we long for
  • (and are convinced that only retribution will bring)
  • We get the company of the God of the universe with us in our victimness,
    • The empathy and understanding of an all-loving, always-present, God, who knows victimness
  • Pastor and theologian Nadia Bolz-Weber says revenge is like peeing your pants — it feels warm at first, but then it feels cold, sticky, gross, smelly
  • I agree. I can tell you from personal experience God's company in self-sacrifice is so much more effective than retribution at providing psychological closure
  • Have you ever felt truly seen by a friend?
    • And it changed nothing that you were struggling with or grieving over, but somehow you felt better because of that friend seeing you?
  • Take that and put an exponent on it and you have the experience of God that Jesus’ death on the Cross invites us into.
    • We can have that with not just a friend.
    • But the God of the universe
    • Who every moment is bringing to you an empathy and a love and an understanding you can never give to yourself,
    • and yet simultaneously it already resides within you, by God’s Spirit.
    • It is not far off at all. You don’t need to climb a mountain or meditate for hours to access it.
    • In simple prayers — in deep breaths — in the smile of my 1 year old — in the hug of my wife — in the encouragements of my friends — in all these things I have learned to perceive the company of Jesus, the God who knows and sees all victimness, who experiences it with us...
    • Bringing me all the psychological closure I need.
      • So I can resist turning my victimness into a weapon,
      • without just relying on my own limited will power.

An invitation to pick up your Cross and follow Jesus…

• Is not a guilt trip on you meant to satisfy a God of retributive justice
• It is an encouragement to draw from an endless spiritual well so you come to rest
• This is vital for our immediate, interpersonal relationships
  • It can help us normalize apologizing and forgiveness in our partnerships, friend groups, work places, with our kids, our parents, our neighbors.
  • These are the small ways we can all practice self-sacrifice instead of others-sacrifice: get good at apologizing. (Not like “I’m sorry you felt that way” But REAL apologies where we own our impact.)
• And this is vital societally
  • I’m going to drop in our resources discord channel a link to research on some pilot projects in Chicago:
    • Restorative Justice Community Courts for solving disputes ==triple Venn diagram visual==
    • Rather than our more retributive civil or criminal justice system
    • I’m compelled by what experiments like these might be able to demonstrate is possible
    • So we can imagine a society less wedded to retribution’s logic (==visual off==)
  • And then there may not be a more important thing to pray for in our world
    • Praying for the lie of retribution to be exposed, its spiritual powers and principalities to be dismantled,
    • So that our retributive cycles of escalatory violence can be stemmed
    • Praying for hearts and minds to be consoled by the lure of Jesus, the forgiving scapegoat, instead of whipped up by the lie of retributive justice
    • If we don’t have a spiritual perspective on this, on what is killing innocent Palestinians, I think we are underestimating the evil
    • This is more than the sum of a bunch of bad faith actors’ choices. This is an evil that somehow becomes more powerful than that.
    • Call it systemic injustice or call it demonic or the devil if you like
    • But prayer is part of confronting it.
    • When we pray I believe we increase the chance for the lure of Jesus to be more influential than the lure of retributive justice ==blank slide==

So let’s pray…