10-18-24 - Ransomed

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

Many Christians these days challenge traditional doctrines of the Atonement, those various ways of articulating how Christ’s death on the cross effected salvation for humankind. Some reject the idea that humanity needed saving; others are put off by the notion that our God of love could be so wrathful as to require an atoning sacrifice to meet the demands of his justice, let alone the sacrifice of his own son. Ideas that Christians have prayed, confessed, preached and sung about for centuries are now in the trash bin.

This is more than I can address in a short spiritual reflection. I raise it simply because of the last thing Jesus said in his discourse to his disciples about service and humble leadership: “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” If we wonder why theories of atonement developed at all, that line about giving his life as a ransom is one reason. That tells us something about how Jesus saw his mission and impending passion. It suggests that “many” are indeed in need of being rescued, saved, liberated, redeemed like an item sitting on a pawn shop shelf.

Whatever you think about sin and sinfulness, however you view your need to be forgiven and saved or not, each of us can relate to the notion of being held hostage to something. Whether we are hostage to our own schedules, to cycles of disease or addiction in family members, the materialism of our culture, the demands of social media, or our own broken patterns of relating to ourselves, to others and to God – each of us can, I believe, appreciate the notion of being ransomed from that bound condition into freedom.

Even if we accept Jesus’ gift only in that light, it is enough to make us profoundly grateful to be ransomed – meaning, someone has paid the ransom so that we can walk out of captivity into the bright sunlight of liberation.

What in your life have you been ransomed from? What do you need freeing from now?
Might you ask Jesus in prayer how his offering of himself unto death and back into new life has provided you a key for the door?
Do you owe a debt to another person you can never repay, perhaps a hurt you caused or joy you stole? Can you accept that Jesus may even have paid that debt for you?
In what ways might we still be sitting in our captivity, even though the door has been opened – because it’s scarier to move out of our patterns of unhealth into the responsibility of freedom?

There’s a beautiful song called Be Ye Glad, with this refrain:
Be ye glad, O be ye glad; every debt that you ever had;
Has been paid up in full by the grace of the Lord; Be ye glad, be ye glad, be ye glad.

We are ransomed. Open the door and step into the Light!

© Kate Heichler, 2024. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for next Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.