Paid In Full?

Paid In Full 

An essay on the meaning of a sign and on being Christian.

Joe Szimhart (March 2020)

This is another case of biting off more than I can chew, but I feel inclined to explore the question again from its cosmic implication. Stimulation for this essay occurred when I stopped to buy dry feed corn at an unattended stand on a country road in Pennsylvania because I like to feed the deer that stroll through our back yard in winter. Using the honor system, the farmer posted signs for customers to leave cash payment in a mail slot inside his produce stand. My fifty-pound bag of corn on cobs cost a mere five dollars. Next to the feed stand, the farmer posted another sign (pictured above) that said:

Would You Hang On A Cross To Save A Sinner’s Soul? Jesus Did! Paid In Full

The sign nailed to a wooden pole is painted on scrap aluminum siding. I wondered, how did this farmer interpret these words? What did he mean? Where does he fellowship? Since I am not inclined to knock on his door to interview him, I will speculate about the text itself. Often, when I saw signs with similar content in my travels, the sign was linked to a local church with evangelical, fundamentalist leanings. Christian understanding depends on context, so the pastor and type of church will inform how a believer and perhaps this farmer interpret scripture.

The farmer’s sign is a simple way to state the kerygma, which means in Greek “to proclaim” or “herald” the good news (Gospel) of Jesus's salvific sacrifice. Kerygma appears in the Christian Gospel nine times. Kerygma can mean the irreducible essence of Christian apostolic preaching. Evangelists like my farmer are especially invested in kerygma. That is why they post signs on country roads and ask you if you know Jesus while you are relaxing on a park bench.

Two things stand out:

1.       Salvation is a mystery as to how it works, if it works. The Gospel and especially Paul maintain this is a matter for faith, not scientific or material proof.

2.       Salvation is a done deal; it is “paid in full.”

I grew up Catholic, so the bloody carcass of a nearly naked Jewish rebel rabbi nailed and tied to a Roman cross was the centerpiece of the aesthetics in my religious experience. The crucified image evoked both horror and guilt because mutilated corpses are horrible and this Jesus, I was told, fatefully accepted his horrible death for humankind’s benefit—to “save” me. As a fallen sinner who inherited his fall from the first human called Adam, I needed the “Son” or human symbol of God in the flesh to show me that the debt for my sins (flaws, trespasses, ignorance, and bad judgements) is eternally paid. The Son demonstrated that the Father truly forgives and loves us all. Nevertheless, I owed this Jesus/God something and that something was what he told to his head disciple Peter: If you love me, feed my sheep, keep my commandments. Reciprocity reigns in this cosmic bargain and reciprocity takes the shape of imitation of Christ. We must empty ourselves for others just as God empties self for us. A tall order laying down our lives for our friends and enemies in acts of love. The dead rabbi on the cross is the symbol of an emptied life par excellence.

Of course, there is more to the story. The dead Son came to life again temporarily in a partially glorified body, wound marks and all, then in front of a throng of disciples rose to heaven into the clouds and disappeared—ascended to be One with God. The story promised that the ascended being Jesus would come again to judge the living and the dead within one generation. Later, the writers of the Gospel punted the literal meaning of “generation” (typically, forty years in Jewish lore) to a mysterious time not to be specified. Jesus would come as a thief in the night, so we must be diligent, always prepared, or we might be living in sin and miss the opportunity to repent and ascend. Yes, repentance is necessary in this bargain. There is no free ride to heaven despite the paid in full ticket on the farmer’s sign. We will show our love and gratitude by tending to God’s sheep. We must be good shepherds of being, of life, symbolized by sheep. As to the reappearance of the Christ, many have proclaimed it over the centuries and more so in the past 200 years. Could the “second coming” have a metaphorical meaning that extends to a cosmic scene?

To be a Christian means to believe in a conflicted set of Gospels and epistles. One of the early church fathers, Origen, boldly interpreted the Gospels as meaning that eventually all creation, even Satan, will be saved or restored, such was the eternal forgiving power and love of the Creator God. Other church fathers found this idea of total salvation troubling. What about the evildoers who never, ever repent? Surely, no sane God would treat the evil the same as the humble and the sorrowful, would He? The Gospel writers did indicate an eternal punishment for some called hell. So, Origen’s doctrine of total restoration of pre-existent souls (even devils) was deemed anathema by a 6th Century church council. But if all our debt is paid in full, what about the debt of evildoers? The rejection of God’s love creates a debt. The common answer for this conflict claims that as beings created “free” we have a duty to choose between good and evil., thus our actions, not God’s determines our fates. We may have free tickets to the Garden of Eden, but we do not have to use them.

I wonder about Origen’s speculative theology. He produced roughly 2,000 religious and philosophical essays before his death in 253. From what we have left of his writings, it is not hard to fathom why a reasonable oversight committee would find some of his ideas heretical. Origen the scholar pushed beyond the limited fuzziness of early oral and written Gospel tradition into a private revelation that reflected with neo-Platonic philosophy and argued against prevalent Gnostic visionary myths. (We are not about to unpack what I said in that last sentence here).  With a Platonic verve, he proposed that heavenly bodies of men and women would not look human but be transformed into spheres or orbs as eternal monads of divine light. The Roman church would rule against that kind of speculative doctrine.

That leads me to ask, what was paid for if not an invitation to exist eternally as an orb of divine light? What is saved? Is it the “soul,” as the farmer wrote on his sign? Will the soul look like one of Origen’s orbs or will it look like a human body with its head, hands, feet? What color hair? What age? Will we have the navel, pancreas, testicles, breasts? Jesus said that in heaven we will not marry nor be given in marriage. If procreation is eliminated, I assume we will not need to sleep, drink, eat, urinate, defecate. Some cultures and religions say we (the men) will have 108 wives or many virgins, like bucks with a herd all our own. What for? The Mormons teach something similar and claim that women will populate new worlds with soul bodies from their “wombs.” Others (Valentinians, for example) in ancient and current occulture teach about twin rays or a man and woman that will merge as one being (Aeon) in the Gnostic Pleroma (eternal divine light) forming a kind of syzygy (think, Ying Yang symbol).    

Paul’s epistle said that we will be changed (ascended like Jesus) in a twinkling, that the perishable will become uncorruptible. Does that mean the body, soul, mind, or the entire in-group?  What about personality, the very thing we call the “self?” Buddhists and others in the ultimate game of what happens after death will say no; the personality will dissolve, will disappear forever just as a flame extinguishes on a candle, the same as Atheists claim. But Atheists would not be caught dead talking about Nirvana, the inexplicable heaven for a Buddhist. Some Buddhists, Tibetans among them, posit hell worlds that aspects of the “person” will suffer if we die with an evil state of mind. Thus, some 19th century observers felt that Tibetan Buddhism and Catholicism had things in common: demons, saints, hell, purgatory, the golden rule, a titular head in a lama or a pope, sacred sites with pilgrimages, and a belief in the magical power of prayer. The “twinkling” of Paul can be a long time if you believe as a Roman Catholic or a Tibetan Buddhist. Or even longer if you follow Pythagoreans and New Agers who view reincarnation and metempsychosis as real.

I get the fall from grace thing. Genesis writers were no fools. Taken from ancient oral traditions in Canaan, the Genesis creation myths tell us that early humans noted the dramatic differences between them and animals. Animals seemed content to live in the “garden” of life without moral judgements about sex and appearance. “Who told you that you were naked,” God asked Adam and Eve who suddenly took to covering themselves and especially their genitals with “leaves.” Animals seemed to have no expressed anxiety about death beyond the instinct to survive, but Homo sapiens did. Early man developed language to talk about and share abstract ideas about living forever like the “gods” (Elohim) after their “eyes were opened” by eating of a “forbidden fruit.”

Animals felt no compunction to offer sacrifices to Elohim. Cain and Abel, the first “sons” did. And for some unexplained reason, Elohim rejected Cain’s offering of farmed produce while accepting the shepherd Abel’s offering of “firstlings” from his flock. The jealous Cain killed Abel. When animals kill, murder is not a judgement. Wolf packs do not seek to take revenge on a bear that killed one of their pack. No bear bears the mark of Cain to protect it from a revenge murder. Only man became the judge of good and evil, thus taking on the role of Elohim, however imperfectly. Man’s original sin was losing his innocent animal nature through an evolutionary leap in brain size and function. Man wondered and decided what was right and wrong and made decisions to establish moral rules.  

Could dying on the cross have a metaphorical meaning that extends to a cosmic event? The Gospel of John indicates it does. Everything in the created universe came from the Word that Jesus represented in human form and returned to after death: In the beginning was the Word… What can this mean? Platonism influenced the development of the Christian message by the time of the Gospel of John that scholars place late in the 1st Century.  Even before John was compiled, many Christian sects appeared, each with their spin on the Jesus story. Gnostic movements influenced by Platonism were prevalent before the reasonable critiques of the entire Christian tradition took hold of the empire under Constantine by the 4rth Century. Nevertheless, Jesus retained his idealized cosmic status as Lord of the Universe, the ultimate King and Judge. All who ruled in His Name, ruled as lords with universal power to rule by divine right. Heady and dangerous stuff if the judge is wrong or biased. This power seems to come from one thing alone: Deicide. The Creator dies to sustain the creation. One became two, then split infinitely to infinity. How will this mess ever get back to unity, to home again? Is there a cost? The message of “paid in full” means we are covered, “covered in His blood,” as the good farmer’s sect might put it. The mystery here is that Jesus "resurrected" in God because, well, God can die (totally empty self to create) and live forever (sustain the creation) at the same time. Hindus have another way of stating a similar doctrine through the primal deity Shiva.

That is the message, the kerygma, that brings comfort to all who know they are unworthy and unable as a temporal creature on a tiny planet to perfect the wrongs funded through evolution by the Creator; or, by the roiling ferment of the universe with its physical laws and ways. There can be no mistake in the end in the farmer’s belief system. Perfection sustains the imperfect because nothing would exist without it. This awesome idea, understood or merely intuited, is the power behind the attraction of Christianity in all its forms, no matter how crudely managed or taught.

The farmer’s crude and guilt-tripping question, “Would you hang on a cross to save a sinner’s soul,” totally misses the point of the Gospel. God did this so we would not have to hang on a cross to save anyone, and if we did, the act would be mere hubris dignifying and signifying nothing. The crucifixion of Jesus meant nothing until the Gospel writers framed the Jesus story in a cosmic context as God’s story. Jesus was, in the end, just like us, but he dared to reveal what no Jew dared to reveal before. Jesus emptied the Jewish Temple sacrifice into himself to show how he knew and understood God in himself. The Lord indeed shepherds His creation through His creation, as flawed and mysterious as that arrangement seems to us. Will everything good be saved by the good shepherd? Will all sin be forgiven? Will all unrepentant sinners go to eternal hell? The answers depend on the language games in your head or in your sect of identification. The truth may come as a surprise to the farmer and to us all if that “twinkling” of Paul is real when we die on the crosses we bore.    

And if you happen to be Jewish, the prophets that influenced Jesus said this:

And He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide for many peoples. (Isaiah 2:4)

For let all the peoples walk each one in the name of its god, but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God for ever and ever. (Micha 4:4-5)