Later and Greater

In Galatians 6:7 Paul says, “You reap what you sow.”  Paul is making an important spiritual point—”If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh; but if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit.”  But “You reap what you sow” is not exactly some deep, profound insight.  It’s actually rather obvious.  Everyone knows that.  If you plant an apple seed, you aren’t going to get an orange tree.  It’s so obvious that I’m not even going to bother with more examples.  The fact that Paul states it, however, means that the Galatians were ignoring this important principle.  They thought that they could live a lifestyle apart from the Spirit and yet reap all the benefits that the Spirit offers.  It didn’t make any sense, and Paul was pointing that out.  “You reap what you sow.”  (You can almost hear Paul adding, “Dummies.”)

This is a basic principle of life.  Jesus spoke to it in different words: “Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles?” (Matthew 7:16)  You reap what you sow.  What comes around goes around.  Garbage in, garbage out.  You are what you eat.  It’s basic.

Now, here’s the thing about reaping: you reap later and greater.

You plant corn and it’s three months before there’s anything to eat.  Plant asparagus and it’s two years before there’s anything on your dinner plate.  Graft an apple branch onto an apple rootstock (the apples we eat don’t come from seeds, they come from grafting) and it can take from 3 to 15 years before you are eating apple pie.  There is no such thing as instant reaping.  It’s always later.

Later is why we so easily give up on doing the right thing. We might do the right thing without seeing the fruit of it for days, weeks, months, years.  Later is why we give up so easily on losing weight or learning to play an instrument. Later is why we question our choices: Why am I being so diligent when nothing seems to be coming from it? Later is why we give up too soon.  Later is also why we look at people who are doing wrong and start to envy their seeming good fortune.  The consequences generally don’t happen immediately.  You always reap later.

You always reap greater too.  It’s disproportionate.  From one kernel of corn comes a stalk with two ears, each full of rows of kernels.  Plant one apple tree, and you get lots and lots of apples.

Greater can be harder, because it works both ways, both positive and negative.  This is the emotional part, because it's not necessarily "fair" in our minds.  It's not commensurate. So a person who has been somewhat irresponsible with his money might say, "I know I haven't been responsible, but I don't deserve this." To that I would say, "You're right." The principle of sowing and reaping doesn't understand fair or just or balance; what is reaped is always greater than what is sown.

Look at it this way: you are home with your family when a guy barges in brandishing a gun.  He threatens your entire family, herds you in the basement, locks the door, and then steals your valuables.  The whole incident takes thirty minutes.  The guy gets caught, is convicted at trial.  Does the judge sentence him to thirty minutes in prison?  A thirty-minute sentence for a thirty-minute crime?  Of course not.  For armed robbery he’s probably going to get more like 15 years.  15 years for a 30-minute crime?  Yes.  You always reap greater than you sow.

It works the other way as well.  For instance, when a regular smoker quits, one year later their excess risk of suffering coronary heart disease has decreased to half the risk of a continuing smoker.   And if they live smoke-free for fifteen years, their risk of coronary heart disease is now comparable to that of people who never smoked a single cigarette. Their risk of dying also is nearly back to the same level as that of non-smokers.  Is that fair?  Who cares!  It’s wonderful!

      If there is any area of your life—your finances, your money, your dating life, your relationship, your professional life—in which you are not where you want to be, chances are you have sown and reaped yourself there in some capacity.  And this is also true if you aren’t where you want to be spiritually.  The good news is that you can start sowing to the Spirit right now, and eventually you will see the fruit of the Spirit in your life.  No one has dug a hole too deep for the Spirit of God.  You may have to come from further back than others, but that just means that your later will be later than others.  But the more you stick with it, the greater your greater will be.
     “If you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit.  So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up.”

Later and Greater.

One

The other day I was talking on the phone with a friend in ministry.  He is one of three brothers, all of whom are in ministry here in Maryland, themselves sons of a Baptist pastor (now retired) who spent his entire ministry in Maryland.  He told me that one of his brothers who is a pastor has become very good friends with a Catholic priest.  “My brother said that he has learned things about Christianity that he never knew.”  And he also said that when they were young, this friendship would have never occurred.  They were warned to stay away from Catholics, that they had nothing to learn from Catholics, that Catholics believed in salvation by works, worshiped Mary, and practiced empty worship.  And it’s true.  Thirty years ago it would have been extremely unlikely that a Baptist pastor and a Catholic priest would not only be good friends but would consider one another fellow travelers on the journey of faith, with much to learn and much to teach one another.  They would have instead looked upon each other with suspicion—suspicion born of ignorance.  The Baptist would have questioned the salvation of the Catholic because they didn’t believe in salvation by grace through faith apart from works.  I know this for a fact because this is what I myself was taught.  On the other hand, the Catholic was taught that those outside the Catholic church, like us Baptists, were in danger as well because there is no salvation outside the Church, and there is only one Church.

Thank God, we know better now.  They were wrong about us, and we were wrong about them.  I don't agree with everything that the Catholic Church teaches, but that’s all right—I don’t agree with everything the Baptist church teaches either.  I have learned, as has my friend and his brothers, that none of us have a monopoly on the truth, that we all see through a glass dimly, and that we have much to learn from the different traditions that fall under the large umbrella of Christianity.

As recently as twenty years ago, the information  that was readily available to the average Christian was controlled by the denomination.  We bought all of our Sunday School literature from the Southern Baptist Sunday School board.  When pastors bought commentaries and study aids, they went to the Baptist Book Store and bought commentaries and study aids written by Baptists, for Baptists.  Everything that I learned growing up about Christianity came from Baptist sources.  To me, it wasn’t Baptist theology, it was just theology.  It was Christian theology.  I figured every Christian believed in this particular way and if they didn’t, well, they were wrong.  What was true for me was also true for my Methodist friends—the only religious literature they were exposed was by and large Methodist.  This was how it was for all Christians.

A lot has changed in the last twenty years, and the Internet has been the biggest factor in the change.  If I want to read about a subject, I can order any book I want to from Christian Book Distributors or even from Amazon.  I can find articles on the Internet written by every different breed of Christian that exists.  Through email, blogs, book review postings and other online media I can be exposed to a wide variety of opinion, viewpoints, worldviews, interpretations, etc.  Some of it is insipid, some of it is ignorant and/or ill-informed, but some of it is extremely insightful, extremely enlightening, and extremely helpful.  And like my friend’s brother—I’m actually friends with all three brothers—I enjoy and learn from friends from different traditions.  My closest friends include not only Baptists, but a Catholic, a Methodist, and a Christian who gave up on the church but not on Jesus.  They each bring something different and something important to my understanding of Jesus.  And because I have come to respect them and have seen firsthand that they are serious about following Jesus, I have had to be more respectful and more understanding of their views while at the same time holding my own with more humility.  None of us have it all right, and none have it all wrong, and so—and this is most important—we need to listen to one another and learn from one another.

Because in the end what matters is not our identity as Baptists, Catholics, Methodists, Greek Orthodox, etc.  The only identity that matters is that we are followers of Jesus Christ.  

Greasing the Skids

      I concluded the last with this thought: “We need to learn to be the humans God created us to be—made in his image and likeness, good yet with room for improvement.”  The question some may be asking is just what did God do (and still does) to grease the skids for this process? What resources are available that even makes this possible?

The first answer will seem pretty obvious, but it needs to be said: God provided his son, Jesus, for us, but not just as a sacrifice that takes away our sin.  Sin is just part of the problem.   Forgiving sin makes it possible for us to enter the Kingdom of God, but the removal of sin doesn’t show us how to live in the Kingdom of God.  But Jesus is more than our Savior, he is our teacher; more exactly, he is our mentor.  He not only taught us what to do and not do in order to live fruitfully in the Kingdom, he showed us.  His acceptance of society’s outcasts, his concern for the poor, his courage in confronting injustice—whether it came from religious powers or political powers—while steadfastly refusing to resort to violence in doing so, his cutting through religious minutiae to get to what really matters spiritually, his faithfulness to God all the way to his death—in all of these things and more, he didn’t just teach them to us, he demonstrated them for us.  Jesus is our model.  That is why it is absolutely crucial for the follower of Jesus to read the gospel narratives over and over, becoming immersed in the life and teachings of Jesus.  How can you follow someone if you don’t know their teachings and their example?  A follower of Jesus is not just someone who accepts as true the facts about his incarnation, death and resurrection; a follower is someone who actually follows, conforming their life according to the pattern set by Jesus.  Admittedly, this was a tall order even when Jesus was walking around the earth, but he’s not anymore.  Are we then reduced to reading four rather short narratives about his life, as great as they are?  It would have been nice if Jesus had hung around to help us out, wouldn’t it? 

Well, the good news is that he did.  He gave us his Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God.  When his first disciples were upset because he was leaving them, Jesus offered them these words: "And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever.  This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.”  The Spirit of Jesus abides with us, goes alongside us, and prepares the path before us so that we can actually do what Jesus tells us to do.  We have spiritual power to be the followers of God intends us to be.  But not only that, Jesus said that the Holy Spirit will be in us.  Paul puts it this way: I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:19-20)  So this new Kingdom life we are called to live we live in cooperation with the Spirit of Jesus living in us.  Like any new life skill we are trying to learn, at first we are pretty incompetent.  An apprentice on their first day doesn’t know how to do anything, and the master craftsman must pretty much do everything.  But as the apprentice learns and masters new skills, the master backs off, letting the apprentice do more and more, correcting, guiding, fixing mistakes, and then teaching new skills.  And even when the apprentice reaches the point when they are so competent at the craft that they need little guidance, the master craftsman is always there, his presence inspiring confidence. 

But not only that.  God has given us his plan for all of creation.  He has revealed his plan, which while we were in sin remained a mystery to us.  But now, with renewed minds and understanding, with fresh eyes guided by the Holy Spirit living in us, we are able to see what God has been up to all along.  He has been guiding history—not through coercion, not through predestination, but through love—toward an end, a fulfillment: the earth as it was created to be, humans as we were created to be.  Paul speaks of this in Romans 8:19-21—For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

This plan wasn’t a mystery because God hid it from us, but because we refused to see it, as Paul says in Romans 1.  But having our sins removed, the life of Jesus before us, the Spirit of Christ within us, we are able to read the story of The Plan—the Bible—and understand what God is doing, and then see where we can fit in and actually be a part of the fulfillment of God’s plan.

Then, we will not only be disciples, we’ll be fully human according to God’s plan; humans in which the image of God in us is undimmed by sin.

The End of Discipleship

What is the goal of discipleship?  If a disciple-making process or system is going to be implemented, you need to know what you are striving for.  I have found, however, that the answers to that simple question have often been inadequate.  They tend to be so obvious that they say nothing: “The goal of discipleship is to make disciples of Jesus Christ.”  That’s the very definition of begging the question.  Or they are fuzzy: “The goal of discipleship is to draw a person closer to Christ, to conform a person into the image of Christ.”  Yes, but what does that mean?  What does “closer to Christ” mean, and what exactly am I supposed to do?  Conformed to what image of Christ?  The image of Christ on the cross?  Cleansing the temple?  Eating supper with prostitutes and tax collectors?  And here’s the other problem with that: Jesus wasn’t some ordinary guy.  He was God incarnate.  I’d have a better chance of playing basketball like Michael Jordan than I would of living my life like Jesus lived his.  Think about it: the disciples, the original 12, who lived with Jesus for almost three years, listened to him day after day, watched his miracles—these guys couldn’t pull it off.  They misunderstood him, betrayed him, denied him, abandoned him—and we’re talking about Peter and John and James, guys who weren’t spiritual lightweights.  What possible hope do any of us have that we could be like Jesus?  That’s like taking a bunch of people to a cliff and telling them to fly.  The most committed will end up as broken heaps at the bottom of the cliff; the rest will wisely walk away in hopelessness.  We aren’t birds, we’re humans.  We aren’t humans who are also part of the Trinitarian Godhead.

We are merely humans.  And that’s a problem.  And it’s a problem that discipleship often tries to solve by implying that in becoming disciples of Jesus we can be more than merely human, we can become something supra-human.  We can become more spiritual, less earthy, maybe get to pull off some miracles, certainly get to live forever like God does in the place where God lives.  And yet, no matter how much we try, no matter how many discipleship classes we take and books we read, we find we are still, somehow very, very human.  Very, very flawed.  Very, very body-bound and spiritually anemic.

We are still merely human.

But the problem isn’t that we are merely human.  There is no such thing.  God created humans, and nothing God creates is merely anything.  Humans are created in the image and likeness of God, we were created for fellowship with God.  We were never created to become God-like.  We were created to be made-in-the-image-and-likeness humans, and that should be good enough for us.  But it’s not.  We don’t like that we aren’t God-like, and so we call ourselves merely human, and set as our goal to become God-like, and that’s where things get messed up.  “But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God.’”  The Original Sin begins with the dissatisfaction with being merely human and the desire to be like God.  And in striving to be like God, we no longer are even merely human.

We have become less than human.  The Original Sin, the violence that we humans commit against one another, begins when we consider others to be less than human and we begin to treat them inhumanly.  That’s our problem.  We are inhumane. 

Jesus came to deal with this problem, our inhumanity toward one another, toward God’s creation, even our inhumanity toward God.  The fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness and self-control—these aren’t spiritual qualities, these are humane qualities.  And yet we struggle with them.  We struggle with being human.

This is what Jesus came to teach us.  This is what a disciple must learn.  This is what a disciple must strive for.  This is the goal of discipleship—to learn to be human. 

But not merely human.  There is no such thing.  We need to learn to be the humans God created us to be—made in his image and likeness, good yet with room for improvement.  Because you can always learn to love more.  You can always learn to be more forgiving.  You can always learn to be more peaceful.  You can always learn to be more patient.  You can always learn to be more kind.

You can always learn to be more human.  That’s what Jesus came to show us.

Good Church Member and Good Christian: They Aren't the Same Thing

I have been a participant in many different discipleship programs since childhood.  Starting with Training Union when I was a small child living in Alabama (only life-long Southern Baptists know what I’m talking about) I have tried a lot of things, some very intense, some not so.  All have been variations on the same thing.  They have all tried to instill in me certain habits—daily Bible reading and prayer (the two were invariably linked into one activity), consistent witnessing, weekly attendance in worship and Sunday School, and tithing.  I was taught that doing all of these things would “bring me closer to Christ,” which sounds really good but, when you really examine it, is both fuzzy and circular.  What does being “closer to Christ” really mean?  Fuzzy: it’s when you have warm feelings of affection toward Jesus.  Circular: a person who is close to Christ is a person who has a daily “quiet time” which involves reading the Bible and praying, who witnesses to non-believers, who attends worship and Sunday School every week, and who tithes.

At some point it occurred to me that all of these activities are more likely to result in a person who is a good and useful church member, a person who is loyal to and helps to build up the local institution of the church.  The churches I’ve been involved in all my life have never had enough Sunday School teachers, and the best Sunday School teachers are those who read the Bible and pray, not just in church activities, but on their own, at home, preferably on a daily basis.  A person who witnesses and wins people to Jesus is constantly feeding the church new members and, even better, people who get baptized.  They give awards to churches whose memberships grow the most and who baptize the most people, did you know that?  At the annual meeting, the pastors of these churches will get called up to the platform and given a nice little framed certificate, their picture in the state Baptist paper, and invitations to speak at church growth and evangelism conferences.  Finally, it’s rather obvious how weekly attendance at worship and Sunday School and tithing support the institution, so I won’t say anymore about that.

Is that being too cynical?  Maybe.  But notably absent from that list is any kind of missional action—serving others outside the church.  That never made it to the check-off list.  Perhaps it was omitted because the benefit to the church is not obvious.  In fact, it could take away from the church if a person became too involved in Christian activities outside the church—you’d be too busy to teach Sunday School or serve on a committee, and you might give some of your money to that cause, money that could have gone to the church.  I was actually warned about getting involved in what are called “para-church” Christian organizations for this very reason—it would take me away from the church.  Hmm.

There is nothing wrong with these activities—I advocate them for all Christians, but not as ends unto themselves, and not merely to support an institution.  That can’t be what discipleship is about.

So I’ve had to try to come up with a new definition of what it means to be a disciple, and what that means that I need to be doing.  Disciple means learner, but not in the sense of a person sitting in a classroom learning facts.  More along the lines of an apprentice learning skills from a master craftsman.  It involves learning a body of information, but more than anything it is about learning to do something.  An apprentice learns information not just to know stuff, but to be able to do something with intelligence.  So, for me discipleship has come to mean at minimum two things: 1) doing the things that Jesus told us to do, and 2)talking about the things that Jesus talked about in the same proportion in which Jesus talked about them.

Which means one of the things I need to do is spend a lot of time reading the Bible, but not just the Bible—reading Jesus, paying attention to what he talked about and what he didn’t talk about, what he did and what he didn’t do, what he told his followers to do and what he didn’t.

That’s just basic.  So why wasn’t I told to do this before?  I mean, I was, but  wasn’t.   

More on this to come.

The Solution, Pt. 2

Last post I showed how the teachings of Jesus are every bit as salvific as his death.  There really should not have been a separation between the two, but it’s understandable how in our theology we did it.  The New Testament centers on the death and resurrection of Jesus.  The four Gospels, for instance, all differ from one another in many ways: an event is recorded in one Gospel that is not in one or more of the others; the same event is recorded differently in different Gospels; one parable appears in one Gospel that is not in another; even the chronology of events is different. 

But in the events surrounding the arrest, trial, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, the Synoptic Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—there is not just unanimity in their writing but uniformity.  They are almost word-for-word the same.  It is commonly agreed that Mark was written first and that Matthew and Luke had a copy of Mark before them when they wrote, but it is telling that they deviated from Mark in many ways, but concerning the Passion of Jesus, they stayed with him.  That’s how important the events of Jesus’s death were to the early church’s understanding of the Good News of Salvation.

Paul likewise emphasizes the salvific nature of Jesus’ death.  Particularly in Romans and 1 Corinthians he connects the dots from one to the other:  Romans 5:6—For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly; 1 Corinthians  15:3—For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.  Peter does as well, for instance in 1 Peter 3:18—For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit. 

From the beginning of the church the cross has been the symbol of both our religion and our salvation, and Jesus’s death takes center stage in our doctrinal and theological statements regarding salvation, so it’s understandable that the salvific nature of Jesus’s teachings got lost in the shuffle of Holy Week and Easter.  But the reality is that the entire life of Jesus is salvific—his birth, his growth into manhood, his miracles, his calling of the disciples, and, yes, his teachings.  And his death is part of his life just like it is for any of us.  It’s not proper, however, to take that one event of Jesus’s life, no matter how important it is, and focus the entire salvation event on it.  We are saved by Jesus’s whole life, not just his death and resurrection. 

I believe this becomes more clear once we understand that The Problem is not just sin in general but that Jesus came to address a particular root sin: the violence that humans do to each other.  His teachings pointed to a different way to live, to interact with one another—and not just our friends, relatives, and neighbors, but also our enemies.  In other words, Jesus came to show us a way to live without violence.

We can accept that this is true, and that violence is wrong, and it must be avoided at all costs—but we always reserve the right to use it as a last resort.  We lack the imagination the see a future in which evil can be dealt with in any way other than violently.  But what good is it to preach and live a lifestyle, not just of non-violence but of anti-violence, if in the end we resort to it? 

That’s exactly what Jesus was faced with.  When the violence of the Temple cult and the evil of the Roman Empire coalesced and focused their combined wrath on Jesus, if Jesus had decided that this non-violent thing was going to get him killed and then powered up, he would have negated everything he had said and taught for the previous 2 1/2 years.  Then, instead of being the solution, Jesus would have just been one more piece of the problem.

Jesus had to die, not to fulfill some plan that God cooked up to satisfy his own wrathful need for justice; Jesus had to die because whenever anyone confronts the powers that be that gained and maintain their power through the threat and use of violence, it’s a virtual certainty that they are going to die.  Jesus had to die to prove, however, that the most powerful force on earth is not violence, it’s love.  A love that is willing to sacrifice itself for another.

And that’s why Jesus’s death is a sacrifice—not because God needs a sacrifice in order to get over his anger, but because one who willingly and sacrificially dies to break the cycle of violence has done something that leads to resurrection and eternal life.  That’s the life Jesus led, and it’s the life he calls his followers to lead as well.

The Solution to The Problem, Pt. 1

If the violence that humans do to each other is the original, foundational, and archetypal sin that plagues all creation, then we would expect that Jesus would address this problem; that he would provide us a way out of this mess that we do; that he would save us from this sin that we do—our sin.  The typical way that we have been taught that he has dealt with our sin is through his death, and that is true.  I’ll address that later.  Right now I want to address how Jesus addresses this through his teachings.  We typically see his death as salvific and his teaching as being, well, something else.  Not salvific, but how someone who has already been saved should live.  He teaches us how to live after we’ve been saved, and then he does what he needs to in order to save us.  I would argue that his teachings are every bit as salvific as his death; they show us what to do in order to escape this addiction to power-up on each other in ways that violate others i.e. do violence to others in both subtle and overt ways.  If this isn’t clear even though you’ve read Jesus’ teachings over and over may be (and I assert in fact is) due to a misdiagnosis of The Problem as simply being generic sin.  But once we buy into the idea that the sin Jesus is dealing with is this particular sin identified above, you read Jesus’ words differently.  I tried to show last week how this is so with some of the “You have heard that it was said...but I say unto you” statements in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), but you can see it in other places in the Sermon as well.  The Sermon begins, for instance, with the Beatitudes:

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

"Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

"Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

"Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

"Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

"Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

“Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

They read differently this way, don’t they?  And I would argue that you have to do less interpretive gymnastics in order to make sense of them than when there is no real identification of the problem they are addressing.  (I could use the rest of this space to delineate how they address The Problem, but a) I think you are perfectly capable of doing it yourself and b) I think there is great value in you doing it yourself rather than have me do it for you.)

Try this one:  "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.'  But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”  (Matt. 5:43-44)  If Jesus’s death is salvific but his teachings are not, then this is just seen as a very difficult, maybe even unrealistic, statement that we should do but even if we don’t we’ll be OK because Jesus’s death saves us from the sin of not loving our enemies but in fact seeking to kill them.  If The Problem is that all of us feel justified in killing our enemies—well, OK, maybe not our enemies, but at least the enemies of our country—then we see that Jesus’s command in fact is intended to break our addiction to violence.

How about this one: "You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.'  But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.”  (Matt. 5:38-39)  This directly addresses the issue of escalating violence due to the need for “justice”.  Formerly it only sounded like a recipe for getting beat up—which in fact it is—with no particular end in mind—which in fact it is not.  The end game is to stop the cycle of violence not by resorting to it but by absorbing it self-sacrificially. 

Which is exactly what Jesus did on the cross.