{"id":7469,"date":"2004-04-16T22:45:37","date_gmt":"2004-04-16T22:45:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/the_sacrifice_of_christ.html"},"modified":"2004-04-16T22:45:37","modified_gmt":"2004-04-16T22:45:37","slug":"the_sacrifice_of_christ","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/the_sacrifice_of_christ.html","title":{"rendered":"The Sacrifice of Christ"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the UK journal Priests and People<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

This is a wonderfully rich way of bringing together incarnation and salvation, focusing on the theme of Christ\u2019s solidarity with and commitment to human beings who have lost their way. But more should be said: there is a particular significance in the fact that the climax of his journey into the far country is a death at the hands of brutal human beings. This matters: think for a moment of how different our account of Christ and God would be if Christ had died of natural causes at a ripe old age, surrounded by grieving disciples. If his life had unfolded in this way, he would have been regarded as a teacher of wisdom rather than as the saviour who by his sacrificial death opens the Gates of Mercy. His impact on us and our relation to God would then be pedagogic, exemplary and moral, the one among us who \u2018gets things right\u2019 and shows us how to do the same.<\/p>\n

It is surely significant that a strong current in our contemporary Life of Jesus Research is the interpretation of Jesus as a teacher of subversive wisdom who challenges the constraints of conventional living, a Palestinian gadfly more grounded in the Socratic method than in Torah fidelity. Our destabilised culture is currently so uncertain about how to be a good man or woman, how to be real and holy, moral and secure, stable and authentic, strong and honourable, that we are desperate to find a way of avoiding the manipulations of our culture by uncovering a pre-modern depth of wisdom. Jesus, at the hands of some American interpreters, fits the description of such a teacher. That by portraying him in this way they downplay his sense of bringing God\u2019s relation to Israel to a climactic pitch is something they are prepared to accept; that they insistently marginalise the aspect of Christ\u2019s self-offering in death makes their interpretation of the historical Jesus inadequate not only for historical purposes but also for Christian faith.2 <\/p>\n

That Christ dies violently is significant…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the UK journal Priests and People This is a wonderfully rich way of bringing together incarnation and salvation, focusing on the theme of Christ\u2019s solidarity with and commitment to human beings who have lost their way. But more should be said: there is a particular significance in the fact that the climax of his…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Sacrifice of Christ - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/the_sacrifice_of_christ.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Sacrifice of Christ - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"From the UK journal Priests and People This is a wonderfully rich way of bringing together incarnation and salvation, focusing on the theme of Christ\u2019s solidarity with and commitment to human beings who have lost their way. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7469\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}