Part of the problem with this transactional view of the gospel – that Jesus just came to offer forgiveness of sins and get you into heaven where everything is perfect – is that it doesn’t help us deal with the darkness we are still presently in. You get forgiven and punch your ticket, but you still do and think bad stuff and the world is still full of brokenness and tragedy.

This transactional gospel focuses on sin and sin management. It’s like this: God can’t put up with sin – he can’t even look at it – and somebody has to pay the price for it, so Jesus is sent to dispense with sin and take the punishment. God is disgusted with sin, but Jesus pays the price so God doesn’t see our sin when he looks at us. That’s not really the version of God I see in the story of the Prodigal, when the father immediately runs to and embraces the son who betrayed him because he loves him so much. Jesus also didn’t seem too disgusted by hanging out with people who apparently were sinners. He actually seemed to love them without too much trouble at all. It was like it’s just who he was.

We might say God doesn’t just deal with sin by offering forgiveness or paying the punishment, but also by “absorbing” it and “redeeming” it.  Wiping out humanity and starting over didn’t work (as in the Noah story) and just offering forgiveness didn’t make people fully good, so God must also be doing something else: accepting and working with the bad, bringing good out of it and incorporating everything that happens into a larger wholeness. God loves and accepts people who don’t love him, even people who do really terrible things. He forgives (as in the transaction), but he also causes the sun to rise on them all.

Jesus put on human skin, so we can assume he experienced all the human things we experience: weakness, yearning, rage. He also chose to undergo torturous suffering. My favorite descriptor for Jesus is “man of sorrows.” There is this view, too, that Jesus actually went to hell, so where did we get this idea that God couldn’t handle or look at sin and darkness? If God cannot look at and handle abject evil and the rottenness that exists within us, I’m not sure I have any interest in believing in him. If, on the contrary, God is on a big redemption project, then he can handle all the darkest darkness. The most rotten stuff you can think of, he can handle and work with.

There is nothing that can’t be brought into the whole. I don’t know exactly how God does it; I can hardly look at just the evil within myself, but I don’t think God is daunted by my sin or the tragic nature of existence. In some ways, I think he made it this way. He at the very least allowed it. We have made Jesus small and innocent and incapable of looking at and dealing with sin probably because we are uncomfortable looking at evil ourselves. I don’t think God is as scared of sin and darkness as we are.