The Way of the Source

Tag: Sacrifice

  • Does God Need Blood?

    Yesterday was Good Friday and that has me thinking a lot about Jesus, his life, his movement, his death, and his resurrection. And I think it’s important that we talk about this, because how we present “God” to humanity is important. And that starts with our understanding.

    For centuries, Christians have wrestled with a haunting question: Why did Jesus have to die?
    The answers, depending on who you ask, can vary wildly. But one of the most dominant explanations — especially in American churches — is something called Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA).

    This is the idea that Jesus died in our place, taking the punishment (penal) we deserved for our sins, satisfying God’s wrath so that we could be forgiven. In short, God needed blood — Jesus’ blood — to satisfy divine justice and cool His wrath.

    It’s a theory so embedded in the modern Christian imagination that many assume it’s the only explanation. Even further, most Christians believe that you have to believe this to even be saved or to call yourself a Christian. From Sunday sermons to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (or as I like to call it, Beating Up Jesus: The Movie), the narrative is relentless: humanity is sinful, God is angry, and Jesus took the beating we deserved. Roll credits.

    But there’s a glaring flaw to this theory… Jesus never said that. What if that’s not the story that Jesus came to tell?

    Let’s peel this back and start at the beginning.

    Photo by Alem Sánchez on Pexels.com

    What is Atonement Theory, Anyway?

    The word atonement literally means “at-one-ment” — the process of reconciling humanity back to right relationship with God.
    The earliest followers of Jesus, trying to make sense of his death and resurrection, developed different explanations for how this reconciliation might work.

    Here’s a quick breakdown of the most common theories:

    • Ransom Theory — Jesus pays a ransom to free humanity from Satan’s grip. Big in the early church.
    • Christus Victor — Jesus defeats the powers of sin, death, and evil.
    • Moral Influence Theory — Jesus’ life and death inspire radical love and compassion.
    • Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA) — Jesus takes our punishment, satisfying God’s supposed need for justice.

    PSA, which is what I’ll call it for the rest of this post, didn’t actually become mainstream until the Reformation (thanks, John Calvin), but today it’s everywhere — especially in American evangelicalism. It’s preached so often and so passionately that questioning it can feel like questioning the Gospel itself.

    But maybe the problem isn’t the questioning.
    Maybe the problem is how we’ve been taught to see God in the first place.

    The Problem with PSA: God or a Bloodthirsty Warlord?

    Let’s just be blunt: PSA turns God into a cosmic child abuser — a Father so bound by legalism that He has no choice but to kill His Son to forgive the rest of His creation.

    Imagine telling a hurting, broken person that God loves them unconditionally… but also required someone to die a brutal death to make that love possible.

    It’s no wonder so many walk away from church when they realize how twisted this sounds. Especially when they realize that the type of “unconditional love” that this belief comes with… seems to have lots of conditions, rules, and expectations.

    If God is truly love — the kind of love Jesus taught us to embody — then He shouldn’t require violence to offer forgiveness.
    We are the ones who demand violence.
    Empires demand violence.
    Religions demand sacrifices.
    God doesn’t.

    The crucifixion wasn’t about satisfying God’s wrath.
    It was the inevitable outcome of what happens when you confront the violent systems of the world with radical love and truth that renders external power systems as useless.

    Who Killed Jesus? (It Wasn’t God)

    Look closely at the Gospels, and you’ll see: Jesus wasn’t executed by God’s hand.
    He was crucified by Rome, at the urging of religious leaders.
    Empire and religion, working together, do what they always do to threats: they eliminate them.

    They silence them.
    They crucify them.
    They declare them dangerous, and they snuff them out.

    Jesus didn’t die to appease God — he died because he exposed the corruption of both empire and religious establishment.

    His life was a living protest against systems built on power, exclusion, and violence.

    • He ate with “sinners” and “outcasts”.
    • He healed on the Sabbath.
    • He forgave without a sacrifice.
    • He called out the religious elite as “whitewashed tombs.”

    They didn’t kill him because he was too holy.
    They killed him because he was too loving, too dangerous, too uncontrollable.

    Photo by Arthur Karapetyan on Pexels.com

    The Symbolism of the Cross: A Bigger Story

    If Jesus’ death wasn’t about paying off God, then what was it about?

    Through a mystical lens, the cross is layered with meaning:

    • It’s a mirror. It shows us what we do to truth, to love, to the divine when it doesn’t fit the systems and constructs that we’ve created.
    • It’s an unveiling. It exposes the violence and corruption baked into both empire and religion. The need to be right and superior, rather than repentant and transformative.
    • It’s a victory. Not the victory of punishment fulfilled, but of death and violence defeated — precisely because love resurrects.
    • And it’s an invitation. To leave behind systems of fear and step into love and alignment.

    Jesus didn’t die to uphold the sacrificial system of death and lack.
    He died to end it and bring life and abundance.

    In Matthew 5:17, Jesus says he came not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it. And how did he fulfill it? By embodying what the Law was always pointing toward: mercy, justice, love, faith. He became the final sacrifice — not because God needed blood, but because we needed to see, once and for all, that sacrifices were never the point.

    The divine doesn’t trade in blood debts.

    The divine trades in grace, mercy, blessings, and mystery.

    So… Does God Need Blood?

    No.

    God doesn’t need blood — we do.
    We were the ones who believed sacrifices made us clean.
    We were the ones who demanded violence and death to balance the scales.

    The cross is Jesus stepping into our broken system and letting it do its worst, only to rise again and prove that love is stronger than hate, forgiveness stronger than vengeance, and life stronger than death.

    The cross wasn’t about satisfying divine wrath from a sense of lack or separation.
    It was about unmasking human wrath and showing us a better way through faith, abundance, alignment, and generosity.

    Jesus’ LIFE … his radical compassion, his healing, his forgiveness… was the point all along.
    The resurrection isn’t proof that God accepted the payment.
    It’s proof that the powers of this world don’t get the final say.

    That there is a better Way that’s been unfolding straight from the Source.

    And it’s inviting us, leading us all somewhere greater in the here and now.

    So let’s stop worshiping a bloodthirsty warlord and start following the revolutionary, resurrected Jesus — the one who taught us that God’s love doesn’t come at the end of a whip or a nail… but at the table for the least of these, with bread, wine, and an invitation to love like he did.

    Because that’s the Gospel.

    And that’s enough.

    You are enough.

    A Child of God.

    What does this stir in you? Let’s wrestle with it together in the comments.

  • The Cross Was Never “Plan A”

    Photo by Luis Quintero on Pexels.com

    At my church growing up, Easter was an event.

    Not just Sunday morning services. I’m talking full-scale theatrical production, like small-town Broadway with a crucifixion. We called it an Easter play, but really, it was a full-blown Passion drama — complete with billboards along the highway featuring my sister on Jesus’ lap, men in the congregation growing out their beards for historical accuracy, and a backstage makeup crew armed with fake blood and latex scars like a low-budget horror film masquerading as salvation.

    My actual sister talking to Jesus, aka my friend’s dad Jim, for our Easter Spectacular

    The sanctuary would transform into ancient Jerusalem. Lights dimmed. Smoke machines puffed out an eerie haze. Roman soldiers stomped around in homemade armor. I can still hear the clank of their plastic spears on dowels against the grey-carpeted plywood stage. And then there was Jesus — usually played by the same middle-aged volunteer every year, my friend’s dad Jim, who somehow managed to look both exhausted and radiant under the spotlight as they lashed him and led him to the cross he had just carried through the audience.

    Musical numbers were woven throughout, of course. These weren’t your tame, soft-rock worship hits. (Although we definitely included Avalon’s timeless CCM banger, “Testify To Love”) These were operatic, full-throated ballads about blood, sacrifice, and salvation. High drama. Choir robes swaying. And every spring, as the trees outside the church began to bud and bloom, those songs would crawl back into my head like ghosts of Easter past.

    We didn’t just perform it once, either. No, we ran it for a full weekend, sometimes longer. And after the play wrapped, we’d leave the cross standing at the front of the church like a trophy. For weeks afterward, during regular services, it loomed there — scarred, splintered, stained — casting its shadow over every sermon, every song.

    I remember sitting there as a kid, sandwiched between my friends, half-distracted by thoughts of holding hands with one of the girls in the youth group, sneaking glances during altar calls. Hormones and holy fear mixed together in a strange cocktail of confusion.

    But beneath my adolescent daydreams, another thought kept gnawing at me.

    Why did it have to be this way?

    Even as a kid, part of me wondered why the story was written in blood. Why the whole spectacle — the torment, the torture, the grotesque display of violence — was presented as good news. Why God, who supposedly loved us beyond comprehension, needed so much suffering to be satisfied.

    I didn’t have the words for it then. I just knew something felt off.

    Now, all these years later, I’ve started to understand what that feeling was.

    It wasn’t doubt.

    It was an invitation.

    That invitation would take years to answer. But eventually, it led me to question everything I thought I knew about the cross.

    Photo by Patricia McCarty on Pexels.com

    I grew up believing the cross was God’s “Plan A”.

    That from the dawn of time, God had been building toward this gruesome, brutal solution to the problem of human sin. That our rebellion was so total, so cosmic, that the only way for God to stomach our existence was to watch His own Son be tortured to death like a common criminal.

    They told me this was love.

    But I remember staring at the blood-stained cross in the sanctuary, week after week, and feeling something under my ribs tighten. Not reverence. Not relief.

    Grief.

    Confusion.

    A quiet, trembling sense that something here didn’t fully add up.

    Because if God is love… real love, unconditional love, not transaction-in-disguise love… then why the need to demand blood at all? Why set up a system of cosmic justice that could only be balanced by violence? Why build a universe that requires innocent suffering to fix what fear and separation broke?

    The deeper I went, the harder it became to reconcile the claim that Jesus’ death was necessary with the belief that God is, at essence, goodness itself. Not just good “to us,” but good at His very core level of being.

    And it turns out, the language had been whispering to me the whole time. I just didn’t know how to listen.

    Photo by Karol Wiu015bniewski on Pexels.com

    See, we inherited a story shaped not just by scripture, but by centuries of empire. Empire loves blood sacrifice — because empire lives by the sword and dies by the sword. Empire loves a violent god, because it justifies its own violence.

    But buried beneath the empire’s version of the gospel is an older song.

    Take atonement, for example. We were taught it meant appeasing God’s wrath. But the English word comes from “at-one-ment.” Union. Restoration of relationship.

    Or repentance. The Greek is metanoia — not groveling, but a change of mind. A widening of perception. A turning toward the light.

    And in Hebrew, there’s teshuvah — not a groveling apology, but a return. A homecoming. It literally means “to turn back,” not toward punishment, but toward the Source of life itself. Teshuvah is the art of remembering where we belong, of finding our way back to wholeness when we’ve lost the path. (I wrote about it at length in this blog post a few weeks ago.)

    Even sin. The Greek hamartia means “to miss the mark.” Not a legal violation deserving execution or bloodshed, but a distortion of aim. A sickness needing healing, not punishment.

    And sacrifice? Long before it became code for slaughter, the Latin roots point to “to make sacred.”

    To make sacred.

    What if Jesus didn’t die to satisfy God’s demand for violence, but to make sacred even the ugliest parts of our human story? To enter into the belly of the beast — into the empire’s machine of war, death, and brutality — and expose it for what it really is?

    A sham.

    A system built on fear, fed by scapegoats, perpetuated by people too terrified to imagine another way.

    The cross was never Plan A.

    Plan A was — and always has been — union.

    Plan A was the Garden. Walking together in the cool of the day. No separation, no shame, no sacrifice needed.

    Plan A was breath. Spirit. Ruach. The animating presence of God in all things.

    But we lost our way. Not because God demanded blood, but because we did. We built religions of fear and altars of violence, believing that blood would keep the gods at bay.

    And Jesus — Yeshua — stepped into our madness not to affirm it, but to dismantle it from the inside.

    To let it exhaust itself on his body.

    And then, to rise from the grave, holding out his wounds not as receipts of divine satisfaction, but as evidence of our deliverance from the system we thought would save us.

    The cross is not a transaction.

    It’s a revelation.

    A revelation of what happens when divine love collides with human fear.

    And a revelation that, in the end, love always has the last word.

    I’ll be unpacking this more in my next post: Does God Need Blood?

    But for tonight, let this question linger:

    What if the cross was never Plan A?

    What if God’s original plan was never punishment, but participation?
    Never condemnation, but communion?

    And what if the resurrection is not God’s bailout of a broken system, but the unveiling of a love, miraculous and powerful, that has been beneath it all, waiting to be discovered?

    We’ll go there.

    Soon.

    Stay tuned.

    Thanks for taking the time to read my blogs! I’d love it if you subscribed or left a comment, especially if something resonates with you or if your church had an easter play and I brought up some memories! -JD