The Axis of Atonement

Good Friday: where Time and Eternity Meet

Is Good Friday the Christian Church’s Day of Atonement?

The word is one of the English language's few original theological terms, originating in John Wycliffe’s 14th century translation of the Bible, coined purely for that purpose. He left the word in its two constituent parts: “at onement.” It was Thomas More, two centuries later, who joined them into the single word we now know. It means what it says: making two or more things be “at one” with each other. Wycliffe meant to convey that the Jewish Yom Kippur and the sacrifice of the Cross are means for the reconciliation of God with His people.

Wycliffe’s neologism powerfully conveys the core of Christian revelation, but has its limits. It bears little resemblance to the Hebrew or Greek words it was intended to translate, narrowing their semantic range. It has been further narrowed into rival “systems” of atonement which take one of St Paul’s many motifs and apply it systematically, conforming Scripture to one’s favoured Procrustean bed: Christ saves like this, not like that.

On Good Friday, we must gaze not just on the Cross, but through it at everything it encompasses. Today is the focal point of Christ's atoning work, yet His sacrifice was once and for always: He was atoning from the beginning and does so even to the end. His sacrifice is not just for individuals to be unified with God one by one, but through His atoning work, mankind is drawn into His cosmic priesthood, intended to unify all Creation with its Maker. Good Friday has metaphysical significance, making sense of God’s work in creation, Incarnation, Resurrection and beyond. Today:

1. I will start with the fundamental meaning of atonement as restoration of proper order between creator and creation.

2. We will see how interpretations of atonement have been guided by cultural particularities, each valuable, but none exhaustive.

3. By contrasting Japanese and Western cultural norms, I will suggest what aspects of atonement might speak clearest to us today.

1. Cosmic Atonement

“The fundamental mystery of the Christian religion,” wrote Prebendary William Sherlock in 1690, “is the stupendous Love of God in giving His own Son, His only begotten Son, for the redemption of mankind.” Thus far, any Christian might agree. Where we differ is on the how and when.

There is danger in pinning the Lord’s entire redemptive work to this day, even to the exact hour when He proclaimed it “finished.” The Cross may be the crucial moment in the Lord’s redeeming work, but it exists within a wider arc.

Today marks the centre point of the Cross: but its arms spread along time’s horizon before and after, from First Day to Last, Alpha to Omega; its trunk rises taller than mountains, plunges deeper than the sea, making a ladder between heaven and hell. Christ hangs at the midpoint of time and eternity, making possible both horizontal and vertical axes. The axes cannot be without the centre, nor can there be a centre without the axes.

On the horizontal axis, God has never not been at work, creating, sustaining and redeeming. Every incident of sacred Scripture laid foundation for His Incarnation, Passion and Crucifixion. His saving work continued in the Resurrection, Ascension and Pentecost, and continues in the Sacraments.

But redemption is not possible only on the horizontal scale of time. The ancient offerings on the Day of Atonement had to be made yearly. They were not ineffective—God does not decree in vain—but they were not final. Only on the Cross does the Divine Word proclaim His reconciling work complete: tetelestai, it is done.

Through an act in time, time is reconnected to eternity. The arms spread outward, not just up and forward, but backward and down. In His descent to Hades, Christ sanctifies what was as well as what will be.

I say "what" and not just "who" with reason. God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son. We limit this truth if we lose sight of the first clause: God loved not just mankind, but the world, the cosmos. The Cross is more than a prompt for individuals to believe. Christ died for the atonement of the entire cosmos with the One who holds its corners in His hand. St Paul writes, it pleased the Father that in Him should all fulness dwell; And, having made peace through the blood of His cross, by Him to reconcile all things unto Himself; by Him, whether things in earth, or things in heaven (Col 1:19-20): all things! “It is,” as Robert South preached in 1698, “as it were to cancel the essential distances of things, to remove the bounds of Nature, to bring Heaven and Earth, and both ends of the contradiction, together.”

St Paul's cosmic reconciliation was part of his Jewish inheritance. One term Wycliffe translated as "atonement" is found in Leviticus 16. God ordained an annual ritual involving two goats. Chosen by lot, one goat was taken to the High Priest, who would lay hands on it and confess over it all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins. This goat, made unclean by the sins of the people which it bore, was not fit for sacrifice. Rather, it was let go into the wilderness. The wilderness, as I have written before, was where demons dwelt, among them the goat like Azazel, sometimes identified with Satan. Thus sin returns ritually to its source.

St Paul saw this fulfilled in Christ, cursed and driven outside the gates bearing the people’s sin, as Hebrews (13:12-13) testifies: Wherefore Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered without the gate. The scapegoat ritual is only half of the atonement, and notably not a sacrifice. The goat for Azazel was not sacrificed but set free. Christ's connection to the scapegoat must be distinguished from His self-offering as priest and victim.

An image which can help us with this distinction is the hellmouth of Anglo-Saxon art. The Anglo-Saxons envisaged Christ as a warrior willingly entering the Devil’s mouth, essentially tricking Azazel, only to descent into his bowels and cut Himself out from within: a motif repeated, as I posted last week, in the legend of St Margaret of Antioch. We might say that He offered Himself to the Devil as bait, but to suggest that He was sacrificed to the Devil should, I hope obviously, be resisted.

For what then does Christ's blood avail? In Leviticus 16, we find an answer on cosmic scale. The Hebrew root kfr, literally “cover,” appears frequently. It is, for example, the “cover” of the Ark of the Covenant we know in English as the “mercy seat.” In the ritual, it refers to “covering” the sanctuary with the blood of the sacrificed goat. This blood represents the people's life, and once hallowed, purifies the proto-temple. This explains Moses aspersing blood over the people elsewhere, and St John's vision of multitudes whose robes are washed in the Lamb's blood (Rev 7:14). The purification extends beyond the elect. The Temple represents the cosmic order, annually cleansed to receive God's Presence. Christ’s sacrifice purifies the entire cosmos, rendering it a fit habitation for God.

Cur Deus Homo?, St Anselm famously asked: Why did God become man? Or, alternatively translated, Why the God-man? An intriguing hint comes from Philo of Alexandria, on Leviticus 17:17: There shall be no man in the tent of meeting when the High Priest enters to make atonement. Philo muses:

What then will he be if he is not a man? Will he be a God? I will not venture to say that... nor again is he man, but he touches both these extremities.

Even non-Christian Jews saw the need for someone spanning humanity and divinity to cleanse the cosmos. Christians were those who did “venture to say” explicitly that the true High Priest was both man and God.

During a discussion of Cain (De Posteritate Caini XX), Philo also connects the scapegoat with cleansing by blood, comparing sins to diseases:

Since diseases and infirmities sent against us flourish; let us endeavour to overturn and destroy them... until we have entirely sent away the scape-goat and made atonement.

On Good Friday, we remember Christ as priest, as King and Judge, but also as healer. Through Him, the whole creation, which has been groaning in travail... will be set free from its bondage to decay (Rom 8:21). We must hold together all aspects of His atoning work to confess its full power.

2. Atonement through the ages

Eastern theologians criticise Western churches for individualistic and legalistic approaches to Atonement, preferring the healing interpretation. Scripture supports this, particularly in St Paul and Eastern Fathers. Yet Scripture also suggests concern with justice and balancing wrongs.

St Paul describes Jesus as giving himself as a ransom for all (1 Tim 2:6). The Greek lutron means the fee to release a slave from bondage—a metaphor from Roman legal practice. We are slaves to sin and death; Christ paid for our release. But specifying exactly how this works risks going beyond Scripture. Are we hostages of God? Or worse, did Christ repay the Devil? We need to be careful not to push metaphors too far.

St Anselm used the chivalric code of his mediaeval age. Human sin, he suggested, affronts God’s honour, requiring satisfaction we cannot offer. Only God has such power, but the debt is owed by humanity. God became man as the only way man’s debt could be paid to God.

This differs from Calvin’s later penal substitutionary atonement. Anselm did not say Christ was executed to propitiate God’s wrath. Calvin’s interpretation confuses the two goats of Atonement, implying the scapegoat was sacrificed to God. Nor does it balance the scales justly, since Christ died bodily, not in soul (there is no time when the Logos was not!), yet our deserved punishment in Calvin’s reading is the final and spiritual death. It focuses solely on individual believers, limiting atonement to the justified few. Anselm offers no such certainty; read as metaphor rather than system, it retains value.

Less valuable is the modern liberal reading where Christ dies merely as exemplar of God’s forgiveness. That He does so is undoubted—forgiveness of His assailants was among His final words. But reducing Atonement to moralism— “be more forgiving, like Jesus!”—questions why Christ's death was necessary and reduces the cosmic dimension to the merely psychological: you're fine with or without Christ because God forgives anyway. This reading emerged in a less permissive age, but yielded one so permissive that many now seek the old boundaries their forebears broke down.

Different generations are drawn to different aspects of Atonement, each rooted in Scripture and capturing some essence of the Cross's metaphysical depths. None is exhaustive. The healing aspect is perhaps most complete, but does not stand alone. The ransom metaphor encompasses our personal addiction to sin, Israel's collective bondage in Egypt, and the universe’s metaphysical bondage to death. Anselmian satisfaction emphasises God’s fundamental goodness and fairness. Even Calvin's system stems from his premise that "the infinitude of good which resides in God becomes more apparent from our poverty" (Institutes 1.1) Its fault lies in its absolute conviction.

3. Atonement now

Which aspects might speak most clearly to us today? That depends on who we are.

I am privileged to live in both English and Japanese worlds. In the Anglosphere, foreboding about present and future grows, with abolition of norms leading to nihilism. Liberal churches assuring us that everything is fine while tied to the very forces that have atomized society are declining. Conservative churches offering clarity grow among the young. But outside the churches, new age and pagan practices flourish. Young people desire ritual, healing and enlightenment they do not expect to find in local churches. Sacramental, ritualistic, meditative and metaphysically oriented churches will combat such spiritual rivals more effectively than moralising movements. Young people get enough moralism in the classroom and on TV; they seek truth, goodness and beauty while remaining skeptical of watertight “systems.” Christ’s cosmic healing power should resonate in an age of false news and mental overload.

Japan faces different anxieties—more pragmatic than existential. Workplace and familial expectations exhaust many young students I have counselled. They are less concerned with Western "culture wars," though some naively see all Western ideas as progressive, while others fear unwanted Westernization. Spiritually, Shinto has inculcated a sense of purity and impurity —kegare— rather than morality. The purgative, cleansing aspect of atonement likely resonates here more than moralistic approaches. Creation’s cleansing occupies Japan’s imagination, as evident in many Studio Ghibli animations. Creation’s restoration through the “old, rugged Cross” has affinities with wabi-sabi aesthetic of beauty amid decay and imperfection. Japan’s dominant Pure Land Buddhism emphasizes entrusting in Amida Buddha's salvific vow, suggesting ritual participation in Christ's compassionate self-gift may resonate more than rationalist explanations of salvation mechanisms. Finally, despite its small numbers, Zen Buddhism’s disproportionate influence on Japanese culture means the struggles of Christus Victor might appeal—though not without dangers, as kamikaze pilots and wartime Zen monks who turned their no-self doctrine to dying for the God-Emperor might attest.

In contemplating the Atonement on Good Friday, we stand at the centre point of the cosmic Cross. Its vertical axis connects heaven and earth, while its horizontal arms stretch across all time. The fully human, fully divine Christ—our priest, judge, and healer—reconciles not just individual believers but the entire cosmos to its Creator. Different ages have understood this mystery through their own cultural lenses, none exhaustive. Today, as Western youth hunger for metaphysical meaning beyond moralism and Japanese sensibilities resonate with ritual purity and cosmic restoration, the Cross speaks afresh. Hanging at its centre, we find not merely the forgiveness of individuals, or a moral exemplar, but the cleansing and healing of all creation by which death and sin are covered and the cosmos reset at one with God.