Atonement

Atonement: A word that provides the title to a recent film. But what does the word mean? We can speak about making an atonement for our sins, usually by saying “sorry” or offering some sacrifice of service to the offended party. The word atonement was invented by William Tyndale when he translated the Bible into English during the time of Henry VIII. It is really a phrase made of two words: at, one. He was trying to translate a word that did not have an English equivalent. It described the sacrifices made to God to put people right with God. To be reconciled with somebody or something is in one sense to be at one with that person or thing. Traditionally, Christians have seen the death of Jesus as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Jesus pays the price for the things that you and I have done wrong. But I would like to think of atonement in a slightly different way. Athanasius says of Jesus, in his work on the incarnation, that Jesus “indeed, assumed humanity that we might become God.” So we might say that, in Jesus, God is at one with us. He is at one with our birth, he is at one with our living, our crying and laughing, finally he is at one with our dying.

A few months ago I was driving down from Bollingham. It was a bright December day, and in that brilliant late-morning sunshine the valley was a white river of mist, the hills either banks or islands. As I looked upon this beautiful sight I yearned to connect, to be at one, with it.

It has been said that Christians are somewhat obsessed with sin. But then sin is misunderstood, it is not what we do, it is a state that we can be in. When we feel disconnected, being apart from, rather than at one with everything, we sundered from the rest. In sin. It was Einstein who said “We experience our self, our thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of our consciousness. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

The separation from others might result in a failure to myself in someone else’s shoes. ‘How might they be effected by my actions.’ And yet we do display a need to be at one with others. Our yearning to connect arises perhaps out of a recognition that we are also at one with the rest of creation and not truly separate from it. The monks on Mount Athos say “We have died and we are in love with everything.”

Must we wait for death? Maybe not. As Richard Jefferies put it.

“Eternity is here and now. I am within it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it as the butterfly floats in the light-laden air…The years, the centuries, the cycles are absolutely nothing; it is only a moment since this burial mound was raised; in a thousand years it will still be only a moment.”

Put another way. At one ment is now, because in the now every moment is one moment.