Substitutionary Atonement

+In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Every year, in late September and early October, I buy myself figs – when I can, from market stalls or grocers’ shops, nestling them into brown paper bags, and otherwise from supermarkets. I buy them at this time of year because of their seasonality, partly, but also because of my seasonality: figs, for me, represent adulthood, independence, the ability to make my own decisions. When I first moved out of my parents’ house at this time of year, at the age of 18, and began to buy my own food, it was a little act of rebellion to buy figs on my way home from work, to eat them all myself, and to do the same the next day. It was a signal, primarily to myself, that I was my own person, answerable to no one.

It is, perhaps, difficult to know how to feel about celebrating Harvest Festival this year. Due to the unpredictability of the seasons in the climate crisis, and in particular the cold and wet summer, newspapers are reporting an estimated 21% loss in the wheat harvest in England this year. As consumers, we may not have noticed a particular difference in the shops, where the shelves are still stocked albeit with imported products, but these global infrastructures are likewise threatened by ongoing warfare in Ukraine and elsewhere. It feels less ‘all is safely gathered in’ and more ‘winter storms’, if we’re perfectly honest. In the United States, the wealthiest country on earth, millions of people are without power and living off emergency supplies; according to Action Against Hunger, Haiti, Mali, South Sudan, Sudan and the Occupied Palestinian Territories are all facing devastating levels of famine at the moment.

In this context, Jesus’ words in our gospel reading can come across as, at best, naïvely optimistic, and at worst, unbearably smug. ‘Do not worry, saying ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we wear?’’. Of course, we may find this instruction easy to follow: many of us in church today will indeed not have to worry about being able to afford to feed ourselves, but that’s not the case for everyone in this city, and very far from the case globally. If we have any empathy, surely we should worry – perhaps not for ourselves, but for our neighbours, for our siblings. 

Let’s pay attention to this impulse to worry on behalf of others, because it points us towards the deeper meaning of our gospel passage. Jesus’ words are not a blithe dismissal of the profound need and suffering in the world – far from it. Nor are they a call to follow a shoulder-shrugging providentialism, a creed that simply says that some are God’s favoured and others not, through his ineffable will. We cannot simply say that we are the lucky ones, and leave it at that.

Instead, Jesus’ words are a manifesto for stripping away the corrosive illusion of independence and individualism which tells us that we are sufficient unto ourselves, that we need nothing and owe people nothing. This is the first step towards being able to act upon that impulse of empathy towards others: before we can do this, we have to acknowledge that we ourselves are totally dependent upon God for all that we have. So when Jesus speaks of the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, he’s not trying to persuade us into following a Disney-esque career of forest-dwelling, sipping at mountain springs and conversing with bluebirds. He’s drawing our attention to their acceptance of their total reliance on God for all that they are, and all that they have. ‘Look,’ he is saying, ‘all of creation except you understands how dependent it is on God. And if you were to understand it too, that knowledge wouldn’t diminish you: it would make you as magnificent as a lily or a mountain or a sequoia or a head of wheat.’  We don’t need to make ourselves dependent on God, as the lilies or the birds are: we simply need to recognise that we already are dependent on God, utterly and totally.

Of course, we spend much of our lives, especially the first few decades, establishing our independence. From our first steps to our first car, our last time being carried upstairs to bed or our last time sneaking in after curfew, we put a lot of time and effort into proving that we are our own person, not reliant on anyone. For me, it was about those deep purple figs, bought on my way home from my first real job, with my own money. This is all part of growing up.

But it’s only the first half of growing up. The second half is the work of the rest of our lives, and it’s about relearning our dependence, and interdependence. It’s about discovering our need for other people, those complicated and intricate relationships which compass us around and make us who we are. It’s about recognising our need for the natural world, to feed us and clothe us, to shock us and remind us of our smallness, to charm us with its quirks and awe us with its strangeness. It’s about looking at the impact we’re having on the world around us and doing what we can to diminish its devastation. It’s about looking at some figs and asking who grew them, who shipped them, where their packaging might be going. And, finally, it means looking with clear eyes at the needs and injustices of the world, those structures which leave so many hungry. 

If we try to face these needs alone, before recognising our own dependence, we are unlikely to achieve anything. Either we will be overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the problem, or become cynical about the impact one person can have. We’ll become anxious and seek to distance ourselves from other people because that will feel like the only way to stay safe, to protect ourselves. But if we recognise that we, like every other human being, and like all of creation, are dependent on God for everything that we have, we have nothing to lose from sharing with one another, and everything to gain. We can strive first for the kingdom of God, for the vision of the world in which the hungry are fed, the humble lifted high, not seeking these things for ourselves or through our own power, but recognising that this, too, is in God’s gift, and a harvest worth striving for. Amen.