Everyone once in a while on a Sunday evening or a Monday morning, a great idea or quote pops up and I think, “This would have been perfect for my sermon!”. I suppose this blog could help pass along late thoughts and quotes. I’m subscribed to Tim Chester’s blog and he wrote a review on the book, “Atonement” by Ian McEwan. It’s not a theological book, but a novel which was made into a movie staring Kiera Knightly. His conclusion was excellent and it would have been a better end to the sermon. Here it is, albeit a few days too late.
So Briony achieves a kind of atonement through fiction. She re-writes the story. But, of course, it is fiction. And so she adds:
The problem these fifty-nine years has been this: how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, nor novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all. (371)
The result is ‘the bleakest realism’. ‘The only conceivable solution would be for the past never to have happened.’ But the past has happened. And we cannot now atone for the wrongs we have done.
But what if it is God who writes the story? And what is the story is for real? And what if God steps into the story? What is God is not simply the narrator, but has also now become part of the story? In Jesus God enters our story, shares our humanity, suffers our pain, dies our death , pays our penalty, atones for our crimes.
‘She longed to have someone else’s past,’ McEwan says of Briony (288). But that is precisely the offer of the Christian good news: we can have the sinless, righteous past of Jesus. He takes our past with its crimes, its evils, its wrong, its errors and atones for them in full on the cross. And he gives his ‘unstained life’. A life ‘lived in one room, without a door’ can be transformed into an ‘unstained life stretching ahead’.
Read the whole post here. The sermon is here, although it’s not the greatest recording.
