The common theme that I see in today’s collect, epistle, and gospel lesson is atonement. Chances are that if this is not your first time in a church, you are familiar with the basic idea of atonement. The most beloved bible verse is probably John 3:16, which is a perfect definition of atonement.: For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.

If you’ve listened to this verse and understood it even once, you understand the basics of atonement. It tells us that we are saved from ‘perishing’ and given ‘everlasting life’, that the reason we are saved is because God the Father loves us, and that the way we are saved is through Jesus. There is no question “that” we are atoned by Christ: God so loved the world that – – – we are atoned. What has been occupying the minds of theologians for two thousand years is the how of it. How is it that Christ atones for our sins? There are many attempts to answer this how question, and I think that each of the orthodox explanations of the atonement probably capture important aspects of how Christ’s life and death and resurrection have saved us, though I do not think that any one of them is a complete comprehensive explanation: in fact I don’t think we can ever completely comprehend the atonement in the sense that to comprehend means to completely encompass everything about it in it is entirety. But we can apprehend, which means to get a true and accurate understanding of a part of it.

Several of these atonement explanations come up in our lessons and collect for today. The collect reflects on how was given as a sacrifice for sin, and the epistle says that Christ “his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree.” This language is in line with some more familiar explanations of atonement, wherein Christ is understood to pay the penalty that was meant for us for because of our sin, or where Christ is understood to return to the Father what was taken from him when we sinned, or even where Christ buys us back from Satan, that payment being his death.

But I also see in today’s readings another atonement theory that may be less familiar to us, but which is also biblical, and worth exploring. I love it because it is centered on love and the fact that we were created to love. I think God really loves love. We were created because of God’s love, and we are atoned because of God’s love. On most Sundays, instead of reading through the ten commandments, we hear the summary of the law:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it; Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.

According to Jesus, the entire Decalogue boils down to two things: love God, and love each other. Humanity is good, insofar as we posses love and practice love perfectly. But because we fail to do that, we have a problem, and the problem isn’t as much about breaking law as it is about failing to love.

Peter Abelard, drawing from the early church fathers, said that the way that Christ atones us is by enabling us to love as we were always intended to love. For Abelard, salvation is loving as we were created to love, and the only way we can learn to do that is by the example of Christ. Today’s Gospel lesson teaches us about love though the metaphor of the good shepherd:

Jesus said, I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. But he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth. The hireling fleeth, because he is an hireling, and careth not for the sheep.

In other words, Jesus cares for us because we are his: the love flows naturally out of him, without effort, and he cares for us the way no one else can because we belong to him and no one else. The natural effect of that love is that, as he says “I lay down my life for the sheep.”

Jesus teaches this same lesson in love in John 15:3, when he says “greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” Jesus came to teach us the true meaning of love, and then, by his death, he showed us the true meaning of love. As the collect for today says, God has given Christ “to be unto us both a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life.”

Today’s epistle is a lesson in how to live a life of love by tolerating suffering and abuse that is not deserved. If you think about it, that’s crazy. What gives St. Peter the nerve to tell us that when we are being abused wrongfully that we should just “take it patiently?” Sure, it may be the right thing to do, but that is just too hard of a pill to swallow. Doesn’t Peter know that people will be bitter about being told to suffer patiently? I think Peter knows that he is asking us to do something that is impossible for us to do on our own, and that is why he points out that “Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps.” How can we be bitter about our undeserved abuses knowing that Christ, living the perfect life, to whom we owed worship and adoration, endured terrible suffering and pain, and yet he took it patiently and even forgave his tormentors?

We may intellectually know how we ought to love, but it is the example of Christ’s perfection of love that enables us to actually live out that love. Christ’s life, death and resurrection does more than just teach us how to love. His life is an example that proves God’s love to us: he lays down his life for his friends, for his sheep. Furthermore, Christ’s death convinces us how much we ought to love him, and our hearts are enkindled and inspired to love God more deeply: his death throws the weights off of our hearts that were preventing us from loving properly, and enables us to be the creatures of perfect love that we were meant to be.

This understanding of Christ’s atonement for us is amazing news! We do not need to despair that we have broken God’s commandments and that we have failed to love. God’s plan for our redemption does not require him to “get even” with us for our sins. He is not uncontrollably angry and in need of someone to “take it out” on. Instead, Christ, on the cross, performs the duty of mankind for us, and the power of that action actively restore us to a state of love.

The atonement, then, is not just an abstract concept that has something to do with what will happen to us after we die. Christ’s atoning work transforms us into loving people. You who have heard the Gospel, you have been given the ability to love, and to love the way that God intended. When you study what Christ has taught about how to love, when you read about love in Peter, Paul, and the rest of the New Testament, when you learn about love outside of the cannon, perhaps from C.S. Lewis or Martin Luther King Jr., or an organization that teaches how to love the poor or a counselor explaining how to love your family, or any other intellectual knowledge you gain of love, thank God, because you have been restored to your ability to practice that love. The gift of God, though Jesus, is the power to love like God loves. He is the good shepherd, and we are his sheep, and our identity in him is through love. We have been given the ability, if we work at it, to follow the blessed steps of Jesus’ holy life!