Christ and Healing with Goats

Abstract Chapter 3 focuses on the nature and work of Christ. Key parts of the NT look to Jesus as the ultimate continuant of God’s drama of bearing burdens and healing sinners. As the quintessential divine agent, Christ keeps loyalty with Israel and beyond, continuing God’s healing work by embodying divine presence among blighted persons and by enacting and completing the scapegoating ritual of Yom Kippur. Christological forgiveness seamlessly fulfills both divine commitments of gracious forgivingness: on the one hand a new humanity, separate from the sin-sickness, is reworked from within, as it were, in Christ’s own humanity; on the other, as God’s unique representative, Christ absorbs into his being humanity’s sin-sickness, without passing on the contagion. Embodying God’s graciousness, completing temple-related rituals, and acting as a double-representative, Christ’s actions and dispositions also paint for believers an ambitious normative ideal for responding to evil. The chapter traces two theological ramifications. The first is an expression of the doctrine of the Incarnation. In Christ, God offers forgiveness through embodied immersion in the sin-stricken environments and histories of sinners. Contrasting the mindreading account of sin-bearing, it proposes a ritualistic, representative, recapitulationist, and physically immersive interpretation. The second theological implication sketches a framework for participating in Christ’s work of forgiveness through incorporation into divine agency. Just as God incorporates God’s agency into humanity through the Hebrew sacrificial system, we are incorporated into the agency of God when we lovingly immerse our imagination into the grace-filled narratives of Christ’s actions.