What is the appeal of Jesus? Part 3

What is the appeal of Jesus?

Part 3: How did the person of Jesus acquire universal significance? : The basis in the impulse to make a sacrifice to atone for sin

This transforming vision that the love of Christ lives on would, I think, explain Jesus’ appeal to the first disciples, but how did he acquire the global appeal to be the foundation of an enduring world-wide religion?

When people do wrong, they feel bad. They then want to do something to put things right and make themselves feel better. We might argue that this is a key root of religion, and in a variety of ways, religions evolved to enable this to happen, and their basis is very often a system of sacrifice. In order to express your sorrow and “do something” about it, by giving up a bit of your money to buy a sacrificial animal and going through the rites that society prescribes, you “do the right thing” and this counters the effect of your sin. We can see that this is psychologically satisfying and “works” as a system of putting things right. Hopefully, if the person is remorseful, they have made recompense to the person they have wronged, been reconciled to them, and then the sacrifice puts right the damaged relationship with God, and reinforces publicly for society the values that it approves of – and which had been broken – including affirming for the benefit of the wronged person that we disapprove of going against our values. Sometimes, it might not be possible to make amends to the person you have wronged, but making amends to God is deemed sufficient – and, indeed, there’s nothing else you can do. In fact, we have been emphasising the primacy of the inner relationship with God as the heart of a faithful life, and so putting things right with God is of supreme importance.

This desire to put things right seems to be a fundamental human characteristic. It is so powerful that some societies have even adopted human sacrifice as a way to try and express the enormity of the task in putting right serious offences. The sacrificial system works provided people have complete trust that by going through the prescribed rituals, their sin has been obliterated. Even so, it’s possible that some people would still feel guilty; they might feel that what they’ve done is so wrong that it can never be forgiven.