Sin is such an old fashioned word, a ‘churchy’ word, if you will. I’ve tried not to use it very much, and instead spoken of causing harm to others, or more adequately of willful behavior that runs contrary to the various alternative ways that God – who is love – would have prescribed in the situation. But that’s a very long-winded way of speaking, and to unpack its various elements is a task for another occasion. So for the sake of understanding Christ’s atonement, we’ll speak in terms of good, old-fashioned sin.

In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our sins according to the riches of His grace…

During His earthly ministry, Jesus forgave people their sins, and as we have seen, that means he accepted the harm those sins caused God. And that must mean that through the work of His ministry and His death and resurrection – by means of divine decree that we cannot possibly hope to understand this side of heaven, if even there – He accepted the harm done to God by all people, everywhere, for all time.

This is a sobering thought, isn’t it? We do not like to think of Jesus as still suffering, but I’m afraid that is what we must think. The pain of every cruelty still reaches to heaven and adds to Christ’s unthinkable burden. And yet isn’t that exactly what He said to Paul during his apocalypse on the road to Damascus: Why do you persecute me?

I have spoken of the great privilege and responsibility Christians have to forgive, meaning that when we forgive someone for sinning against us, we not only begin the healing process of softening that person’s spirit, but we also accept the burden of the harm that person causes to God. Our forgiveness is also God’s forgiveness.

But we may also put this in terms of relieving Christ’s burden. When we, as Christians, accept the divine suffering from wrongdoing, we are, to that extent, taking the weight off Christ’s shoulders and placing it on our own. On becoming Christians, we are given a share of Christ’s own spirit for that very purpose, to extend the reach of Christ’s forgiveness into the world. Just as children, maturing within a household, are asked to relieve the burdens of their elders, so we, maturing as Christians, are asked to relieve Christ’s burden.

When Paul wrote on many occasions of sharing in Christ’s suffering, this is surely what he was communicating. Christ’s suffering is ongoing. Our privilege is to share it, and the proof of our fidelity, of our brotherhood and sisterhood with Christ, is our commitment to relieving Christ’s burden. That is the yoke He invites us to share.

This will be a difficult teaching for those who think of following Christ, of being Christians, mainly in terms of receiving benefits. There are benefits involved, to be sure. But the chief ‘benefit’ is not a benefit at all in worldly terms. It is the benefit of suffering.

Becoming a Christian is, at its very heart, not a promotion, but a recruitment, a recruitment into the sufferings of Christ.