When You’re Loved, You Love
Almighty God, you have given your only Son to be for us a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life: Give us grace to receive thankfully the fruits of his redeeming work, and to follow daily in the blessed steps of his most holy life; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
The Collect for Proper 15
Have you read Atonement? It’s a novel by Ian McEwan that was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film in 2007. In it, thirteen year-old Briony Tallis misinterprets flirting between Robbie, the housekeeper’s son, and Cecilia, her older sister, as harassment. When she later witnesses her cousin being violated in the dark she assumes the runaway is Robbie. She accuses him, and he is sentenced to prison.
A few years later, Briony comes to discover that the perpetrator was someone else, and that she had ruined Robbie’s life and the relationship between him and her older sister. She wants to atone for her actions, but both Robbie and Cecilia die in World War II before they were to be reunited and before she can do a thing.
Decades later, we meet Briony again as she is being interviewed about her final autobiographical novel. She says that she’s been trying to make up for this single act her entire life, and that this work is the culmination of her efforts. In the book, she creates a fictitious ending to Robbie and Cecilia’s story. The lovers don’t die, but are reunited and living together happily in the home where they had planned to be reunited.
McEwan’s novel highlights the irreversibility of certain decisions. Briony’s action prevented Robbie and Cecilia from getting married, had profound consequences on Robbie’s life, and was the catalyst for Cecilia going off to war to leave her family. In contrition, she spent her whole life trying to atone for this one terrible mistake.
This week’s collect is about the atonement of Jesus. In the prayer, we acknowledge that Christ’s life and death was “a sacrifice for sin,” and we ask to receive “the fruits of his redeeming work.” It is with this in mind that we recognize him to be “an example of Godly life,” and ask for the grace “to follow daily in the blessed steps of his most holy life.”
At the end of Atonement, the reader knows that Briony’s subsequent efforts to make things right can’t undo what she’d already done. Her lifelong attempt at rectification may be the best anyone can do to approximate justice, but without the ability to make right what had gone wrong there could be no true atonement.
The promise of the Gospel is that there is one who has the ability to rectify all that has gone awry — one who has the power to make right all that has gone wrong. And the best news for you and me is that we have access to this wondrous “redeeming work” in that one person, Jesus the Christ.
This is true justice — this is real atonement — not just for victims but also for victimizers like you, me, and Briony. The truth of the Gospel liberates you and me from capitulating to despair because of the promise that our terrible decisions will be undone and made right. It frees the us to make reparation — not in order to approximate atonement like Briony but — to act proleptically in anticipation of the day when God will undo Sin and Death once-and-for-all.
The one-way love of God for sinners means that we offenders do not make restitution so that we’ll get in God’s good graces. True atonement means that Christ forgives us and loves us despite our terrible decisions. Neither do we make amends to undo the harm we’ve caused others either, because only God can do that. We love and make redress because “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” And when we “receive the fruits of his redeeming work,” we “follow daily in the blessed steps of his most holy life.” In other words, when you know you’re loved, you love.
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