Dionysus on a Bike

Psalm 50:7-15 – 6/4/2026

God does not demand blood. Sacrifice, in the sense of taking a life to atone for sin, is not necessary before God. God’s response to sin is not blood lust. The Psalmist recognizes this fact. Whatever it is that God wants of us or demands of us, it is not to kill living things to somehow make up for our wrongdoing and the harm that we have caused.

The belief that God demands a blood sacrifice to somehow make up for or pay satisfaction for sin leads to the idea that Jesus’s death on the cross was a blood sacrifice to appease an angry God that demands someone die when there is sin. This is God offended, a God whose anger is so great, only death will appease it. This leads to the Penal Substitution Atonement theory of salvation where Jesus voluntarily took on the punishment that was reserved for us for our sins. Jesus was the scapegoat, and the demands of justice that someone take the pain for sin were fulfilled.

On this picture of God, we have a rigidly “just” God whose mercy depends on someone suffering. On this picture of our sin, the biggest problem with sin is that it offends God’s moral sensibilities. Jesus then is the place for God to vent anger to the point where Jesus was in such agony that he believed the Father had forsaken him.

What if we follow the Psalmist and understand God as not demanding blood to make up for sin? If God does not demand blood, then our communion with God is restored not by suffering but by love. It turns out that the consequence of love in a fallen world ruled by empire and corruption is suffering and death. Jesus suffered not for our sins to satisfy God, but because the consequence of love in a sinful world is suffering. Jesus’s love saved us; Jesus’s resurrection assures us that the triumph over the forces that kill is final and complete. Jesus’s death was the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, not to appease a bloodthirsty deity but to show the emptiness of all substitutionary atonement.

Let’s call it the exasperated theory of atonement. It’s as if God were saying, in the person of Jesus, “You think I want sacrifice? I’ll show you sacrifice.” And went the way of sacrifice to the end, not to appease God, but to show us that God’s way is love and not vengeance and an eye for an eye. On this understanding of the cross, Jesus’s death is still what saves us, but how it saves us and what it saves us from is quite different that we might imagine if our picture of God is simply the vengeful, petty little deity that demands something must die every time he’s offended.

Reflections of a Dionysian Lutheran, comments on the daily readings of the Revised Common Lectionary.