The cross as a moral example
Moral influence theories or exemplary theories comprise a fourth category used to explain the atonement. They emphasise God's love expressed through the life and death of Jesus.

Christ accepted a difficult and undeserved death. This demonstration of love in turn moves us to repent and re-unites us with God. Peter Abelard (1079-1142) is associated with this theory. He wrote:

"The Son of God took our nature, and in it took upon himself to teach us by both word and example even to the point of death, thus binding us to himself through love." -Peter Abelard

Abelard's theory and the call to the individual to respond to Christ's death with love continues to have popular appeal today.

"...Our redemption through the suffering of Christ is that deeper love within us which not only frees us from slavery to sin, but also secures for us the true liberty of the children of God, in order that we might do all things out of love rather than out of fear - love for him that has shown us such grace that no greater can be found." -Peter Abelard -source http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/beliefs/whydidjesusdie_2.shtml

The cross, then, is not about Jesus reconciling an angry God to us; it's almost the opposite. It's about a totally loving God, incarnate in Christ, reconciling us to him. On the cross Jesus dies for our sins; the price of our sin is paid; but it is not paid to God but by God. As St paul says, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Because he is Love, God does what Love does: He unites himself with the beloved. He enters his own creation and goes to the bottom line for us. Not sending a substitute to vent his punishment on, but going himself to the bitter end, sharing in the worst of suffering and grief that life can throw at us, and finally sharing our death, so that he can bring us through death to life in him.

There's a song by Sidney Carter which ironically sums up our misunderstanding of the cross, in the words of the impenitent thief:

"It was on a Friday morning when they took me from the
cell,
And I saw they had a carpenter to crucify as well
Well: you can blame it on Pilate, you can blame
it on the Jews
You can blame it on the Devil - but it's God that
I accuse;
It's God they ought to crucify instead of you and
me -
I said to the Carpenter a-hanging on the tree."

Like the impenitent thief, we too can be so fixated on our picture of the punishing God of power we imagine up in heaven, we can't grasp he's really down here, bleeding and dying at our side.

The most powerful illustration of this I know comes not from a Christian writer but a Jew, Elie Wiesel, the holocaust survivor and Nobel prize winner, who described his experience of Auschwitz in a famous book called Night. In the face of so much horror and evil many lost their faith; yet for a few it became, paradoxically, a new realisation of God's closeness to them. In one harrowing passage Wiesel tells how a young boy was punished by the guards for stealing food. He was hanged on piano wire, while all the other prisoners were forced to watch:

For more than half an hour the boy stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony before our eyes. We were all forced to pass in front of him, but not allowed to look down or avert our eyes, on pain of being hanged ourselves. When I passed in front of him, the child's tongue was still red, his eyes not yet glazed. Behind me a man muttered, 'Where is your God now'? And I heard a voice within me answer him, 'Where is he? Here He is. He is hanging here on this gallows'.
For me - if not for Ellie Wiesel - this above all is the meaning of the Cross: that God is one with us in our sufferings, and not just 2000 years ago but through all time.

On the cross God absorbs into himself our falleness and its consequences and offers us a new relationship. God shows he knows what it's like to be the loser; God hurts and weeps and bleeds and dies. It's a mystery we can hardly glimpse, let alone grasp; and if there is an answer to the problem of suffering, perhaps it's one for the heart, not the reason. Because the answer God's given is simply himself; to show that, so far from inflicting suffering as a punishment, he bears our griefs and shares our sorrow. From Good Friday on, God is no longer "God up there", inscrutably allotting rewards and retributions. On the Cross, even more than in the crib, he is Immanuel, God down here, God with us. -Jeffery John

I have never looked at it that way. Doesn't Paul say that the wages of sin is death. So Jesus (God) need to pay for our sins. I don't think that that made God's anger for us go away. I believe that God was very sad that that had to happen. At least that is how I see it. But I understand what your saying. Very interesting thought.

pkrause