While it may look white to the naked eye, technically, white light is a combination of all the different wavelengths of light—the different colours, that is, in the electromagnetic spectrum.
When white light passes through a prism, each colour in the beam of light refracts at a different angle, which in turn causes the white light to split up into a rainbow of colours, a phenomenon called “refractive dispersion.”
Besides being a great elementary school experiment refractive dispersion is also a helpful image for thinking about Jesus’ death on the cross, and why, or how, his death “saves” us when we believe in him.
In one sense, of course, the execution of this 1st Century Jewish Holy Man was a single historical event—in much the same way a beam of light is a single thing.
And, while the New Testament writers all agree that there was something “saving” about his death—that God did something there that meant salvation for human beings like us—they don’t always agree on what exactly it was, on how, exactly, Jesus’ death saves.
In some places, it talks about his death as though God were wining a victory over evil for us. In other places, it talks about Jesus paying our ransom. In another place it talks about Jesus satisfying the demands of the Old Testament Law, and so on.
Over the years, theologians have debated, sometimes at great length, which explanation for the Cross is best. These various explanations are sometimes called “theories of the atonement”—theories, that is, for how the cross can and does “atone” for our sins.
Put simply, the question is: which theory of the atonement is the “correct” one?
And here’s where refractive dispersion comes in handy. Because just like a single beam of white light is really a rainbow of colours, so too with the cross. If we could “refractively disperse” the message of the cross, theologically speaking, we’d see a whole spectrum of things happening all at once, that together make up the saving nature of his death.
On the tone hand, his death summarized and fulfilled the ancient story of God’s People, for us and in our place. On the other hand, his death was an unexpected victory over sin and death, for us and in our place.
His death satisfied the requirements of the Old Testament Law. It was God’s demonstration of his holy, emphatic “No!” to human sin, and it was also God taking the effects of that “No!” onto himself.
It was God paying with his own life the ransom necessary to free us from evil. And it was God making peace with us when we were dead set against him, by laying down his life for us, and in our place.
Now: none of these ideas—victory, ransom, satisfying God’s “No!” to sin, making peace, fulfilling the Law none of them on their own explains the cross, but together—just like all the colours of the electromagnetic spectrum together makes white light—together all these make up the content of the message: Christ died for our salvation.
Of course, the real question remains: what is the prism in our analogy. That is to say, what allows us to “break up” the message of the cross into its constituent colours?
When framed like that, the thing that stands out as common to all the different “explanations” of the cross is the fact that Jesus was dying for us and in our place. This is sometimes called the “substitutiary atonement”—the teaching that in Jesus, God was actually standing in as our substitute,” doing for us and in our place what we couldn’t do for ourselves and on our own.
And when we pass the Event of the Cross through the “prism” of the substitutiary atonement, trusting that, whatever happened there on the cross, Jesus was dying for us and in our place—that’s when the death of this 1st Century Holy Man becomes for us what the Bible says it is: “The light of the knowledge of God, shining in the face of Christ.”
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