There’s this Arts and Culture program on Canadian public radio called Q, that I used to be a big fan of. It was all about music and film and other cultural trends, and it usually featured fascinating interviews with fascinating celebrities.
In the fall of 2015, this program went through a dramatic upheaval, however. The host, a pretty well-known name in Canadian media and much loved by fans, was involved in a salacious scandal involving some pretty unsavory allegations of sexual misconduct and harassment.
Even though these were simply allegations, the host was seen as the public face of Q, and the damage had been done. Fans were disillusioned. Fans felt betrayed. Fans dropped off. Many even felt a sort of guilt-by-association: I think I did, at the time.
The producers of the show tried to recover from the scandal; they made public apologies; they brought in guest hosts on a rotating basis. But everything they did seemed touched with the taint of the whole sordid affair.
The only way to escape it, it seemed, was to completely rebrand. They relaunched the program with a new logo, new theme music and especially a brand new host. The program kept its name—Q—but everything else was rebranded under the head of a new host.
Q is a successful program again—though I’m no longer a fan—but the story of Q helps us get at one of the major ideas in the story of the Cross, and the reason why the death and resurrection of Jesus brings salvation to human beings.
The idea here is a theological concept called recapitulation. It’s a Latin word that means something like “summed up under a new head,” and the idea is that in Jesus Christ, and especially through his death and resurrection, God “recapitulated” our humanity, summing it up under a new head.
The idea goes something like this: originally, God created human beings to live in holy relationship with him, and in loving relationship with the rest of creation. But because of human sin, people did not, and have not, lived up to that original intention.
Adam and Eve, in other words, sinned. Scandalously. And no matter how hard we try, we can’t escape the taint of that scandal. We are guilty by association.
So God came to us in the person of Jesus Christ, as the Second Adam, or the New Adam, is how the New Testament writers put it, to sum up our humanity under a brand new head.
Through the Cross, God puts-to-death our old human nature, and its guilt-by-association with Adam; he crucifies it in himself, and then through the resurrection he offers us a brand new way of being human. The resurrected Jesus puts his Spirit in us so that we can fulfill God’s original intention for humanity: a right relationship with him and a loving relationship with the rest of creation.
In this theory of the atonement, the cross is the place where our old “tainted” human nature dies and our new human nature is “summed up” or “recapitulated” in Jesus.
The ancient theologians felt that this was one of the most crucial things that happened on the cross. One compared it to a painted portrait. “If a portrait becomes distorted and stained,” he said, “the artist doesn’t throw the canvas away, but the subject of the portrait has to sit for it again, and then the likeness is re-drawn on the same material.”
We don’t sit for hand-painted portraits that much anymore, so perhaps a more contemporary analogy is the radio program Q. When it became tainted by scandal, the only way to save it was to completely rebrand it.
The producers didn’t cancel the show, but they “summed it up” so to speak, under a brand new host.
Metaphors are limited, but in a way, this is what God has done for human nature in the person of Jesus Christ. He recapitulated it with a brand new host. Like it says in one place, “His purpose was to sum all things up in Christ.”
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