There’s an old story from the Polynesian islands called “Johnny Lingo and his ten-cow wife” that goes like this. In those days, and in that part of the world, if a man wanted to marry a girl, it was necessary for him to pay the father of the bride a dowry.
Usually the expected dowry was a single cow, but depending on how badly the man wanted his bride, he might even go as high as three, maybe four cows.
Now: It just so happened that Johnny Lingo was in love with Mahana, a young girl on the next island over, a woman who—well—let’s just say that all the villagers agreed her father Moki would be lucky to get even one cow for her.
She was short, and sallow and sullen, and when Johnny arrived to bargain for her, shrewd old Moki asked for three cows, because he thought, at least that way Johnny Lingo will have to offer one cow in return.
Johnny squinted his eyes for a minute, and then he said: “Moki, three cows is a lot. But it’s not enough for my Mahana. I’ll give you ten cows for her hand in marriage!”
Everyone was stunned, but Moki agreed before Johnny could change his mind. So Johnny paid 10 cows for poor, sad looking Mahana, and with all the villagers snickering behind his back, he went home with his bride.
It was some time before anyone heard from them again. But it so happened that one of the villagers on a trading trip to Johnny’s island stopped by for a visit, years later.
When he arrived, this stunning young woman met him at the door. She stood tall and straight, her face glowing and he eyes shining. Stammering, the villager asked for Johnny Lingo.
After they exchanged pleasantries he asked Johnny, “Who was that beautiful woman?” To which Johnny replied. “That was my Mahana.”
He could tell the visitor was having difficulty lining up the beautiful woman he’d just met with the memory of the ugly girl who left the island so many years ago, so Johnny explained: “What girl could be truly beautiful if she believed she was only worth one or two cows to her man? No: we are as beautiful as we’re told we are. And a woman who is told she’s worth ten cows will become a ten cow wife.”
While the actual practice of paying a dowry for a bride may seem foreign, even distasteful to us, the core idea of this story—“That a woman who’s told she’s worth ten cows will become a ten cow wife”—is a useful analogy for one of the traditional atonement theories, explanations, that is to say, for how and why the death of Jesus is able to save human beings like us.
The theory is sometimes called the “moral Influence” theory.
The idea is that, there is something about the way in which God demonstrates his love for us on the cross—the lavish, reckless, unfathomable love he shows us by dying for us like that—that when we glimpse it—the very fact of his love has the power to save us from sins.
It may not be immediately clear how a mere demonstration of love has the power to save, but that’s where the story of Johnny Lingo and Mahina comes in.
Just like Johnny’s lavish demonstration of love transformed Mahina, saving her from the ugliness she believed was true about herself, so too with the cross: in showing us how much we are worth to him—even to the point of dying for us in Christ—God transforms us into the love-able creatures that the cross declares us to be.
On its own, the Moral Influence theory does not account for the full picture of what Christ accomplished on the cross, but it does add an important and necessary theme to our understanding: that whatever the cross is about, it is, first and foremost, a saving demonstration of God’s holy love.
Like the Bible says it in one place, “God demonstrates his own love towards us in this, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
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