Gethsemane 1

The Atonement has always been a big mystery to me, especially when I was younger. You hear about “the atonement” and that because Jesus performed the “atonement” we can repent of our sins, but what does that mean? If we are indebted to justice because of our sins, then what currency did Jesus use to pay justice back for our debt? It took me a long time of thinking to just realize that, I’m not going to fully understand the atonement during this life and that I just needed to stop focusing on the how and start focusing on the why. It doesn’t matter how the atonement works if I don’t repent and use it, then it’s like it never happened, so I decided to work on the obedience part first, and then came the lesson, and I still learn more and more about it all the time. So anything I say on this subject is “gospel by Amy” only.

The IM points out that the word “atonement” is literally “at-one-ment” or to make one or to reconcile us as imperfect beings with the Father who is perfect and can’t allow anything imperfect to be with him permanently. I think it is because I’ve always lived with the concept of “repent and be with God again,” and even though we might not agree on the specifics of how it happens, most of the world in their respective religions believes that becoming better people by giving up negative behaviors and attitudes is what brings us back to whatever higher power we subscribe to. So the concept of “become better and be rewarded in the next life” is pretty universally understood by most people and because of this, I don’t think we understand the gravity of just how lost we are, or just how bad off we could be without the atonement. The whole creation of the universe hinges on this one event that occurred over a period of less than 24 hours by one man. If Jesus had not been successful, then the eons of time that had been spent creating and cultivating the universe would have been pointless, and it’s very difficult for me to fathom just how serious of a concept that it.
The first way that I have to understand the atonement comes from an unlikely source, that of a chromosome. Think of it like a slinky. When all down up nice and neat while resting, the slinky is very small, but as you begin to stretch it out, the surface area of each individual coil as it wraps down the spiral is exponentially larger than the surface area while it was resting. So it is with a strand of chromosome. Just looking at it, which you can’t without serious medical equipment, all you see is a little tiny X appearing thing. Or maybe a better example is a knitted sweater. Laid out flat, the completed sweater doesn’t appear to be that big, however, if you take a single strand of yarn and pull, then the sweater begins to unravel and where you used to have simply surface area on the front, back, and inside of the sweater, you now have surface area along the whole strand of yarn as it is pulled out.
What I mean is that, when you look back on your life, it’s like a flash. You’ve heard people say after a near death experience, that their life flashed before their eyes. Our lives are drawn out by time, but I wonder if our experiences in living might be compressed into a short burst of all our emotions and pains and hopes. Does that make sense? So when Jesus was praying he didn’t have time to live our whole lives out on our mortal time line, but maybe it’s possible that our whole existence might be compounded into a miniscule amount of time that Jesus could experience in its fullness. Kind of like uploading a zip file of our lives into Jesus, one after another until he has experienced the whole of all existence. That is how I believe that he was able to experience all the pain and suffering for every living thing of all time in such a short period of a few hours. And then he has reference for every moment of our lives.
I’ve always wondered about the currency, what did Jesus give to justice that would allow us to pass by? I’ve thought about it a lot, at one point thinking that the price could have been paid with blood, but what I’ve come to understand is that perhaps Jesus paid in pain. For instance, if I punched you in the face, then the pain that came from that experience is on your shoulders. When it comes time to be with God again, justice would say, “no she can’t come in because she caused this other person pain by punching them in the face.” Ok, so if I caused you pain, what would justice require in order to be satisfied? I believe that justice would require that I receive the same exact amount and feeling of pain as I inflicted. That would be just, for each person to feel exactly the same amount of pain and suffering that they caused another person or creature.
So that begs the question, why can’t we all just suffer for our own sins and then go back to God. I really had to think about why this wasn’t the case. Sure, it really sucks to have all of your creations suffer for an indeterminate amount of time, but is it really so necessary that Jesus save us from that suffering? I mean, we did the crime, we should do time. Imagining that existence, we would suffer for our sins, but then because we are still flawed individuals, we would continue sinning, and then continue suffering, etc. for all eternity. It would be a vicious cycle because we haven’t changed who we are as people, we are still just as bad as we’ve always been, so we could continue the sin/suffering cycle forever. Now that sucks.
It is not the act of suffering that changes who we are as people, because if we remember, there will be those who will refuse to repent and they will be forced for suffer for their own sins. They won’t come out of their suffering purified beings, they will be the same stubborn fools that they went into the suffering as. It is the process of repentance and working with Jesus that transforms who we are into God like beings. Even if it wasn’t possible for us to sin after we suffered for our own sins, we still wouldn’t be God-like, we would just be clean from sin, but we wouldn’t have God-like love for others, patience, kindness, humility, and capacity for eternal growth. The atonement doesn’t just make it so that we don’t have to suffer if we choose, but it also gives us the ability to work with the Savior to become more like Him.
But what’s the difference between Jesus suffering for our sins and us suffering for them? The suffering is the same, so how does Him doing it instead of us allow us to transform who we are as people? Jesus has set the requirement that in order to benefit from the atonement, we must turn away from our wrong doings and follow His example. The act of repentance, in order to access the atonement, is what changes who we are. Not only do we not have to suffer for our own sins, which I don’t believe that any of us can quite comprehend exactly how horrific that would be, but the process of trying to be the way Jesus commands us, changes our hearts and gives us Christ-like attributes. And it’s not just a matter of Jesus suffering for our sins, but I believe that in order to suffer for the sins of all mankind, that required that he feel all the hurt and anger or victims as well as perpetrators.
Justice demands that the pain caused to one person by another be felt, because that’s fair. If my kids are fighting, and one hits the other one, mercy has me asking the other person to be forgiving, but it would only be just to let the one hit the other, or if I hit the offender, that would be just, but what if I put the offender in time out? Is that the same amount of punishment? No. It’s kind of like when someone is sentenced to go to jail because they had done something horrific. Is that justice? Kind of, the offender is being punished, but are they able to feel the same amount of pain, terror, and suffering that they caused? Probably not.
Going back to the hitting analogy, justice would necessitate that the offender be hit just as hard and inflict the same amount of emotional trauma that had been dispensed. Is it possible for that to even happen? Not in our finite, mortal world. The physical hit can be just as hard and inflict just as much damage, but how being hit made that person feel, the fear and anger and trauma that they felt, justice requires that that too be felt. So it seems that the only way for justice to actually be satisfied, we would have to have some sort of ability to feel the experiences of someone else to fully comprehend what we had actually done, which we aren’t able to do.
But what if someone who was able to feel the full extent of every single consequence came around, maybe that’s why Jesus was the only one who was able to perform the atonement, because he was the only one with the spiritual ability to actually take on the full extent of pain and suffering for others. I believe that Jesus had to vicariously live each person’s life from beginning to end, in its entirety, in order to not only pay for our sins, but to pay for the sins of every person who has ever wronged us, both for victim and perpetrator. And I believe that he experienced it in a condensed and hasty manner, which would put all of our pain and suffering into short, but intensive bursts.
I believe that this is how I came to believe that the Savior has given birth to every child, has died every death, has mourned every loss, and suffered all things. The IM quotes Elder Tad R. Callister as teaching, “What weight is thrown on the scales of pain when calculating the hurt of innumerable patients in countless hospitals? Now, add to that the loneliness of the elderly who are forgotten in the rest homes of society, desperately yearning for a card, a visit, a call- just some recognition from the outside world. Keep on adding the hurt of hungry children, the suffering caused by famine, drought, and pestilence. Pile on the heartache of parents who tearfully plead on a daily basis for a wayward son or daughter to come back home. Factor in the trauma of every divorce and the tragedy of every abortion. Add the remorse that comes with each child lost in the dawn of life, each spouse taken in the prime of marriage. Compound that with the misery of overflowing prisons, bulging halfway houses and institutions for the mentally disadvantaged. Multiply all this by century after century of history, and creation after creation without end. Such is but an awful glimpse of the Savior’s load. Who can bear such a burden or scale such a mountain as this? No one, absolutely no one, save Jesus Christ, the Redeemer of us all.”