The old priest admonished us to "throw away" the idea of God as judge. "It's garbage!" Jesus died on the cross to show us God's love not to reconcile us to God, because God never stopped loving us. God is nothing but love and mercy.
It's odd. The old priest is traditional in his piety. He says Mass prayerfully (even if he's a little loose with the words sometimes). It is obvious that he loves the Church.
But none of that stuff makes any sense if God's love and mercy negate, entirely, God's judgment. If the message of the Gospel is fundamentally "God loves you, you're OK, and everything is awesome!", why sacrifice? Why be converted? Why, indeed, should Christ die?
I know, I know. We should be good and worship God out of love, in response to his love. That should be enough. But how is sacrifice a meaningful display of love, how is the cross a meaningful display of love if it doesn't conquer our sin or accomplish our reconciliation with God?
I'm not talking about particular soteriological theories, here. I'm saying that if we get rid of the language of sin and judgment and atonement and sacrifice, then the Christian story is completely deprived of meaning. OK, the message is that God loves me. Great, but why should I care? If those things don't mean anything to me (and, in fact, they have become foreign concepts to our culture), God's love is an answer to a problem I've never had.
Indeed, it is as if Christ came not to deliver us from sin, but to deliver us from Christianity. Now that that mission has been accomplished, the good news has become, at best, superfluous, and, at worst, incomprehensible.
