IT’S BEEN DECADES: since 1986, to be exact. I was going through the interview process to become a tenure-track professor where I did my training and now teach. I hadn’t even finished my dissertation yet. But to be hired, I had to pass what we used to call a “theology exam.” The candidate (in this case, me) gives a written response to each article of the seminary’s Statement of Faith. Each member of an examining committee, comprised mostly of theologians and Bible scholars, reads the response, noting any questions or concerns. Then everyone comes together to grill — umm, “converse with”? — the candidate.

Picture it: a 29-year-old grad student being quizzed by a roomful of scholars, some of them with international reputations. And my primary discipline wasn’t theology, but family studies.

Gee, that’s not intimidating at all.

Moreover, there was no way to know what direction the questions might take. The resident Christian ethicist, for example, gave me a hypothetical scenario (as ethicists are prone to do). Suppose a man came to me as his pastor for advice, he said. Over the last few years, the man had been caring dutifully for his wife as she drifted deeper and deeper into dementia to the point where she no longer knew who he was and was in a vegetative state. Hungry for emotional support, he had fallen in love with a female friend. He wasn’t proposing to abandon his wife, but in essence, he wanted pastoral permission to have an affair with the friend. What would I tell him?

I don’t remember what I said. Whatever I did say, I’m sure it was lame.

Then one of the professors of systematic theology asked me if I knew the difference between propitiation and expiation. There was no faking an answer on that one. I didn’t know, and I told him so. He patiently explained it to me, and we moved on to the next question from somewhere else out of the blue.

Suffice it to say that I know what propitiation means now, and we’re about to encounter the word in John’s letter.

HERE AGAIN ARE the first two verses of 1 John 2:

My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world. (1 John 2:1b-2, NIV)

The bad news is that Christians still sin. The good news is that we have an advocate with the Father: Jesus himself. Who else could it be? Who else but the Righteous One could stand by and stand up for the unrighteous? I’m reminded here of 2 Corinthians 5:21, where Paul proclaims of Jesus:

God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

And there’s more. John says that Jesus is not only our advocate, but the “atoning sacrifice for our sins.” That’s the way the New International Version translates it. The Common English Bible, more vaguely, says that Jesus is “God’s way of dealing with our sins.” But this is where the classic King James Version (along with the New King James) calls Jesus “the propitiation for our sins.” This is another word that in all of the Bible is only used by John, and it appears twice in this letter.

But what does it mean? What is “propitiation”?

Imagine a husband and wife getting into a fight. In the heat of argument, both of them end up saying things they later regret. But the husband, after calming down, admits to himself that he is mostly to blame for starting the argument in the first place. What will he do? He knows he has to apologize, and that the best way to appease her anger is with a bouquet of roses.

What John is saying is that Jesus is our bouquet of roses with God. Well, sort of. Couples fight for all kinds of silly reasons, and there’s nothing silly about God’s anger at sin. But the idea is that the sacrifice of Jesus appeases God’s wrath, as did the aroma of an unblemished sacrifice in the Old Testament rituals.

But as I suggested before, I don’t want us to think of the Father as just mad, mad, mad because we can’t seem to get our act together. Yes, John knows about the wrath of God. Wasn’t he one of the Sons of Thunder? Didn’t he want to rain fire and brimstone on the Samaritans? But it’s an older, wiser John who writes the gospel and his letters, who emphasizes the love of God instead of wrath.

Jesus, he says, is the propitiation for “the sins of the whole world,” not merely ours. That’s not, as some might have it, a statement of universalism. John is not saying that the whole world will be saved; he’s saying that there is no one for whom the sacrifice of Jesus is not enough.

Moreover, when he says that the sacrifice of Jesus is sufficient for the “whole world,” that’s not synonymous with “everyone on the planet.” Usually, when John uses the word “world,” it’s more about spirituality than geography. To be “worldly” is the opposite of being “godly.” As he will say a bit later in the chapter,

Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world. (1 John 2:15-16)

To love the world — in the sense of worldliness — is to follow a path in opposition to loving God. But God loves the world rightly. Look at what John says in chapter 4, the only other place in the Bible where the word propitiation is used:

This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. (1 John 4:9-10)

There it is: “atoning sacrifice.” Propitiation is a demonstration of God’s love — to the world. Thus, when John 3:16 says “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son,” it doesn’t just mean that God loved everybody. It means that God loved even those who lived in darkness, even those whom he might count as enemies.

After all, didn’t Jesus teach that the love of one’s enemies is what shows that we are children of our heavenly Father (Matt 5:44-45)? Isn’t that what Jesus himself demonstrated on the cross as he prayed for the people who nailed him there?

So yes: God, in holiness, is angry at sin, and that anger must be reckoned with. But we shouldn’t have to fear admitting our sin to God — who of course already knows anyway — for God’s love is far, far greater than our sin. And if we can truly grasp the depth and significance of that love and grace, can we also make it safe to admit our sin to ourselves, and to each other?