“Finding Light” by Cortney L. Haley
Why did Jesus die?
Follow-Up Question: Why did God raise him from the dead?
Today we got questions about the meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection from two different people on different sides of the globe. One here in Dayton, Ohio, a Sunday school teacher wondering how to answer these questions for children. And the other in Melbourne, Australia, whose reflections on these questions inspired a blog entry. Both wondered about the common Christian understanding of Jesus’ death as “blood atonement” or, as we regularly hear: “Jesus died for our sins.” It’s a worthy question to ponder, especially during Holy Week and the season of Easter.
So, here’s a GoTell take:
A first distinction is whether Jesus died for our sins or because of our sins. What’s clear in Mark and all the passion narratives is that Jesus died because of our sins, and that a central part of the meaning of the stories is to invite us to think about the impact of our sins on God.
So, the disciples all ran away. Peter denied Jesus. We the people demanded Jesus’ crucifixion and chose Barabbas, an apostle of violence and murder. Our sin was the belief that we must have a messiah who will save us from our enemies by killing them. Jesus did not meet our expectations. The story requires us, if we enter into it, to think about our commitments to separation from our enemies, about hatred, about our love of warfare and violence and about our fear of standing up for another way.
Another direction that the story invites us to think through is God’s response to our rejection of Jesus and his way (non-violence and peace-making; healing, feeding and teaching both us and our enemies). God’s response is to grieve for Jesus, as expressed in the rending of the temple curtain. It is to express God’s love for us rather than rage, as was commonly believed in the earlier experience of Israel.
Jesus’ death is a fulfillment of God’s purpose and a sign that God’s will is that we be ready to die rather than to kill. Jesus asks his disciples to be willing to lose their life for the sake of others. God is willing and able to give God’s own life in love, rather than to respond to our rejection with judgment and hostility.
God also grieves for us when we reap the consequences of our desire for revenge and dominance over our enemies, including attempts at self defense through violent means. Jesus cried over Jerusalem, knowing the agony it would experience as a consequence of choosing military response to Roman oppression as was played out in the Jewish War of the 60’s.
God does not need to get paid for our sins. The notion that Jesus paid the price to God for our sins is a medieval theory of atonement that has little basis in the New Testament. Jesus suffered for the sake of creating reconciliation and unity between people and God when people wanted to kill God. God’s response was to suffer and endure our hostility—our rage at God— for not fulfilling our hopes for what God would do.
The New Testament does refer to atonement as in 1 John 4:10. The meaning of atonement is oneness. The problem that atonement solves is not with God. It’s with us. God is constantly seeking oneness and reconciliation with us. The impact of the stories of Jesus’ passion and death is to change us, not God. The oneness that Jesus’ death creates is the realization that while we were God’s enemies, God loved us with a perfect love that extended to death. God suffered rather than retaliating against us. And the invitation of the story is that we would love God back.
In 1 John 3:11-17 the early Christian community calls its members to love one another, to not hate, to not be like Cain murdering, but to lay down our lives for one another. This call culminates by pointing to God’s example in returning love for hate as was made incarnate in the passion of Jesus. As the composer of 1 John 4:10 says: “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that God loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.”
Sin is our alliance with the powers of evil, our collaboration with the spirit of the powers of evil. The sacrifice made on Good Friday wasn’t a sacrifice to God, like an animal on the altar. It was willingly giving everything one has, “laying down one’s life.” This is what Jesus, God incarnate, did.
The resurrection is God’s way of communicating the victory of this radical self-sacrificial love over the powers of evil and violence. It’s really pretty simple: you don’t defeat the powers of evil with evil; you don’t defeat hatred by hating; you don’t defeat hostility by becoming hostile; you don’t defeat death by killing. Easter celebrates life and the way of life Jesus taught, lived, and was raised to prove.
