This past Weekend, Easter Weekend, a colleague told me about his and his Wife’s experience with Mel Gibson’s, “The Passion of the Christ.” Reflecting back on the conversation since one thing he said stands out in my memory. As they left the movie his Wife said, “Why did they have to be so mean to him?”
This deeply pained identification with Jesus’ suffering is one of the more common responses to this dramatic portrayal of his crucifixion. Cascading down a third of the cover of none other than TIME magazine is emblazoned the question, “Why Did Jesus Have to Die?” Kids wonder. Journalists speculate. Scholars pontificate. Pastors elaborate. One Pastor has published a short work titled, “The Passion of Jesus Christ: Fifty Reasons Why He Came to Die.” A High School Teacher prepared a 3 page point-by-point summary of Biblical answers to this pressing question in response to the endless pleading of his Students for an explanation of what they perceived to be an atrocity.
So, WHY DID HE HAVE TO DIE?
At the risk of appearing presumptuous I’d like to weigh in. Without pretending to provide an exhaustive summary of what the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures teach about the death of Jesus I suggest the following reasons I consider to be critical to us.
1. This is the way we humans treat someone who is truly better than we are.
2. Someone had to reconcile us with each other and with our God.
3. Someone had to defeat sin and its perpetrators.
4. We need a pardon.
5. Somebody had to get us out of debt.
6. We’re dieing someone has to save our lives.
7. We are enslaved to a lot of things and need deliverance.
8. We don’t really know God.
9. We were made to rule and need someone to restore us to our rightful status.
O.K. … I don’t have fifty reasons. Still these are a lot. Theodore Jennings Jr., of Chicago Theological Seminary probably thinks there are too many. “The New Testament,” he commented in an interview with the writers of the TIME article, “is just all over the map … something really drastic, fundamental and dramatic has happened and they’re pulling together all kinds of ways to understand that.” He seems to be saying that if we really understood what we believed here we’d be much more concise and orderly in our answers to the big questions Jesus life and death pose.
Well, maybe we don’t understand it. We are, after all, trying to explain something that has been conceived and carried out in the mind of an infinite God before ever any of it came to our sphere of existence. The nine reasons I’ve chosen are matters I recognize in Scripture and recognize as not only reasons for his suffering but aspects of it that underscore our complicity. You see, he really was “Wounded for our transgressions … .”
1. This is the Way We Humans Treat Someone Who is Truly Better Than We Are.
Have you ever thought about how we came up with the term Nerd and why the sort of person you picture as you read the word ever got branded with such a term of derision? This is a common instance of a self-indicting practice. We have ways of bringing down, or at least down to a little below the level we’ve defined to be our own, people who are, or are perceived as, better than ourselves. And my colleague’s Wife saw that playing out in the life of a man whom she perceived to be guiltless. “He never did one thing wrong,
Not once said anything amiss. They called him every name in the book and he said nothing back. He suffered in silence …” That’s how his friend Peter describes him. Frankly, the more I learn about Jesus the more accurate I find this description to be. What it is about us that leaves us so touchy in the presence of goodness will have to wait for another discussion. The fact remains. We don’t treat good people well around here.
2. Someone Had to Reconcile Us With Each Other and With Our God
Read the first three chapters of Genesis.
Consider this. Our choice to disobey God resulted in alienation from literally everyone and every thing in our world including ourselves. The first couple’s immediate awareness of their nakedness is stark evidence of immediate self-consciousness and shame. Their hiding, ostensibly from each other but most certainly from God, confirms alienation from each other and from God. The killing of animals for clothing, the feud that began with serpents that day, the cursed ground, the oppression of woman by man. Rifts that have divided us to this very day were torn in the fiber of our existence the day we presumed to be our own God.
The New Testament writers use the term “reconciliation” to speak of the bridge that has been rebuilt between God and man, and between us and our fellows, through Jesus. Is there any greater incident of the realization of this possibility than Christ’s compassionate prayer for his tormentors, “Father forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing.”?
The love of God demonstrated in Jesus is God’s first step in the journey to reconcile all the rifts that exist because of our sin.
3. Someone Had to Defeat Sin and Its Perpetrators
Our greatest liability is our sin. The presumptive notion that we could take a course different from the one God designed for us spelled our doom. The burden of God, which we assumed when we chose to define our own destiny, is too heavy for us and we are overwhelmed by its weight. The decision to ignore God and defer to ourselves is called sin in the Bible. Our inability to live up to our own press, our constantly failing to achieve the goals we’ve set for ourselves, our “missing the mark,” our shortcomings are the outgrowth of that sin. We are incapable of fulfilling the mission we’ve given ourselves.
Most of the blame for this rests with us.
There is however an accomplice. The tempter is in it with us.
St. Paul wrote this about our sin and our accomplice. “When you were stuck in your old sin-dead life, you were incapable of responding to God. God brought you alive—right along with Christ! Think of it! All sins forgiven, the slate wiped clean, that old arrest warrant canceled and nailed to Christ’s Cross. He stripped all the spiritual tyrants (our accomplice and his ilk) in the universe of their sham authority at the Cross and marched them naked through the streets.” The cross was a battlefield. Jesus won. He now has the resources to declare you and me forgiven and to set about the lifelong work of recreating us; making us like the God in whose image we were originally made.
4. We Need a Pardon
Think about it! You’re guilty. The execution is about to be carried out. The apparatus has been prepared. The “guard and the sad old Padre” have come to escort you to the chamber of death. You’re “Dead Man Walkin’.”
Suddenly it all comes to a grinding halt. A pardon is delivered. The Governor has commuted your sentence.
And so he has. Read it again. “All sins forgiven, the slate wiped clean, that old arrest warrant canceled and nailed to Christ’s Cross.”
You did it. You told God to butt out. You assumed what you considered to be your rightful place as the ruler of your own life. But you overstepped. You made wrong choices. Your own life was skewed. A lot of other people suffered as well. The world God trusted to you and your race suffered. It is now the kind of world that kills good people.
But God has commuted your sentence. You are free to go. You have been pardoned.
Another reason Jesus died.
5. Somebody Had to Get Us Out of Debt
Every time we pray the prayer we’ve come to know as “The Lord’s Prayer,” we acknowledge another Biblical assertion about the reason for Christ’s suffering and death. We are indebted to God.
To underscore the extent to which this is true Jesus told a story. “The kingdom of God is like a king who decided to square accounts with his servants. As he got under way, one servant was brought before him who had run up a debt of a hundred thousand dollars. He couldn’t pay up, so the king ordered the man, along with his wife, children, and goods, to be auctioned off at the slave market.
“The poor wretch threw himself at the king’s feet and begged, ‘Give me a chance and I’ll pay it all back.’ Touched by his plea, the king let him off, erasing the debt.”
“In the day you eat fruit from the forbidden tree,” God said in Eden, “you will surely die.” That dieing is about more than declining life span. It is immortality in isolation from God who gives life. Eternal solitary confinement is what we owe. Jesus covered our debt. He endured a Divine moment separated from God. His infinite solitude was enough to cover our debt. Paid in full, is written large, in the blood of Jesus, across the loan documents.
6. We’re Dieing, Someone Has to Save Our Lives
Yes, as we acknowledged previously, our immortality has been compromised.
But Jesus has died to correct that as well.
Perhaps the most familiar passage in all the Bible is John 3:16. Even people who have no clue about what’s in the Bible or who Jesus is have seen that reference. They may think it’s a trick play in football cause they keep seeing it at football games. But at least it’s familiar. It is about Christ’s conquest of death. “God loved the world – i.e. – you and me – so very much that he gave up his only Son (let him die) so that anyone who believes in him will not perish – i.e. – die forever – but have life that never ends.”
Jesus endured the most ignominious death known to humankind so that we could live forever with him.
7. We Are Enslaved to a Lot of Things and Need Deliverance
Read this.
“So what do we do? Keep on sinning so God can keep on forgiving? I should hope not! If we’ve left the country where sin is sovereign, how can we still live in our old house there? …
“That’s what baptism into the life of Jesus means. When we are lowered into the water, it is like the burial of Jesus; when we are raised up out of the water, it is like the resurrection of Jesus. Our Father raises each of us into a light-filled world so that we can see where we’re going in our new grace-sovereign country.
“Could it be any clearer? Our old way of life was nailed to the Cross with Christ, a decisive end to that sin-miserable life—no longer at sin’s every beck and call! What we believe is this: If we get included in Christ’s sin-conquering death, we also get included in his life-saving resurrection. We know that when Jesus was raised from the dead it was a signal of the end of death-as-the-end. Never again will death have the last word. When Jesus died, he took sin down with him, but alive he brings God down to us. From now on, think of it this way: Sin speaks a dead language that means nothing to you; God speaks your mother tongue, and you hang on every word. You are dead to sin and alive to God. That’s what Jesus did.
“That means you must not give sin a vote in the way you conduct your lives. Don’t give it the time of day. Don’t even run little errands that are connected with that old way of life. Throw yourselves wholeheartedly and full-time—remember, you’ve been raised from the dead!—into God’s way of doing things. Sin can’t tell you how to live. After all, you’re not living under that old tyranny any longer. You’re living in the freedom of God.”
This is a modern English version of a section of the New Testament. (Romans 6:1 and several of the following verses.)
The message is clear. Our sin has enslaved us under its tyranny. Jesus has thrown off that tyranny by walking out of his tomb.
We are delivered. “Free indeed,” to quote Jesus.
8. We Don’t Really Know God
“No one has ever seen God,” St John wrote in the first chapter of his selective biography of Jesus. “But,” he continues, “(God’s) only Son, who is himself God, is near to the Father’s heart; he has told us about him.”
Every event, every word he spoke, every act in the life of Jesus, even his response to pain and death, gives us a glimpse of God. Jesus said, “This is immortal life. To know the only true God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent.” And, he said to his Father God, “I have revealed you to them.”
We can know God now thanks to Jesus’ willingness to come and tell us about him both through what he taught as well as how he lived and died and lived.
9. We Were Born to Rule and Need Someone to Restore Us to Our Rightful Status
God’s instructions to the first couple were, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” We were made to rule. Our choice to take that too far, disregarding God as the source of our authority and the one alone deserving of the last word, resulted in alienation, conflict, and oppression. The extent to which we had lost control was never more evident than on the day of Christ’s crucifixion. But on that day the potential for a major reversal, what C.S. Lewis described as “death starting to work backward,” was introduced. Within less than 50 years St. Paul was able to write, “The fruit of the Spirit is … self-control;” “He has not given us a Spirit of timidity but of love, power, and self-discipline;” “Here is a trustworthy saying: If we died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him.” “Self-control;” “love, power, and self-discipline;” “reign;” the curse is certainly being reversed. We are being restored, gradually but surely, to our original place in God’s world. This restoration is taking place right now in the lives of people who are filled with the Spirit of God. Great privileges follow for those in whom the Spirit of God is completely free to carry out his ongoing work of creation; greater by far than many of us expect. “We are being changed,” St. Paul asserts, “from one degree to another in our resemblance to Jesus.” Still, though our experiences of restoration are substantial now they will not be “what they’re gonna be,” ‘til we enter the real unseen world where “this mortal will become immortal.”
Jesus said, “I came to give my people life to the max.” This life is ultimate living; the way for which we were created. Restoration to the place of rule to which God originally appointed us is only possible as we take that way. Jesus life as the Christ, the consummate man, is the only model for such life. He had to die to make it possible. So he did. And, so, we will, indeed, live as he lived and rule with him “substantially now, ultimately then.”
Why did they have to be so mean to him? Because rescuing us required an effort that drastic. Because his love was so great it willingly chose such effort. Because he considered the joy of seeing his beloved restored to be worth such a price.
One song writer caught in the euphoria of this love of Jesus wrote the following lines. “Were the whole realm of nature mine that were a present far too small. Love so amazing, so Divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”
I agree!!!
Jim Denison
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