The death of Jesus Christ was not unusual. In a long line of lethal violence stretching from Cain and Abel to Auschwitz, Hiroshima, New York and Baghdad, Jesus’s personal fate was simply one of untold millions for which evil triumphed and goodness was buried. Nor, on the day he died, did Jesus’s death seem un-ordinary. As Leander Keck observed of Jesus's execution day, “All three men [on Golgotha] were equally dead by sundown.”
Nor can we say that Jesus was the first person to give his life on the behalf of others. In fact, it is not readily apparent that Jesus died on anyone’s behalf. None of his disciples were arrested, for example, and there was no opportunity, hence no occurrence, of Jesus telling the Romans, “Execute me in place of them.”
Since the apostles’ day, though, Christian people have held it as an article of faith that Jesus lived and died to offer himself as a ransom for all, as atonement for our sins, as a blood offering and sacrifice by which we may be made right before God. How can this be? And even if we accept the scriptural claim that there are none of us who do good, no not one, and that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, then what made it necessary that God become man and die on a cross to redeem us from our sorry state?
For this there is, really, no answer, for it would require us to know the imponderable mind of God. As orthodoxy has held, we have the assurance that we are redeemed through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, but there is no way for us to know why redemption comes this way and not some other. As the Catholic Church has explained, God could save by any means God chooses, for God is sovereign in power and decision. But this Christ is the way we know God chose.
And yet the question, “Why?” is not so easily dismissed and answerable only from the perspective of love. For we know that God became man because of love, and that the purpose of God’s ultimate self-sacrifice was the fulfillment of love.
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him (John 3:16-17).I knew a man at Vanderbilt who had lost his son, eight, to cancer. The man said that when his son was first diagnosed, he knelt by his son's bed and prayed to God to heal his son. The cancer worsened until it was clear the boy’s illness would end in death. The man said when this fear gripped him, he started offering himself in prayer to God, kneeling by his sleeping boy and begging God with tears and anguish that if cancer there must be, to take the cancer from his son and put it inside himself.
To me, that’s what God concluded: there is no cure for human sin and its end in death except for me to be born of woman and take all the sin of the world to my death, even death on a cross.
We tend to think of sin judicially and see it dealt with in a kind of theological court, where we are found not guilty based on the pleading of Christ. But I think it is helpful also to see sin as a deep illness in the human being that we cannot cure ourselves. In the mind of God, healing this illness must be of ultimate value, the very perfection of creation. And out of love for his children, God became born of woman and took upon himself all the spiritual deficiencies of the human race. Jesus, “in whom dwelt the Godhead bodily,” who was without sin or spiritual sickness, took upon himself the sin of humankind, the deep illness of the human soul. And so we are made well. The prophet Isaiah put it this way:
Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all (Isa 53:4-6).The apostle Paul wrote in Second Corinthians,
... God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting human sins against them. ... God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor 5:19, 21).The book of Hebrews offers this insight: "Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death ..." (Heb 2:14).
And so Lent: when for forty days leading to Easter’s glory we are drawn to confront today's horror and to look inside ourselves, examine our souls and reconsider how we live and why. For even though Jesus’s death was ordinary in nature, it was extraordinary in character, for in his death we find our life. Old Testament scholar Gene Tucker, pondering Isaiah’s prophecy, wrote,
There are times when we must simply surrender because we can find no way forward without God’s grace and truth. There are times when we must surrender because the ways we have chosen to go bear only God’s judgment, and we know that. But there are also times when we must surrender because God has laid hold of us so dramatically that we can scarcely do else. When this happens, the speech we get is directly from God. It comes upon us and shows us a truth we never before could have entertained. And then our tongue is free for confession and release; our sins do not overwhelm us because we can see them clearly and report them freely, because they have been clearly and freely taken away from us and laid upon another.The tragedy of the human condition is that this salvation cost God the life of his Son, but the deep mystery of the divine nature is that in Christ's death, God sacrificed himself, for the Son and the Father are the one and the same. By the wounds that we inflicted upon him, we are made whole.
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