The
Heidelberg Catechism asks, “Why did Jesus have to die?”
It is an
odd question. Of course Jesus had to die, because he was human. All humans and
all creatures that have the breath of life in them must die. Only a Docetist—someone
who says Jesus only seemed to be human but really wasn’t—would argue that Jesus
didn’t have to die. But if he was a man, the die was cast. On Christmas Day
only the when and how of Jesus’ death was still a mystery.
So the question
isn’t really “why did Jesus have to die?” Rather, the question—assuming that
Jesus was (and is) God—the question is, “why the incarnation?” And from this
follow several more questions, including the one that people seem to be asking
most often when they pose, “Why did Jesus have to die?” namely, “why did Jesus
have to die on a cross?”
And of
course, scripture contains the seeds of many answers that were developed for
this question over the next few centuries. One suggested that Jesus’ birth and death
were together a positive moral influence. Another said that his death atoned
for sins—made up for our sins, somehow. For the former, a favorite text is the Carmen Christi, Philippians 2:5-11. The
idea there is that we should do as Jesus did—have his mind. And what Jesus did,
of course—though he was “in his very nature . . . God” (2:6) was an act of
surpassing humility, even death on a cross.
Other
passages suggest that his death was an atoning sacrifice, or a rousing victory
against evil powers, or an act of surpassing empathy. Over time, various
versions of Anselm’s theory of the atonement, in particular, won pride of
place, at least in the West. You can hear echoes of that tradition in the
statements of faith of the United Church, for example. According to the Basis
of Union (1925), “For our redemption, He fulfilled all righteousness, offered
Himself a perfect sacrifice on the Cross, satisfied Divine justice and made
propitiation for the sins of the whole world.” The United Church’s most recent
statement, A Song of Faith (2006)
broadens the scope of Jesus’ work to his
life, but finishes with a familiar, if somewhat more ambivalent statement, that
echoes the older statements of faith. “In Jesus’ crucifixion, God bears the
sin, grief, and suffering of the world.” The Heidelberg Catechism specifies the
cross was necessary for Jesus to shoulder “the curse which lay on me, since
death by crucifixion was cursed by God,” and only later gets into a
substitutionary atonement description of the crucifixion’s benefits.
All of these answers
presuppose that crucifixion was necessary, in particular, because it was
something God demanded of Jesus to set things right. Many will go so far as to
say that crucifixion was not just a divine demand but also a cosmic requirement
because only that sort of death could satisfy the honor or justice of God,
which because of the very nature of things, or God, had to be satisfied. In
other words, the how of redemption was really not up to God—God needed a crucifixion to make
it happen.
Really? Is God so bound by
circumstances and legal theories and human ideas about what is fair? Can God
not graciously, in his or her freedom and omnipotence and compassion choose to
forgive those he chooses to forgive? Or does the “necessary” in Jesus’ words to
some disciples on the way to Emmaus, as in “Was it not necessary for the Christ
to suffer these things and to enter into His glory?” (Luke 24;26) speak to some
sort of cosmic necessity that even God is subject to before humans could be
forgiven?
I doubt it. In the Old
Testament, Jews were mostly of the opinion that they would be forgiven if they simply
(but really) repented, and turned again to the Lord. Though there might be
punishments for sinning against God—exile perhaps or losing some battle to the
Philistines—yet repentance usually led to forgiveness and new beginnings. So
the prophet Joel says, “Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your
heart . . . Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow
to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and relents from punishing” (Joel
2:12-14).
And as long as Anselm can
use an analogy based on human experience, perhaps I can too. I often forgave my
children, when they were little, when they were repentant. That is, they might
break a vase or lamp by recklessly riding a trike through the house, even when
warned not to. But usually the crash led to tears and repentance and how could
I ever ask them to buy a new vase to make things right again? That would be ridiculous. I might even
forgive people who did me great wrong in the past, but who have died without
repenting, just so that the anger of it doesn’t eat me up. The point is, why
wouldn’t God forgive people who made a good faith effort to follow Jesus’
example? Who, in the words of Joel, rend their hearts and not just their
clothing? We forgive people who try and fail all the time.
So why the crucifixion?
Well, it was how some people in power—Pharisees and Romans—wanted Jesus to die.
It was likely given Jesus’ counter cultural message and radical lifestyle and
challenge to the powers that were. His courage in the face of possible
crucifixion—he seemed to know that he would be crucified, one day—was the
courage of a revolutionary who wanted to change the world (not to mention the
cosmos). But I doubt that there was some constraint in the nature of God or the
cosmos such that some sort of “an eye for an eye,” justice had to be inflicted
on the perfect lamb to cover for the actual (never mind original) sins of
people who were not perfect, even if they wanted to be.
At least, that is what I’m
musing about right now.
I have sitting on my desk
J.N.D. Kelly’s Early Christian Doctrines
and Jaroslav Pelikan’s The Christian
Tradition (all four volumes) as well as several systematic theologies. I’m
going to make a bit of a project of rereading these works with a view to
reminding myself what others have said about these sorts of questions. But as
long as I’m musing, I think the greatest temptation we face when it comes to
atonement theories is probably to make God too small; to impose upon God some finite
necessity that we’re tied up in knots about but which also prevents us from
focusing on the bigger picture: God’s infinite love, grace, and other perfect
attributes, and especially God’s penchant for forgiveness.
