Coda: Why did Jesus Have to Die?

(Warning: possible heresies follow.  Possible implications for public life.  Do not read if such ideas offend you or disturb your private devotions.)

As I walk the grounds of the monastery this morning and stand at the foot of the crucifix outside beyond the chapel, I ask him again: why did you have to die?  I hear two answers.  Neither of them has to do with an angry God who tallies up debts and kills his Son to pay for them.  That was not the theology of the early Church, and thank God (I mean that) it’s no longer the only answer we hear.  But we hear it a lot.

That theology, popularly known as atonement, developed the Biblical idea that Jesus “gave his life a ransom for many.”  Through the writings of Anselm of Canterbury, it became widely articulated and officially sanctioned.  But what if that’s not what the ransom is about?

I think Jesus had to die, first, because we have to.  He came to show us how to be human children of God, the loving God he called Abba.  He couldn’t do that without undergoing everything we undergo.  He underwent the worst sort of death so that all our deaths, no matter how horrible or how unjust, might be transformed into moments of God’s life in us.

But the other reason Jesus had to die, and die in this way, is more troubling.  In Matthew 25 he tells us that we will be judged by how we treated “the least of these.”  He names the sick, the hungry, the prisoners.  He says that whatever we do to them, we do to him.

What if he died to try to stop us from killing?  As the victim of an unjust system, a system in which all the rules were properly followed and order was maintained, Jesus held up a mirror.

Are we really going to be judged on whether we fed our neighbors, but not on whether we kill them?  By any pretext, any rule, any law - really, would Jesus want that?  Not the Jesus I know.

Jesus gave his life a ransom for many, so that many would not have to endure senseless death at the hands of other people.  He offered himself as the face of the oppressed, the body of the prisoners.  We do not fully grieve his passion today unless we also grieve all the other children of God who will die in our name by our governments, in hidden prisons or in arenas or strapped to a table or beheaded or placed before a firing squad.  

I’m not saying his death is meaningless if we don’t stop.  I am saying we are not listening.  

Let yourself be saved today.  Repent what is done in our name.  Pray.  Tell others.  No more killing.  Let his death be enough.