Dear readers, while I almost never actively try to solicit comments from y’all, this is one of these rare exceptions. After my past few Bible study sessions with my congregation, I’ve had these questions rolling around in the old noggin and can’t seem to shake them. Let me know if you think I’m on- or off-base here. –E.A.
(Also an aside, this post was inspired by a recent re-read of Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan’s excellent book “The Last Week,” which is a detailed, day-by-day exegesis of the Passion story as told in Mark’s Gospel, as well as by Rachel Held Evans’ memoir “Growing Up in Monkey Town.” All Scripture quotations are from the Common English Bible.)
I’ve touched on aspects of God’s grace (and my relationship with it) in previous entries, but I haven’t actually written much about sacrifice as a component of that grace (even though I preached on sacrifice as a theological concept just a few weeks ago), whether in terms of the sacrifice of Christ himself as a means of grace, or our sacrifices in our good works as a means of demonstrating our justification as a result of that grace-through-Christ’s-atonement.
In a sentence, this is what I've been thinking: that Jesus had to die because He had a human dimension to Him (and we all must die), but He did not have to be executed. If He had to be executed, that makes His sacrifice less than ultimate because it means the Crucifixion was inevitable, which gives us an out—there was nothing we could have done to prevent the Crucifixion, which mitigates the egregiousness of us putting the Messiah to death. And because Christ did not have to die, that means we have inherent worth to God outside of the cross despite our sinfulness—that is, even if the Passion had never happened, we would still have worth and value to God.
Borg and Crossan tackle the first question in their Good Friday exegesis, framing the issue as one of divine necessity or of human inevitability—essentially, did the Crucifixion have to happen because it was the will of God, or did it have to happen because we are sinful?
Borg and Crossan take the latter perspective, and while I don’t agree with everything they say in this book (they are much more interested in the historical Jesus, while I think the theological Jesus is equally important), I do happen to agree with them on this one, though not entirely for the reasons they state. Their exegesis centers around what happens to prophetic teachers when they challenge the sinful status quo, as they refer to the executions of John the Baptist, Peter, Paul, and James as well as Jesus Christ as preachers and teachers who were executed for challenging the sins of the status quo in world they inhabited.
But Borg and Crossan gloss over what I think is the crucial aspect of the sacrifice of Good Friday when they write, “Did it have to happen? It might have turned out differently.”
That single reality makes all the difference in the world to me—that it did not have to be this way (apologies to Tim Rice’s Jesus that sings, in Jesus Christ Superstar, “everything is fixed, and you can’t change it.” That lyric simply isn’t from the Bible).
Did Jesus have to die because it was God’s plan for Him to die? Yes, because He was made human—“The Word became flesh and made his home among us” (John 1:14). So, yes, Jesus did eventually have to die. But was it God’s will that Jesus die by execution? I’m not so sure. I realize that Jesus prays, “Not what I want, but what you want” to God at Gethsemane (Mark 14:36), but I still struggle with the notion that a God of love, a Father (as Jesus calls him, Abba, or ‘Dad’) would “want” his Son to be executed. It implies something about God that, if I’m completely honest with myself, I’m not quite willing to accept.
So too does the theology of St. Anselm that Crossan and Borg are critiquing in their book. St. Anselm's argument revolves around the idea that God demands a price or a debt before He will recognize our inherent worth and have a relationship with us. But for me, it makes God seem petty and arbitrary rather than gracious and forgiving.
Instead, assume for the moment that it is God’s will that Jesus live. By going against God’s will, we create the most extreme necessity for God’s grace (certainly more so than Adam and Eve eating a durned apple would have created). We give the cross even MORE meaning when we admit to ourselves that Christ’s execution could have been prevented by us, and that we disobeyed God’s will by putting Jesus to death.
To be sure—this is not me arguing that we are utterly without worth in the eyes of God because of our sinfulness. Rachel Held Evans calls this “pond scum theology” (ie, that we are no better than pond scum to God), and about it, she says, “To believe that people are inherently worthless to God strips the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of all their meaning and power. It makes Jesus look like a fool for dying for us.”
The ONLY way that I can come up with to explain how our sinfulness gives, rather than strips, the Passion its meaning and power is to say that we went against God’s wishes by executing Jesus, and that God loves us and sees our inherent worth anyways.
Which means that it was not God’s will for Jesus to die on the cross.
If anything, this underlines the sacrificial nature of the Crucifixion even more—that God, in all His glory and power, subordinated His divine power to our earthly power. It was not merely that Jesus made Himself “obedient to the point of death” (Philippians 2:8), it is that God did as well by standing there, watching us kill His Son. I cannot imagine that God would have allowed Himself to witness this if He didn’t believe in our worth and in His own capacity to redeem us.
And here’s the kicker—we KNOW from Scripture that we do have worth in the eyes of God. God created humanity “in God’s own image” (Genesis 1:26). Jesus came “so that (we) could have life” (John 10:10). God’s love, in Christ, for us is “beyond knowledge” (Ephesians 3:19). And, of course, there's the big one—God so loved the world, He gave His only Son (John 3:16). I could go on and on, but hopefully you see my point.
We did not need Christ’s death to give us worth before God. We did, and do, need Christ’s death and resurrection as a source of redemption and forgiveness for the sins we have committed and created. But our worth before God was already there, long before Christ ascended to Calvary.
Sola gratia…by grace alone.
By grace alone, indeed.
Yours in Christ,
Eric
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