More about Jesus' death... still thinking...

After posting a few days ago on the Beautiful Gospel, under the heading "Why did Jesus die?" I thought I should say something more...

Because I feel as though the explanation of Jesus dying on the cross I gave, is true but it is once again not all of the truth.

Christianity is a mystery, it is not easily explained. And we have tended as humans to want simple, clear, step by step explanations - largely especially in western Christianity because we like things clear and logical.

So when I read through my last post, it seemed that I had done away with a belief in the idea that Jesus sacrificed himself for my sins (known as the penal substitution doctrine.) But, there is a lot in the Bible about the idea of Jesus being the sacrificial lamb, whose death paid the price for our sins. I do not believe we can actually write that out of the explanation. But that aspect is the one that western conservative Christianity has focussed on: the metaphor of God as judge but sending his Son Jesus to take the punishment for us. And I think that Brad Jersak, and many many others, have wanted to show that this is not the only way of seeing the cross, this is not the only truth - although it is true. But by emphasising this metaphor, we may have ended up showing God as an angry judge/headmaster, requiring appeasement, sending his own son to pay the penalty on our behalf - and not giving enough weight to the other sides of the story, such as God's love.

There are various different facets of Jesus' death and resurrection in the Bible, and I think they all partly explain what happened there on the first Good Friday. I don't have time nor probably the ability to do justice to this. But I wanted to point out that there are lots of ways of viewing the cross.

For example, John in his gospel compares Jesus being lifted up on the cross, to the bronze serpent which was set up on a pole in the wilderness for the sake of the Israelites, who were being bitten by poisonous snakes and dying. God told Moses to make a bronze serpent on a pole, so the Israelites could go and look at it when they got bitten, and be cured of the snakebite and not die. John says that Jesus was to be lifted up like the bronze serpent. In other words, we look to him on the cross for healing, and for life - not in this case for absolution.

Also, Jesus is likened to the Passover Lamb - well in that case, the Israelites did not kill the lamb to pay a substitutionary penalty for sins (that was a different sacrifice altogether) - but at the first Passover, it was so that they could paint the blood on their doorposts as a sign - so that the angel of death would not enter their houses but pass over them. So if Jesus is the Passover Lamb, it means he dies so that we, as believers, can be protected/saved from death - again, as a way to life.

When Jesus died, the veil in the Temple was torn in two. This symbolises that the barrier between God and human beings was ripped apart through Jesus' death - so that we can now have direct access to God in prayer, and know his presence, and as it says in Hebrews, approach his throne unafraid. So here Jesus' body being broken, is shown to mean that he opened the way for us to God.

Dan is good at putting things into diagrams to help him figure them out. After reading my last blog post, he showed me this diagram he had come up with:



Father...................Son                                                                                

           JUSTICE                                                                            

Words like sacrifice, substitution,                                                                         
propitiation, expiation        

Christ......................Satan

                                                                                                                                     VICTORY

Words  like defeat over demons, spiritual powers,

                                                                                                   crushing the serpent's head, defeat of evil etc.



                                                         

    

                                                           Jesus.............................Me
                                                                             LOVE

   Words about restoring me to God, reconciliation, 

giving me eternal life

So there are many ways of looking at the cross. Whilst I would wish that we didn't have a crucifixion at the heart of our faith... I am at the same time grateful for it - how could I not be. Thankfully, it was a death followed by a resurrection! Jesus didn't end up dead, but alive. So we don't have to stay grieving, we can look on to the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances, and to how Jesus speaks to us today in our hearts. Thank goodness for that!

Why did Jesus die?

When Jesus died by crucifixion at the first Easter, was it a human sacrifice? God hated the pagan practice of human or child sacrifice among some of the Canaanite people of Old Testament times (those who worshipped Molech, Leviticus 18:21.) Why would he have made his own son Jesus die, to appease himself, in the very manner he called despicable and abominable in the Old Testament? It doesn't make sense.

In the Old Testament, God did require animal sacrifices, as a way of dealing with the people's wrongdoings, to restore a right relationship with him. And it is true that in the New Testament, the book of Hebrews calls Jesus the one perfect sacrifice, paying for all our wrongdoings, doing away with the need for the sacrificial system.  Evangelical western Christianity has tended to home in on the language of sacrifice to explain the death of Jesus on the cross.

But I have read and heard a few things recently that have made me see it a bit differently. I have followed some debates as to whether Jesus was really appeasing his own father's anger on the cross. Could that be right? And when we say that Jesus "paid the price" for our sins, whom exactly was he paying? Was he paying God? Or satan? CS Lewis' first Narnia book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, speaks to that a bit when the boy Edmund is captured by the White Witch - Aslan meets the Witch at night and offers himself instead of Edmund and so he Aslan is killed on the Stone Table. But the person demanding and extracting the payment is the Witch, not Aslan. She seems to be in the role of Satan. And after submitting to obey the ancient law (equivalent with the OT Law?) Aslan overcomes the law and death itself, is resurrected, and quickly joins his people who are already fighting the Witch, defeats and destroys her, restores all the poor creatures who have been subjugated to her, and frees Narnia to be the harmonious, beautiful, joyful land it was originally intended to be.

This story seems to fit with the understanding of the Christian Gospel which I heard described a few nights ago by Brad Jersak, under the title "The Beautiful Gospel." In his telling of the Gospel, he descries how, as often as human beings turn their back on God in rejection of him or his ways, God moves to where they are and faces towards them again, always seeking and longing to be face to face with them (us). He talked about something like "the unending pursuit of a relentless God" - but pursuing us with love, not anger. God longing for us to be in relationship with him.

In the beautiful Gospel, God never punishes us for our sin. That is not his desire nor his method. He does though let us take the consequences of sin. Every selfish act has bad consequences one way or another. For example, our friendships and family life get marred when we act selfishly or get angry, when we don't count each other's needs as equal to our own. Sometimes we don't suffer the consequences of our own selfishness, but other people do (like when we wear a cheap T-shirt made by a child-labourer somewhere else n the world) - and other times we do suffer consequences of other people's wrong-doing - like when greedy government policies result in poor planning and, for instance, the flooding of land which could have been avoided. Nobody is being punished - but we are living in a world where everybody's actions have consequences, for good or bad, and we are all bound up in it together.

So when Jesus died on the cross, it was not that God nailed him there to make him pay for us. It was that God entered the world as Jesus, God in man, and lived a perfect life. In telling the truth that he was the Son of God, and in gaining so much popular support because of his wise teaching and loving miracles, he incurred the anger of the ruling parties, who used the system to get him put to death. Jesus gave himself up to dying, he was not forced to do it by an angry God. It was a self-sacrifice, to carry through to the bitter end the battle between God and Satan. Jesus death was like the lightning rod for all of satan's hatred of God, for all the consequences of sin in the world, for all time. And the death was not the end - as in the Aslan story - Jesus overcame death, rose out of the tomb, and entered heaven. It is incredible - it is supernatural -, but, he is God.

Jesus' face

It was not an accident that Jesus' incarnation happened at a time and in a culture where there were no portrait artists, and no cameras. Jesus came for all people - so the fact that we can give him a Middle Eastern or British or African or American or Ethiopian or Russian or Japanese appearance is good and important - he is incarnated into all our cultures. But sometimes I really do wonder what Jesus actually looked like - the historical Jesus. The face above was an attempt to reconstruct the face of a 30 year old Palestinian man from the first century AD, by building up layers on a skull. It doesn't quite work though - because he looks vacant maybe? And I am pretty sure the hair is wrong.

Below is a painting based on the image of the face on the Turin Shroud - for a very long time this was thought to be the real shroud Jesus was buried in, and so the marks on it formed a picture for us, if we believed it,  of the real Jesus. But the Turin Shroud was proved by carbon-dating to be a fake.

















So we are left guessing. I began to think about this again when reading Silence, by Shusaku Endo. The priest in the book spends days and even weeks on his own, in hiding, secretly meeting Christians, then being arrested and paraded through a town in chains, then imprisoned in solitude, hearing others being tortured - and what gives him the courage to keep going is an image of Jesus he had in his mind, from a portrait of him he had back at home. The memory of the face stayed constantly with him, and through it, Jesus helped him endure.

I realised that when I think of Jesus, I am left without a face - or it is kind of vague. I do think of him as he is portrayed in famous pictures, or as the shepherd with lambs in his arms as in a childhood painting we had, or sometimes as one of the movie Jesus-es. But none of them are quite right. One friend not long ago said when she sees Jesus, he is in jeans. Hmm. That made me think of the very American bro Jesus with the tool belt and jeans of William Young's The Shack. But that isn't quite my Jesus.

Maybe I should settle for the image that was on my laptop long ago when I was first in Uganda... I was in the old tiny computer-room at UCU (which is now the Archives), where we all went to send emails back then. I had a picture of Aragorn from Lord of the Rings as my screen saver. Emmanuel Gatera came in and glanced at my screen over my shoulder - "Ahhh, Jesus!" he said. I didn't feel like putting him right!

I think this could work don't you?

As always, open to any other ideas or suggestions...