Why Did Jesus Die? Good Friday, 2014

Why did Jesus die?

Good Friday asks this question of us.  The table isn't set.  It looks like nobody's home.  Like walking into no place and waiting for no one.  

Good Friday asks us to reflect upon the life of Jesus called Christ, the man from Nazareth whose life and works led him to death, who loved his own in the world and "loved them to the end."

I say "life" and not death, because we need to start from history.  

If we read the Gospels from the beginning to end, setting aside for a moment the idea that the cross was part of a "divine plan," it's pretty clear that Jesus' crucifixion was the result of his society's inability to deal with his life - the way he lived, the things he taught and did.  For much of the Jewish ecclesiastical hierarchy (the Scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, etc.), Jesus' teachings and practices - like healing on the Sabbath - challenged comfortably enshrined, age-old, hierarchical and authoritarian interpretations of Mosaic law.  To the Jewish nobility (i.e. Herod), Jesus charisma and charismatic authority pointed to the hidden instability of arbitrarily-instituted power.  People liked him and wanted to hear what he had to say, and that was more than could be said about them!  To the Roman Empire, Jesus appeared as a force that unsettled the status quo that soldiers and governors worked so hard to maintain for the one they called "divi filius," the Son of God:  Caesar Augustus.  Read that way, it's no wonder Jesus died as he did.  In the words of Destiny's Child, the people of his time "weren't ready for that jelly," so they did what they had to in order to preserve the order that was so comfortable, so easy.

Plus, Jesus just wouldn't shut up.  He spoke the truth that he embodied, and he did so "to the end," not only to the end of his life in a chronological sense, but to the end, or to the nth degree, to the greatest extent possible.  So, it's easy to understand without needing a divine plan why this man from Nazareth would be condemned and executed as a criminal, a revolutionary against the state.  

What does asserting a divine plan do to the story, anyway?  Would a loving Father, such as the one given to us in Luke's story of the forgiving father and prodigal son, subject his son to death?  Would a woman who spend all day searching for one lost coin throw that coin away?  Must we say that God willed Jesus' death, or would the God who loves the world so much be equally horrified by the injustice of the execution of an innocent man?  

Most importantly, does an all-powerful, all-loving God need to "plan" things in this way (in OUR way)?  Is the system of exchange through which we understand the world somehow "in God," or is our understanding - our interpretation - of the concrete historical events the source of the plan?  

If God's eternal will to "give life to all things and make them holy," to sanctify and forgive and unite infinitely, and if Christ's life, death, and resurrection radically reveal not just some vague God but THAT God to us, then it seems right for us to understand Christ's death as part of God's plan for salvation.  But it's also right to remember that God's ways are not our ways, and that God's wisdom is not our wisdom.  Just because we see Christ's death as part of God's plan doesn't mean that God "planned it" in the way we understand it to be.  Sometimes it's worthwhile not to have the answers, to say with the Psalmist, "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, far too lofty for me to reach" (Ps. 139:6), and to sit and reflect on the wonder of God's saving action - but at a proper distance and in awe of God's might works.

Yes, "the Bible says," especially in Paul, that Jesus died for the fulfillment of God's plan, but the point I'm making here is that all scriptural language is later interpretation of events.  Nobody was there taking notes.  This doesn't mean it's NOT true that God had a plan; it simply means that we're interpreting God's plan from our side.  So, to impose our understanding on God, as if we know the unknowable beyond God's self-revelation to us, is speculation.  It's deciding that we humans have the resources to know the mind of God.  I'm pretty sure that's what Jesus was on the Pharisees for.  

Again, this doesn't mean that it's not true.  It means that it's interpretation and that aside from knowing that God desires for us to be saved and to live IN A PARTICULAR WAY as demonstrated by the Spirit and Christ, we really can't know just why God made it happen.  For us, the best we can do is say that Jesus died because he was a criminal.  

This doesn't mean that later interpretations about Jesus being the Son of God or part of a plan or divine from the start aren't right or are unimportant.  These are vital, indispensable, and unmistakably true parts of our tradition, and they have and continue to serve the church.  Maybe I'll have a chance to talk about that later.  For now, I want to encourage us to remember that these aspects of the story are imaginative interpretive moves, not details that were evident from the start.

Further, it means that It does mean, though, that to take Good Friday seriously is to remember the radically contrary, the revolutionary, the destabilizing in the mystery of Jesus the Christ, the definitive revealer of the love of God.  It also means that we must have the humility to approach God with wonder and to recognize that to stand before God is to be confronted with ultimate mystery.  

And so what?  Who cares how we approach the question of Christ, anyway?  

To put the historical Christ first is to recall that as participants in the life of Christ and - as saved people - participants in the life of God, we are also participants in God's action with and in the world.  Being saved by Jesus isn't the end of the story.  It's the beginning.  We must work with God and with all creatures of our God to make God's kingdom radically present HERE in the world - even and especially when it means transgressing boundaries of thought and practice and confronting unjust power structures, no matter how self-evident or solid they seem.  

Salvation is present tense, and past tense, and future tense.  God's presence is with us yesterday, today, and forever in the memory of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit.  Heaven isn't just some otherworldly realm.  It's an action, something to be made present here and now.  Because yes, salvation HAS come in the cross and resurrection.  But that doesn't mean the story is over.

After all, we're still here.

And God is indeed with us, even as we bear our crosses in this messy, messy world.