What does it matter WHY Jesus died?

I'm a firm believer in the atonement of Jesus as a multi-faceted gem...

Victory over sin and death? Yep

Ransom? Check.

Uncovering the hatred and violence of "the powers" of this world? Totally. 

Substitute? 

Without a doubt. 

I won't go into *all* the theology here, but I will say a few things. 

First, it's imperative to see substitution in the saving death of Jesus. Why? 

Because without that you either conclude that we don't really need saving (a feel-good-but-ultimately-bankrupt escape hatch more and more are taking) OR you end up, of necessity, trying to save yourself. Trying to be good enough, holy enough, enlightened enough. 

No- it wont be conscious- you probably wont even realize you are doing it. But without the substitutionary death, there's certainly no substitutionary life, that is if Jesus didn't die for me, He most certainly didn't live for me either, and I'm left to cobble together my own righteousness, rather than understanding that I live in His; that His perfect life, his holiness and righteousness is what I get in the bargain of the cross. Double imputation the cool theological kids call it.

 

Apart from understanding that, I will always, always feel not-quite-good-enough, and I'll be chasing one functional savior after another in one self-salvation project after another. 

Second, yes, the violence of the cross is disturbing. Of course! It's meant to be. 

But don't take the easy way out and just try to explain it away. 

Ultimately, the task is to understand the biblical narrative in its paradoxical complexity, not try to wave it away, or make it more palatable. What I see most often in discussions of this, not to put too fine a point on it, is not a lack of faith or love for Jesus, but an unwillingness to sit with the tension inherent in the cross until (allow me to go zen here) enlightenment comes.

To those that see contradiction between the violence of the cross and the love of God, I say... keep going. 

Keep going. It’s meant to raise dissonance in your head about these very things. If you look at the cross and are moved emotionally, it's working. Repulsed? Good. Sense of justice offended? Right on. 

How can a just God do this? Yes, Isaiah 53 and the crucifixion narratives are troubling. By design- the whole thing is meant to provoke, to prick at you, to raise intolerable dissonance. 

First, the violence of this death. All through the OT, God had promised a Messiah, someone who would come and bring peace, healing, wholeness, and restore justice and fairness. From Genesis, all the way up to the early chapters of Isaiah, this anointed one is talked about. Then you get to the middle part of Is. chpts 40 and on, and he appears- it begins to describe Him, bringing what was promised, bringing salvation to the nations.
But when we hit ch. 53 something tragic, something appalling happens. The one who was supposed to bring an end to violence becomes the victim of violence- the one who was supposed to end injustice becomes its victim. “Pierced” for us. The word carries the connotation of someone being impaled- run through, in the front, out the back. It’s a vivid description of a horrible, painful death.

And the question is- How could this be the Messiah? It contradicts everything else that’s been said about Him to this point! How could the Messiah bring an end to injustice and violence and the brokenness of the world… by being broken Himself?

It makes no sense.

And even more shocking and offensive to some, this is a vicarious death- that is, the innocent in place of the guilty. Pierced for OUR rebellion, crushed for OUR sin…

And this is no lamb, but a Man- the “Lamb of God.” All through the OT we see sacrifices described- the life of a lamb or a goat or a bull as a covering for the sin of the people, a guilt offering to deal with their sin. But one thing the Bible is very clear on- never were the people to consider human sacrifice- that was a thing the other nations did, and God despised the idea. And yet… that’s what this is. For someone else’s sin and rebellion, He was pierced and crushed, beaten and whipped. So others could be whole. God condemns human sacrifice, and yet here- that’s exactly what the Messiah becomes.

One other thing is personally shocking to me- the fact that this is a voluntary thing. He picked up and carried our weakness, He shouldered our sorrows- something is accomplished by His anguish and He goes to it willingly…

This is hard stuff to make sense of, no doubt. Some people do it by trying to make this purely figurative, saying, for example, that this passage is a poetic, figurative depiction of the nation of Israel itself- the Jewish people. A picture of the suffering of the Jewish nation. Of course, there’s a problem with that, and the problem is this- the one in this passage suffers on behalf of the nation, in place of the people. This one suffers so the people don’t have to. But if this suffering servant is just a symbol for the people, how can the people suffer so the people don’t have to? How can the nation suffer in place of the nation?

But... the whole thing begins to make sense when we get our Trinitarian thinking straight… If this is Immanuel, God With Us, then… God in human flesh is the only one who can say- My life is My own and I willingly lay it down- no one takes it from Me. And He laid it down- for us? This isn't God crushing His unwilling Son- this is the Judge Himself voluntarily taking the place of the guilty condemned.

And so this also begins to explain the vicariousness of it- how an innocent person suffering for the guilty could conceivably be just.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer said “Forgiveness is a form of suffering.” And what that means is this- When someone wrongs you, it’s pretty obvious how you suffer. What’s less obvious is that if you refuse to forgive them, you continue your own suffering. Generally, the person who hurt you couldn’t care less about your forgiveness- if they did they probably wouldn’t have hurt you that way in the beginning. So by refusing to forgive, by sitting in growing bitterness and anger, you simply magnify your own suffering.

But what is even less obvious than that is that forgiveness itself is suffering. When you want payback and vengeance and you refrain, you are the one who pays. When you want them to suffer and yet refuse to strike out at them, you suffer, you take back within yourself the full brunt of what’s been done. Forgiveness is willingly living with the consequences of someone else’s sin. Doing wrong, hurting others causes suffering. It can’t be escaped. We simply get to choose by forgiving or not forgiving which flavor of suffering we’ll experience when someone wrongs us.

And if that is true for us, with our limited and myopic sense of justice and right and wrong, how much more true is it for God? This is God suffering in order that we might be forgiven. If God wasn’t going to pay us back for the wrongs we do to each other and to Him, then He was going to have to pay. He would suffer. And the cross, a gruesome as it was, showed that in stark reality. There- for all the world to see, our hatred, our violence, God’s love, God’s forgiveness… God suffering on our behalf.

I dislike as much as anyone else the overemphasis on God “crushing” Jesus. But don’t swing too far the other way. Yes- the cross is violent. But it’s OUR violence. Yes, the pain is real- a real demonstration of what God suffers in forgiveness. And yes, it’s vicarious- my penalty, willingly taken. Keep wrestling with it, but don’t neuter the violent, vicarious and yet voluntary death of Jesus on the cross.

Comments

[Dan]

Bob,

My respect for you increasingly grows as I read what your thinking is on subjects like this and how you communicate them. I am in Portland again in 2 weeks, maybe we can meet up!

Dan

[bobhyatt]

Thanks man- I'd like that. Let's do it!

Thanks for the props too- I'm just serving up the crumbs from Tim Keller's table, though :)

[Dan Brown]

I have to ask how you reconcile your particular Trinitarian view with Jesus' Gethsemane prayer: "...not as I will, but as You will."

[Scott M]

Substitution in the terms of ransom? That God in and through and with Jesus of Nazareth died in our place and broke the power of death? Sure. Absolutely. Right with you. However, the issue I have with both satisfaction and penal substitution is not really what they say about me. It's what they say about God. Both of them ascribe a problem to God. God's infinite honor has been besmirched and must be satisfied or God can't forgive without payment? I'm really hesitant to agree with either of those assertions.

[Mike Morrell]

Bob, I appreciate your impassioned-yet-clear response to http://zoecarnate.wordpress.com/2009/02/06/re-visioning-jesus-atonement-beyond-liberal-and-conservative/>my post. You're right, it is supposed to cause dissonance - I don't think anybody's trying to make the cross pretty. "something tragic, something appalling happens. The one who was supposed to bring an end to violence becomes the victim of violence." And this is tragic & appalling. I think what some find even more appalling, though, is when God the Father is seen as the ultimate purveyor of violence upon his Son, venting "His just & holy wrath" upon this innocent victim. In other words, absorbing the violence & wrath of the world? Revolting, but okay. Taking fatal licks from his Daddy? Not okay.

You capture well the revulsion Jewish folk would have at the notion of human sacrifice, even as the early Christian community begins to interpret Jesus in just these terms. Here's the part where I think you begin to mix your metaphors - and we all do at some point:

"For someone else’s sin and rebellion, He was pierced and crushed, beaten and whipped. So others could be whole. God condemns human sacrifice, and yet here- that’s exactly what the Messiah becomes."

I'm going to pose a question to this statement that *should* be Evangelical Christianity 101. We say it so much that it's axiomatic; to question it is to be met with blank stares. My question is In what way does Jesus' particular suffering in a first century empire make *any* others whole? How are Jesus' trumped-up charges interpreted as 'someone else's sin and rebellion'?

I don't have an answer to this; I have yet to hear a satisfying answer (kinda similar to why Augustinian articulations of 'original sin' ring hollow to me). But I acknowledge that the Christian tradition always connects Jesus' particular suffering in his time & place with a kind of redemptive suffering on behalf of humanity, and indeed the cosmos. Maybe the incarnation transforms Jesus' love into Cosmic Love, his death into Cosmic Death, his resurrection into Cosmic Resurrection? This is more of a storytelling technique than a mechanical 'answer,' but I can buy it provisionally.

Bob, you ask "This one suffers so the people don’t have to. But if this suffering servant is just a symbol for the people, how can the people suffer so the people don’t have to? How can the nation suffer in place of the nation?"

Here is another problem I have with our currently in-vogue model: It's not just the penal part, it's the substitution part. Does Jesus really suffer "so we don't have to"? I think we all suffer, and my reading of the Gospels indicates that Jesus calls us to "take up our cross daily" and follow him. And the epistles proclaim that we participate "in the fellowship of his sufferings." I feel like the evangelical substitutionary gospel is "Jesus did all this great/hard stuff, including suffering at the hands of the injustices of the Powers, so we don't have to." I simply don't buy it. Nor do I buy that what Jesus suffered that we don't have to refers primarily to some anger/wrath of the Father. Not to turn this into a debate on hell, but from a storytelling angle this plot device is about as thin, sometimes, as superhero comic books. The hero has nothing to do unless the architect of say, the Marvel or DC universe, also creates super-villains for the heroes to trounce. Because obviously (with the exception of Superman IV the movie), all-powerful heroes can't simply stop wars, disarm the planet, and help create alternative forms of energy. There would be too much dissonance between this fictitious world and our world; we might be able to suspend disbelief about men wearing tights, but not about that. So superhero comics create the problem they want to solve: super-villains. Similarly, I feel like contemporary evangelicalism (and maybe Christendom in general going back to Medieval times) creates the problem - the abiding hatred & wrath of God - that it then presents the solution to: Jesus' penal, substitutionary death on our behalf.

I sound more negative than I intend to; I freely acknowledge that there's something in both (say) Lutheran and Wesleyan formulations of conversion & grace that are deeply liberating. I'm still trying to figure out what that is, though. I'm reading some Robert Farrar Capon to help me.

"The whole thing begins to make sense when we get our Trinitarian thinking straight…" I agree, Bob. And yet it's important, still, to get straight what God is incarnating into the world to remedy. If it's the world's sin, death, and violence then that's one thing. Then the Father sending the Son to deal with that, or God incarnating himself to redeem us from that, is heroic - even if it's knowingly leading to death, we can rightly speak of that death as sacrificial. But if what God's coming to redeem us from is a scheme of God's own deliberate making - the whole comic book creators making villians for the heroes thing - then the Father sending the Son to absorb the Father's own wrath becomes (what has been infamously described as) child abuse. And an incarnational understanding is not much better: This becomes a suicidal God, killing Godself to play by his own rules.

And yet I wonder if our disagreement is more semantic than substantial. Because I really do resonate when you say "But what is even less obvious than that is that forgiveness itself is suffering. When you want payback and vengeance and you refrain, you are the one who pays. When you want them to suffer and yet refuse to strike out at them, you suffer, you take back within yourself the full brunt of what’s been done. Forgiveness is willingly living with the consequences of someone else’s sin. Doing wrong, hurting others causes suffering. It can’t be escaped. We simply get to choose by forgiving or not forgiving which flavor of suffering we’ll experience when someone wrongs us.". Though I still wrestle with the logic of "If God wasn’t going to pay us back for the wrongs we do to each other and to Him, then He was going to have to pay." But, as you admonish, I'm still wrestling!

[ryan]

"We say it so much that it's axiomatic; to question it is to be met with blank stares. My question is In what way does Jesus' particular suffering in a first century empire make *any* others whole? How are Jesus' trumped-up charges interpreted as 'someone else's sin and rebellion'?"

Hey Mike, I think this is a great question, and every good Bible student knows they must pay attention to the historical context of the passage they are reading in order to rightly understand it.

I would propose back to you that the answer to your question is the Kingdom of God. That a vein of confusion and misunderstanding runs through Jesus' disciples during his ministry as to his mission being one in which he was building God's Kingdom and not an earthly one. The resurrection, made possible through Jesus' work on the cross, is answer to both the first century person, and the 21st century person that we can be made "whole". Because resurrection tells us that Jesus has conquered Satan, sin, and DEATH so that we might be reconciled to God and have the eternal life that God intended for humanity.

This makes sense as to why Jesus would say, "destroy this temple and I will rebuild it in three days." The temple is the place where sacrifice occurs and peace with God is made. Jesus is the ultimate and final temple. He is the ultimate and final sacrifice because he willingly lays down his life as a ransom for many (Mk. 10:45). We cheat ourselves when we do not take advantage of the hidden meanings we are privy to through the gospel narrators that Jesus disciples and audience did not have access to.

So while we should look for the cultural significance we should not miss the wider theme of the Gospels that Jesus was always clear that his war was not against an empire or Caesar, but against death, evil, and Satan. This is why he constantly refuted his his disciples when they tried to orient his message toward one of an earthly kingdom, his mission was always to inaugurate the Kingdom of God.

Ohh, and Bob, wonderful post very well written.

[bobhyatt]

Dan Brown:
Well, it makes sense only if we understand the idea that the Word was with God and the Word was God- that is, that Jesus is at the same time both God, and NOT the Father.

[bobhyatt]

Hey Mike- thanks for the response- I'm out of town and can't go too in depth here, but I would say these couple of things.

I read this morning of John the Baptist seeing Jesus for the first time and proclaiming: "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." I think that, on a nutshell, is it- God providing Himself a sacrifice that both covers and takes away our sin.
Whether we like the image of the substitute or not, it's simply too clear to deny. But through seeing it in terms of God's mercy, His desire to recreate the world and us and our human desire for justice, it begins to come together. In other words- we all want God to just forgive US of the little things we have done, our lies, hatred, etc. Why would someone have to pay for that? WHy can't God just let it go?
But what about rape? Genocide? CHild abuse? SUrely we don't want God to just wink at that, right? Right?
We have a sense of Justice- we know that stuff has to be called out, and yet we still want forgiveness to be an option, even for rapists, right? So we want both Justice... and redemption.

Enter Jesus and the Cross.

[Dan Brown]

Right — it wasn't the Father (the sender) Himself that was on the cross. That's the problem I see with that part of your argument.

[bobhyatt]

Correct- not the Father on the cross. But still very much GOD on the cross.
God both judging sin and paying for it.
Mindblowing. :)

[robbymac]

Bob,

You rock. This was one of your best yet.

Thanks for putting it so well. I'll be linkin' ya!

[Dan Brown]

Nothing mindblowing there aside from the nebulous exposition. But there you stand firmly in a proud tradition dating back at least to 325 A.D. :)

Love ya, man!

[bobhyatt]

Dan- It's not meant to blow your mind, it's meant to move your heart.
But for that, it needs your will... or rather, your willlingness, to be moved.

As people have been being moved from 33AD and on, starting with a Roman soldier who recognized who he had just crucified.

I don;t want to debate this with you- but like trying to look at "love" and see the scientific explanation, you'll always come up short. It's not so much science as art. And if you want to call that nebulous, so be it. But mercy, forgiveness, the mystery of God's person and His love will probably always be *just* beyond our ability to master intellectually.

That won't satisfy you, I know, but it's still true :)
Love you too!

[Dan Brown]

On the contrary, I agree with you there. I'm perfectly okay with the idea that we don't have the words to properly explain the relationship between the Father and the Son; my issue is with building theological positions on the shaky foundation of human attempts to describe said relationship metaphorically. On the larger topic, I favor the ransom theory, and hence I'm with you in seeing God suffering, as opposed to inflicting suffering. I just don't think it's proper here to blur the distinction between the person who made the decision and the person who yielded to the decision and bodily suffered the consequences.

By the way, I apologize for the snide tone of my previous comment. It came out a bit more personal than I intended it.

[Bryan Riley]

Excellent. I love how the cross is paradox. At the Cross we can understand how God is infinitely merciful and infinitely just. At the Cross we can understand how God is our Judge and our Lover. At the Cross we can understand how God is Holy and our Friend. It is the Cross that becomes the intersection of eternity.

[John L]

Bob, you've beautifully identified the living essence of the cross. It was never meant to be a nailed-down static idea, but an ever-new, infinitely mysterious act of perfect love and reconciliation. It perennially raises more questions than answers. It sustains us in dynamic tension.

I have all but abandoned Christendom and the endless superstitions of religion and religious culture. But the cross remains – not as a totem of certainty, but as a mirror of the depths of my illness, my blindness, my inability to love. It is in this tension that I glimpse Christ.

[Hank]

The atonement wasn't that God's reputation was "besmirched" and so He required payment. It was that His justice demanded it. Only through the Cross God can both be just and justify the ungodly...

[Ken Bussell]

Hey Bob, great post. You mentioned that you dislike the overemphasis on God crushing Jesus. I think that's where I agree with you most. The atonement IS a multi-faceted gem. And yet this post and most of the comments continue to overemphasize it. I understand your point about not wanting to lose the idea of substitution. But i don't think we are in imminent danger of that. What evangelicals have lost are all the other facets. What I hope for is a renewed emphasis, a re-education if you will, with regard to all that the cross means. To do this, maybe penal substitution needs to take a back seat for a while so people can hear the whole story.