One of the most common questions about the Cross goes something like this: “Even if I could believe that Jesus was God, and even if could believe that my sins were in need of pardon, I have no earthly idea why God would have to be brutally murdered and die for my sins. I mean, if someone does something mean to me, there is no necessary reason for me to die in order to simply tell them that it’s ok and all is forgiven. So why can’t God just tell me it’s ok and all is forgiven, too? Why all the blood and guts?”
I want to say up front that I think this question is perfectly legitimate – it is a natural, thoughtful, and honest question. I wonder it, too. So although I’m going to attempt a rudimentary answer here, don’t think that I’m dismissing your question the way I might dismiss, say, an attempt to argue that brussel sprouts taste better than cheesy bagels.
Now, my first answer to the question “why was the Cross necessary?” is that I’m not sure it was necessary; at least, not in the sense that we typically use the word. I’m sure it was purposeful and loving and hugely important; I’m sure that if God did it, He didn’t do it on a light whim in a kind of ambling-through-the-woods-and-look-there’s-an-acorn-and-I-think-I’ll-feed-this-squirrel fashion. But necessary? I don’t know. To be a Christian, you don’t have to believe that the Great Exchange of Jesus’ life for yours was necessary; you have to believe it happened. After all, I don’t believe my marriage to my abundantly-incredible wife was necessary in the sense that the outcome of two plus two is necessarily four; but I do believe that my marriage actually happened. It is not the less significant in my life because it lacked the mathematical necessity of rudimentary addition.
So in the past few weeks, as I’ve been discussing what the Cross meant to me, I don’t think I’ve ever really thought that it was necessary, in the sense that it was the only way God could possibly have solved the problem of my sin. I probably implied that because I wasn’t talking at a logical, but rather at an experiential, level. When I examine it intellectually, I realize that it would be truer to say this: That while I can certainly conceive of other ways God could have taken away my guilt, in my own life, the Cross is the only one that ever actually worked. I mean, Jesus’ Cross is the only thing that ever solved the unique puzzle called Luke Conway.
Having said all that namby-pamby personal stuff, however, it is still worth pausing a bit from a more objective vantage point to consider what lessons we may learn about why God would die for our sins, instead of pardoning us in the more normal Presidential Clemency kind of fashion. After all, no President to my knowledge has ever felt compelled to take the electric chair for his or her subjects when granting them a full pardon; and I don’t recall their pardons being ineffective for the want of a substitutionary sacrifice; so why should God, of all beings, take the electric chair for us?
Mary Carlin was a devout Catholic women who took a job as a secretary so she could support her cheapest viagra price children. ENT specialis without prescriptions mastercard t can stop any previous medication if that is causing damage to your ear or may suggest you the best way to take the medication and continue enjoying sexual life. The truth is that the product is a supplement that has not been FDA approved but is marketed as a treatment female viagra 100mg for depression. However, the main pathology behind this debilitating cheap viagra from canada condition and it takes a toll on their emotional health and negatively affects their relationships with their partners. As is typical of me, the things that leap to my mind in answer to this question are irritating points of practical psychology. So let’s get that out of the way first – the points of practical psychology. Next week, in the final entry in this series on the meaning of the cross, we’ll talk about the more logical theology.
From the viewpoint of its effects on people, I’d like to note that dying on my behalf is actually a far more effective way of demonstrating limitless and perfect love than is simply offering clemency-at-a-distance. I mean, imagine for a second that a President of the United States did offer to switch places with a criminal, as a means of pardon – and the exchange actually occurred, and the President died, and the criminal went free. I’d be willing to wager a lot of money that the odds of that criminal going back to a life of crime would go way, way down, compared to a regular pardon-at-a-distance. When it costs someone something to offer grace, it suddenly turns from cheap grace to real grace. And real grace is more likely to make a difference.
Well, that’s partially how I feel on multiple levels about the Cross. God’s not cheap. He’s not into granting something that costs Him nothing. He leads not just by word, but by example. So sure, I can easily imagine a world where God just says “all is forgiven” and that’s that. But would that really demonstrate to me how important I am to God? Would that really demonstrate to me how bad my own sin was, and how important it is that I change for the better? Not likely – because it didn’t cost God anything to do it.
And it certainly would not demonstrate the personal nature of God’s affection for me, nor would it demonstrate the personal way God Himself takes our sin (we sin against Him, the Bible says). I mean, the President can offer clemency to people without ever meeting them or feeling the impact of their crimes at all; but our crimes directly impact God in some way hard for us to see, and I think He wants us to be aware of that – and then realize how far He is willing to go to make us free.
And then there’s this: Jesus said there is no greater love than dying for others; and I think that’s right. There is nothing quite like knowing that Someone would lay down His life on my behalf. And if there is no greater love than that, then how could God do any less than the greatest possible love? I would never be able to feel the joy of knowing that He gave everything He could for me without it; that He didn’t just wave his pardon stick and let me go; no, He, God, infinite, untouchable, unkillable – He, God, He Himself, became finite, suffered, and was killed in some incomprehensible way; out of love for me. Now when we ask if the crucifixion was necessary, I say I don’t know – but I do know that His dying for me produced effects of a sort that would be hard to replicate in any other way.
I am no expert on psychology (or anything else, for that matter), but I’m quite skeptical of your “clemency” analogy and the “practical psychology” you associate with it. If I were a condemned criminal and the Governor of Texas (let’s say) issued either a pardon or a commutation of my sentence, I’d be grateful; but if he strapped himself into the electric chair to die in my place, as a way of demonstrating how much he loved me, I’d be horrified and appalled–frankly, I’d think he was insane. I don’t, however, see that it would affect the odds on my recidivism.
I don’t know if you’ve read the novel BARABBAS, by Par Lagerkvist, but it explores the very phenomenon about which you write: how does a guilty man (which is to say, a man) react when an innocent man willingly dies in his place? Suffice it to say that the psychology is a bit more complicated than you suggest. Barabbas, having been pardoned so that Jesus can be crucified, is puzzled, angered, resentful, and suspicious; he is also burdened by a debt he does not know how to repay to someone he’s never even met.
From a certain perspective (I was raised Roman Catholic), the cross merely adds to human guilt. We are first held guilty (deservedly so, perhaps) of our quotidian sins; then we are held guilty of the monumental, unprecedented sin of forcing God himself to die for our sake (in my 6th grade classroom at St. Michael’s School, we hung a banner in the window during Lent: “We are sorry, Jesus…”). Perhaps that latter guilt, a guilt beyond imagining, is precisely our cross to bear; that is, maybe it’s God’s way of exacting revenge on humanity for what it put him through.
I’d agree with Jack on that one – the guilt aspect of it is huge. I think we’ve talked about how the guilt-cycle is really potent, especially in Catholicism with constant reinforcement beyond the normal stuff, but even just with the concept itself without all the bangles it works. You are bad – you’ve done at least something bad in your life, and because of that a pretty decent fellow had himself killed to pardon you worthless heap of sin. And not just a decent fellow, but the very being of goodness itself you basically murdered with your badness. That’s not nice, and if you are at all susceptible to caring about this good fellow (or good people in general suffering) you’ll feel huge guilt about being so cruel, and thus be compelled to ‘go forth and not sin again’.
But I personally thought that the Cross was, like Jack suggested and as Christopher Hitchens mentioned, something I as an individual never asked for. I like the question of if we were there at the crucifixion and had the ability to prevent Jesus from dying, a man whom we knew was full-well innocent and undeserving of being killed (at least if you accept that non-Roman cults are alright to keep around for the stability of the emerging Empire, which is kind of a political question beside the point…), would you save him? The interesting thing is most Atheists say of course unless they are right assholes, but Christians often struggle with it. And strangely enough a lot will say they’d let it through because, basically, Jesus would be alright in the end – and if that is kept in mind, it negates the whole ‘he suffered for your sins’ point. But there are other answers too, and I thought it was interesting.
The other big thing I am curious about is what you said in your last response in the former comment thread, namely that Christianity only has meaning if Jesus was divine (if I read that right… Could be wrong). If Jesus was not divine, if he actually was just a man like anyone else – and not the two-in-one compromise established as doctrine in the Nician Creed – would it all be ‘meaningless’? What does that even mean? I thought about it, and granted it may make Jesus’s death as meaningful as a good man getting betrayed and executed which doesn’t quite match dying for everyone, but really most deaths are ‘meaningless’ in themselves anyway. People attach meanings and purposes to them after the fact to feel better about them usually. But I never quite liked all the focus of Jesus being on his execution more than what he was teaching. It is equivalent to spending most of the time exalting Socrates for drinking hemlock and ending his life on his own terms with grace and peace than for what he taught about reasoning and always questioning assumptions. It is part of his story, an important part, but Socrates didn’t live to die, and I don’t think Jesus did either. To me, Jesus was a teacher of a new perspective and religious philosophy who fell victim to the politics and evils of his fellow man. But just like Socrates, his life and teachings would still have merit even if he wasn’t divine – especially so, because then we could examine his teachings with the foundational question of “Is this true?”, which he who believes Jesus was God and Truth itself cannot.
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