Contributor: Jeremy L. Smith
I imagine this question weighed heavy upon the disciples on the Road to Emmaus.(1) It was just a few days after the tragedy of the crucifixion of Jesus, and their confusion and befuddlement and heartbreak must have still been incredibly poignant. The loss of the one they thought to be the Messiah must have been a punch to the gut, a sweep of the rug from under their feet that left them flat on their back and dazed. “Why did Jesus have to die? Wasn’t he supposed to save us?!” These questions and more must have been on their hearts as they walked.
Then Jesus showed up.
They didn’t recognize him, at first. And through Jesus prodding (him “playing dumb” so to speak), the disciples begin to bemoan the loss of Jesus, the one whom they thought would redeem Israel, and to tell Jesus of the incredible reports of some crazy women who said they saw him alive again. They don’t know quite what to make of it, but Jesus retorts, “How foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” And then, “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.”
What I wouldn’t give to be there for that! Jesus personally explaining from the complete Old Testament why the Messiah had to die before entering his glory? I would sign up for that class any day. One has to wonder what he might have said to the disciples that day, on the dusty road to Emmaus.
I am not going to try and venture a guess. I am sure there is much that might be said about the foreshadowing for the Messiah’s death (and glory) in the Old Testament. But a full blown explication of the Old Testament in light of Jesus is a bit outside my pay grade, and way above the scope of what can be covered in a blog. Why did Jesus have to die? How can we make sense of the Cross? These are gigantic questions. And the Christian discussion on them spans centuries. A survey of everything Christians have said through the years is also (regrettably) too big a task for a single blog post. So instead, let me offer some simple sketches for why Jesus had to die, and then a modest proposal for a helpful way of asking the question, “Why did Jesus have to die?” that goes all the way back to Emmaus.
So, here’s the part where you should put your theology pants on. Don’t worry, it shouldn’t be too painful. Let’s go back to the garden.
We all know the story. God creates humanity and tells them to be creative, have kids, live life, and extend his wise rule over earth.(2) Oh, and also, not to eat from a particular tree in the garden, because on the day they do, death will overtake them. Then the Serpent comes, both Adam and Eve sin, and both enter into a cursed existence under the dominion of death. Humanity loses a life centered in the blessing of God, and things pretty much only get worse from there on out. The rest of Genesis (and even the whole Old Testament) shows how humanity goes further and further off the deep end, how we rebel more and more against God and each other, and how our community with God and others is dismantled and destroyed. Yet even in the Genesis account, God offers hope: He promises that one will come who will be victorious over all these things. (3)
From just the Genesis account, we can begin to identify the forces arrayed against us:
1) There is the Serpent, or Satan, the tempter. There are evil forces in the cosmos who are emphatically NOT on our side.
2) There is sin, our own destructive choices. In rebellion against God, we choose to sin—and our sin removes us from the blessing of God.
3) Death. Sin leads to death. Our death physically, sure, but also our own spiritual death. Our hearts are corrupted, and we no longer have the kind of blessed, joyous, loving, full and complete life for which God intended us.
These three forces show up continually throughout Scripture, keeping humanity from God and from each other. Evil, Sin, and Death. This unholy trinity is the plague that haunts us throughout history. And there is nothing we can do about it. That is the real crux of the problem. Evil, Sin, and Death may be things outside of us, but they are also things inside of us. Now, way down deep, down in our very heart, we are dead, with a propensity to sin, and slavery to evil—as Jeremiah says, “the heart is deceitful above all things.”(4) Israel, as God’s chosen people, was supposed to reverse the situation and bring humanity back into the blessing of God. But they too found the task impossible, since their hearts were corrupted and dead, just like the rest of us.
So, overall, the Bible presents a host of problems for humanity:
Our sin is unpayable, a debt and offense for which it is impossible to pay.
Our sin is a disease and we are mired in the muck of it, our hands dirtied by our choices with no way for us to be clean.
Death stands hauntingly over us, the inevitable conclusion to all our lives, an unconquerable adversary.
Evil accosts us at every turn, and we are held captive by the spiritual forces of evil in the cosmos—enemies we cannot understand or fight.
Our hearts are irreformable. We cannot change ourselves, cannot escape the black-hole of Evil, Sin, and Death because these very things are in us now.
For all these reasons, Jesus had to die. We can see all of these themes brought to the forefront in Ephesians and Colossians:
“As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath.” (Eph. 2:1-3)
“When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.” (Col. 2:13-15)
The death of Christ is central to defeating all the forces of Evil, Sin, and Death. Through Christ’s death, our debt is paid, our sins are washed away, the Enemy is defeated, and (in light of the resurrection) Death itself is conquered. Through the Incarnation, God himself did what was impossible for us to do: He restored us. In Christ, God reconciled us to himself, bringing us into new life. As perhaps the most famous verse from the Bible puts it: “For God so loved the cosmos that he gave his one and only Son, so that whoever believes in him shall not die, but have eternal life.”(5)
This is only the barest of sketch on “Why Jesus had to die.” I urge the intellectually curious to explore the question more (traditionally considered the issue of Atonement), and see how the thoughts of Christians through the ages might help us understand the work of the Cross more clearly.
As good as all of this theologizing is though, I would like to suggest that we as believers need to do more than offer a theology of the Cross. Instead of asking why Jesus died in purely intellectual and theological ways, we need to ask in personal terms. In other words, instead of asking one another the question, "Why did Jesus die anyways?" we should address our question to Jesus himself: "Why did you die for me? Why did you die for us?" The answer is astounding: “Because I love you, all of you.”
Jesus died for Love. In a very real sense, Jesus did not have to die. Jesus' death was not something forced upon him, it was not something he had to do—as if he had no choice in the matter. In fact just the opposite is true. Jesus did have a choice in the matter, and though he did not have to die for us--he chose to do so anyways. God was not forced or coerced to save us, and there was nothing in us that made us worthy of salvation or mercy, but because of his great love for us God mercifully chose to save us even while we were sinners (Rom. 5:6-8, Eph. 2:4).
Love is not something you merely understand with your head, and so, neither is the Cross. Love is at the heart of the Cross, for God is Love. We make a mistake if think we can simply grasp the statement “God loves us” in the same way we can grasp the statement, “Jeremy had eggs for breakfast.” Understanding the Love of God for us through the Cross is not something we do once, but many times, and we do it more and more deeply over the course of a lifetime.
We cannot ask why Jesus died dispassionately. We need to ask the question like the disciples on the Road to Emmaus did: with burning hearts and confused cries and befuddlement at the nature of the world. We need to not simply ask about Jesus, but we need to ask Jesus himself. We need to look for understanding, not in a single moment, but over the course of a journey. We, on the Emmaus Road, need to ask while walking with Jesus.
~J. L. Smith
(1) See Luke 24 for the whole “Emmaus Road” story.
(2) Gen. 1:28
(3) Gen. 3:15
(4) Jeremiah 17:9
(5) John 3:16
(4) Jeremiah 17:9
(5) John 3:16
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