Did Jesus Have To Die?

There is a question about the cross that Christians are often taught to answer before we have really been allowed to explore it properly: why did Jesus have to die?

For much of my Christian life, I thought I knew the answer. Human beings had sinned, God was holy and just, sin required punishment, and Jesus took that punishment upon himself so that God could forgive us. The cross was where the debt was paid, and the obstacle between humanity and God was finally removed.

There are many more careful and sophisticated versions of that theology than the one I have just described. That way of understanding the cross is often called penal substitution, but it is not simply the idea of an angry God punishing an unwilling Jesus, whatever some of its critics suggest. At its best, it takes seriously the reality of sin, the justice of God and the New Testament language about Christ giving himself for us.

But there is an awkward detail in the Gospels that cannot be avoided.

Jesus was forgiving people before he died.

Jesus Was Already Forgiving People

In Mark, some people bring a paralyzed man to Jesus. Unable to get through the crowd, they remove part of the roof and lower him down in front of him.

Jesus looks at the man and says, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”

It causes an immediate controversy. Some of the teachers of the law sitting nearby think Jesus is committing blasphemy, and their objection makes perfect theological sense. Who can forgive sins but God alone?

What Jesus does next is fascinating. He does not tell them that forgiveness will become possible after his death, or that he is offering the man forgiveness on credit, with the understanding that a payment will eventually be made. Instead, he tells them that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, and then he heals the man.

Something similar happens in Luke when a woman, described simply as someone who had lived a sinful life, comes to Jesus while he is eating at the home of a Pharisee. She weeps at his feet, wipes them with her hair and anoints them with perfume. Jesus tells her, “Your sins are forgiven.” Again, the people around the table ask the obvious question: Who is this who even forgives sins?

All of this happens before Good Friday. That leaves us with an uncomfortable question if our understanding of the cross begins with the assumption that God could not forgive anyone until Jesus died.

Because apparently, Jesus was already doing it.

The Cross Did Not Make God Loving

The problem becomes even more interesting when we look at the way the New Testament describes God’s motivation for sending Jesus.

Perhaps the most famous verse in the Bible begins, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son…” Notice the order. God does not give the Son and therefore becomes able to love the world. God loves the world and, therefore, gives the Son.

The same thing happens in 1 John: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” Paul tells the Romans that God demonstrates his love for us because Christ died for us while we were still sinners. Again, the movement begins with love.

This matters because Christians can sometimes tell the story of salvation as though Jesus changes God’s attitude towards humanity.

God is angry; Jesus dies; God’s anger is satisfied; and humanity can finally be loved again. But that is not really the story these passages tell. The cross does not persuade God to love humanity; it begins with a God who already does.

Which brings us straight back to the original question. If God already loves, and if Jesus is already forgiving people, why does Jesus have to die?

Perhaps We Have Made the Cross Too Small

One possibility is that we have asked the Cross to solve a much smaller problem than the New Testament says it solves.

We often look for a single explanation of the cross, a single mechanism or sentence that tells us exactly what happened between God and humanity on Good Friday. The New Testament seems considerably less neat and tidy than that. Its writers repeatedly reach for different images to describe what happened through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Sometimes Jesus’ death is described as a sacrifice. Hebrews develops this language at length, presenting Christ as both priest and offering and contrasting his once-for-all self-giving with the repeated sacrifices of the temple. Sometimes it is a ransom. Jesus says that the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life “as a ransom for many.”

Elsewhere, it becomes reconciliation, the repairing of a broken relationship. In Colossians, the cross is described as a victory over the powers that enslave and destroy. There is also the language of Jesus suffering for us, of a new covenant, of his suffering becoming an example to follow, and even of Christians somehow sharing in his death and resurrection.

These images do not have to cancel one another out.

Perhaps the problem begins when we take one of them and ask it to explain everything else. The New Testament seems content to use several different pictures, perhaps because what happened at the cross is simply too large to be contained by one.

Ransom Paid to Whom?

The ransom saying is a good example.

Jesus says in Mark, “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” It is a powerful image. In the ancient world, ransom was associated with release. Someone who had been enslaved or captured could be redeemed by the payment of a price, while Jewish Scripture also contains a wider language of redemption and liberation.

So, it is natural to ask the next question. If Jesus’ life is the ransom, who receives the payment? God? The devil? Death?

The interesting thing is that Mark never tells us. We can build theological systems that attempt to answer that question, and Christians have done exactly that, but the Gospel itself seems much more interested in what the ransom does than in explaining the mechanics of the transaction.

People who were captive are being set free.

Perhaps that is enough for the metaphor to do its work. A metaphor can tell us something true without answering every question we can ask of it. Ransom tells us something about liberation. Reconciliation tells us something about a restored relationship. Sacrifice tells us something about sin, cleansing and self-offering. Victory tells us that the powers which enslave and destroy do not have the final word.

Participation says something different again. Salvation is not simply something that happens somewhere else on our behalf. Somehow, we are drawn into the death and resurrection of Jesus ourselves.

They are different windows looking at the same enormous landscape.

None of this means the New Testament has no language of sacrifice, blood or Jesus dying for us. It plainly does, especially in Hebrews. But those images sit alongside ransom, reconciliation, victory, covenant and participation. My hesitation begins when one of those images is made to explain what was happening on the cross, as though everything else is simply another way of saying the same thing.

Jesus Did Not Simply Die. He Was Killed.

There is another danger in spending too long discussing theories of what the cross means: we can forget what actually happened.

Jesus did not simply “die for our sins” in an abstract theological space. He lived in a particular place, under a particular empire, at a particular moment in history. He taught about the kingdom of God, challenged religious hypocrisy, and disturbed people who were comfortable. He entered Jerusalem surrounded by crowds, overturned tables in the temple, was betrayed, arrested, tried and finally handed over to Rome.

Then, Rome crucified him.

That historical story matters because the cross reveals something about sin, not only because sin requires forgiveness, but because we can actually see what human sin does. It betrays, accuses, protects power, mocks, tortures and kills. According to Christianity, God enters directly into that world rather than remaining safely outside it.

Perhaps the cross is not about Jesus changing God’s mind about humanity.

Perhaps it is about what God’s love looks like when it enters a world like ours.

So, Did Jesus Have to Die?

I am increasingly unsure whether this question has the simple answer I once thought it did, partly because so much depends on what we mean by the word have.

Did Jesus have to die historically? Given the path his ministry took, confrontation with those holding religious and political power becomes increasingly understandable. Jesus does not seem interested in staying safe by becoming less troublesome.

Did he have to die in fulfilment of Scripture? The New Testament certainly thinks so. Again and again, the early Christians return to Israel’s Scriptures to understand what has happened, and the Gospels themselves remember Jesus saying that the Son of Man “must” suffer.

Did his death have saving significance? Again, the New Testament leaves very little room for doubt. The earliest Christians did not regard Good Friday as an unfortunate interruption before the real miracle of Easter. They believed something happened through the cross that was central to God’s work of salvation.

But there is another version of the question: was violent death the only conceivable mechanism by which an all-powerful God could forgive humanity? That is a much bigger claim, and I am no longer convinced that Scripture gives us enough information to answer it as confidently as we sometimes do.

The Cross Is Bigger Than Forgiveness

Perhaps the question becomes easier when we stop imagining that forgiveness is the only problem Christianity is trying to solve.

The human problem is not simply that we have a guilty record somewhere that needs to be cleared. We are alienated from God and from one another. We become trapped by things we cannot easily escape and participate in systems that harm other people. We wound and are wounded. We fear death, create enemies, carry shame, and repeat patterns we know are destructive.

We need forgiveness, but we also need reconciliation. We need liberation. We need healing. We need evil to be defeated. We need death itself not to have the final word, and we need to become something new. The New Testament reaches for all of those ideas when it tries to explain Jesus. That may be why one theory of the cross has never been enough.

Perhaps the cross is not the moment when God finally becomes willing to forgive us. Perhaps it is the moment when the love and forgiveness that were always in God enter fully into the world we have made.

And then comes resurrection.

Christianity does not finally proclaim that death is the price God demands before life can begin again. It proclaims that God enters death and defeats it.

The cross matters. But perhaps it matters for reasons larger, stranger and more hopeful than we sometimes allow.