Why did Christ die?
This is the question for Good Friday.
Christians would normally gather in holy places across the globe, but this year is different.
This year humanity experiences a global pandemic, they sit at home on this day.
But the question should still be pondered. Why did Christ die?
Many evangelical voices claim a monopoly on this question. Jesus died because of the enormity of our sins in our place and for the debt it incurred. The kernels of truth that might exist in this proposal are so obscured that they lose all meaning.
The debt logic existed in some capacity since the earliest Christians, but it never really took the majority seat in the theological imagination until the turn of the first millennium. There are many theologians to blame for this shift, but the biggest culprit is was a honor/debt culture of the wider world. Citizens inhabiting this culture sought to give theological support to the culture so that it might retain its Christian status.
Culture always has power as its aim.
Then comes the crucifixion. Jesus being one of infinite world offers the obedience and death that we could not and satisfies the debt we owe. Therefore, Jesus had to die for the greater good of giving salvation to the masses.
The logic goes like this. One person suffered so all this good can come from it and others would not. His suffering had a purpose.
The problem here is this: the theology projected out onto the world.
The worst of it fell on the bodies who experienced this logic of surrogacy in slavery. To summarize, Jesus is a model for humans to understand their suffering as divinely ordered toward the end of some greater good.
(I would highly recommend Delores Williams excellent piece on this very issue)
This entire blog could devote itself to all the different kinds of theological bile that emerges from this: God as the architect of evil, redemptive suffering, everything happens for a reason, prosperity gospel. However, I wish to focus on one.
Testimony Pornography.
The story is simple: God caused me to suffer and potentially die so that I can reach the lives of others. Even if one is saved, it was all worth it.
Let us explore the picture of God this presupposes. God turns some of God’s creatures into instruments in order to save others. God causing the events of a testimony at the price of extreme trauma, sickness, and death for the individual.
This should offend every moral sensibility in our hearts and minds.
But you can see how this maps on to God’s death in Christ.
Well, why did God die?
Notice I am not saying God had to die, but rather God did die. I ask this question: why?
I propose two answers.
1) God was an innocent victim that suffered at the hands of unjust power. Good Friday’s liturgy is this, God has died and we have killed him. Borrowing from Delores Williams, Jesus dies at the hands of the mob for those he came to save. It is not a path to surrogate suffering, and thus must not be a buttress for that theological logic. Quite simply put, Jesus ruffled enough feathers that he comes to a choice: either stop his mission to live the rest of his days in peace or keep loving those he came to save and die at their hands. He chose the latter and Good Friday remembers the tragedy of this moment.
Jesus’s death is a reminder that the powers will kill you to maintain their own religious authority. Those who tell you that your suffering is for the purpose of saving others perpetuates this kind of power.
2) This I borrow from the ancient understanding espoused by our earliest Christian ancestors, namely that the death of God is the death of death. I maintain this logic still inside Williams’s provocative claim, but even in his innocent death, death meets its end. The early Church Fathers and Mothers attest to this and all Scripture was at its beginning read through this theological principle.
The pastoral theology present here is important. To the girl who suffers alone in the hospital room wondering why she suffers, God comes near and says, “no more.” God did not cause her suffering, nor does he desire it for some greater purpose. Rather, God shares in and suffers this death and suffering because death is not an instrument of God, it is the enemy (1 Cor. 15:26). Furthermore, this is not a path for our imitation, but rather this is uniquely God’s task.
To carry Christ’s death in our bodies is not for our bodies to be an instrument of salvation to others, but to recognize that only God saves. And this God saves through rendering death and suffering meaningless.
With these two things in mind, we can confidently say this:
God’s death does not reveal divine meaning in suffering. In fact, it shows its lack of divine meaning in suffering.
God must make a way where there is no way, no purpose, and no glory.
The reason why Christians worship the old rugged cross is not because it gives meaning to their suffering, but rather it proclaims its end. The one who is crucified is also raised. Therefore, suffering, death, and their meaninglessness will not have the final say on our lives.
The extenuating questions remain: should we rejoice in our suffering?, what about those who recover from ailments?, what about Job?, why should I pray?, is the lamb of God crucified before the foundations of the world?
Yes, rejoice, but we must recognize those words are written to believers who endure the unjust powers of empire. They rejoice because they know that suffering indicates their refusal to collaborate with the powers that crucify Jesus. This is not suffering that includes a right to be homophobic, to sell a cake to who ever they want, to not give proper benefits to their employees, but rather the suffering of crucifixion as a result of not worshiping the gods of death.
Praise God for those who do not die because of illness. It is a gift. But there is not a formula for who lives and who dies. Much of it is related to the gods of death we serve and not divine desires that some might headline events to tell their tale of suffering and pain as spiritual pornography for the herd.
Furthermore, visit and pray for the sick and dying. This is a central teaching of the faith. It is so that those who suffer may know that they are not alone, but rather are attended to by the many in the communion of the Holy Spirit. I do believe in miracles, resurrection, and the life ever lasting, but I refuse to believe in a formula where one dies and another lives for divine purpose.
This leads me to Job. Many readers focus on the beginning and ignore the end. When Job asks “why do I suffer?” he is not given an answer. The fundamentalist will overplay the beginning at the end. But read in its entirety, Job tells one story: there is no answer to suffering, there is only God. Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar are wrong. Job is honored in God’s sight because he argues that his suffering is unjust. This is what God affirms and God is content to say that suffering is not the final word. If Job were a lesson in divine purpose of suffering, it would say so. To say it is bends and contorts it beyond recognition.
Your suffering and sickness are not the result are the result of divine purpose. God did not love other creatures more than you so that your story might save them while leaving you with trauma. I don’t know why some people survive sickness and others don’t, but I do know it is not because God loves some of God’s creatures more than others. God’s willingness to submit to the same death of you and me shows that God does not spare Godself from the worst or our experiences. And in this submission to death, death dies.
So we should not look for the meaning in the suffering of a girl, sick in a hospital, but rather pray “our lord come” (1 Cor. 16:22) and look for the day when God will not explain why a girl had to suffer but will instead wipe every tear from her eye, for look I make all things new. (Rev 21: 5)
