Why did Jesus Have to Die?

A little book of guidance

Jane Williams

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780281074402
• eBook ISBN: 9780281074440
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

For many people, the crucifixion of Jesus by the Romans is just another tragic fact of history - a cruel travesty of justice, perhaps, but nothing more. But for Christians the death of Jesus has a much deeper and far-reaching significance.

Jane Williams examines the reasons why Jesus' death was seen by his first followers as nothing less than the demonstration of God's love for his creation, and the means by which we all can find forgiveness and redemption, both now and in the world to come.

1

Why did Jesus have to die? The first witnesses

The writers of the New Testament, drawing on the memories and speculations of those who knew Jesus, do not have a clear, systematic answer to the question of why Jesus had to die. They record that the disciples were shocked and frightened by Jesus’ death, and assumed that it meant that they had been mistaken in their identification of him as God’s chosen one. They had no obvious religious framework in which Jesus’ death made sense. As far as they could tell, that was the end of the story of Jesus.

It is only after the resurrection that Jesus’ followers go back over his life and teaching and begin to try to make sense of what has happened. Jesus’ resurrection is God’s vindication of Jesus, God’s claiming of all Jesus’ life and death as, in fact, the work of God, and so now Christians have to make sense of why God allowed Jesus to die.

The disciples recall a few occasions on which Jesus seemed to suggest that he would have to die (cf. Matthew 16.21), though the disciples did not believe it at the time. They notice the fact that Jesus did not avoid arrest, did not try to rouse his followers to fight for his freedom, but went willingly, if sorrowfully, to his trial and death. They also begin to notice the symbolism of the significant last meal that Jesus shared with them.

The Gospels agree that the Last Supper and Jesus’ death are full of the symbolism of the great Jewish feast of the Passover. Passover remembers the mighty act of God to free his people from slavery in the time of Moses. This act of God brought them safely out of Egypt and constituted them as a nation again. So when Jesus shares the Passover meal with his friends, he is drawing on that set of profound allusions to the liberating work of God, which establishes a new, free people. But in place of the usual Passover lamb, Jesus puts himself. It is his blood, not a lamb’s, that marks out the people who are to be saved.3

This supper has become one of the characteristic actions of Christians. It has its roots deep in Jesus’ Jewish understanding, but it also has a new twist, given to it by Jesus’ teaching and death. All four Gospels recount the supper (Matthew 26.26–28; Mark 14.22–24; Luke 22.17–20; John 13—17 is a long meditation on the Last Supper); Acts 2.46 shows the ‘breaking of bread’ as part of earliest practice, and Paul, whose letters are among the first written Christian documents, says that the tradition about the supper is part of the core narrative that every Christian teacher is required to pass on (1 Corinthians 11.23–26). Christians throughout the ages and throughout the world celebrate this supper, with its complex interweaving of history, death, liberation and the creation of a new people, as the defining ritual that gives us our meaning, and, unavoidably, at its heart this supper has the death of Jesus.

So the Passover imagery, reinterpreted through Jesus’ own lens, provides some of the key themes for answering the question of why Jesus had to die.4 It highlights God’s action; it speaks of liberation from slavery; it uses the ancient rite of blood sacrifice; and it draws on the whole biblical account of God’s relationship with the people of Israel. This is a hugely resonant and suggestive set of images, but not yet a clear ‘theory’, nor is it the only lens through which the New Testament makes sense of Jesus’ death.

In 1 Corinthians 15.3 Paul reminds his readers that the tradition about Jesus says that he died ‘for our sins’. Even more dramatically, in Galatians 3.13, he writes that Jesus’ death made him ‘a curse’, or, in 2 Corinthians 5.21 that ‘for our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin’.5 In this particularly challenging saying in 2 Corinthians, Paul is talking about an exchange made possible by Jesus: he is God’s way of reconciling sinners to God; because Jesus becomes ‘sin’, we can become ‘righteousness’ and continue Christ’s work of offering God’s reconciliation. In 1 Peter 2.21–25 the same set of themes appear, suggesting that they were indeed widespread in the early Church. Peter says that the sinless Jesus takes our sins into death, so that we are now ‘dead’ to sin. Jesus waits on God’s judgement, rather than human judgement, and that gives us, too, hope, as we suffer, because, like Jesus, our lives are judged by God, not just by other people. Jesus becomes an exemplar of hope for us.

This is such a complex web of ideas that it is extraordinary that Paul and Peter do not spell it out further. They seem to take it for granted that their readers know this and understand it. Paul comes at this same idea in a number of different ways in several of his letters. For example, in Romans 5, Paul talks of the humanity of all who share in ‘Adam’, which is our humanity, sinful and ending, inevitably, in death; whereas Christ’s humanity is righteous and obedient, and leads to life (an idea picked up again in 1 Corinthians 15.21–22), and we are offered a share in this new humanity ‘in Christ’. In Romans 6, Paul links this web of theological argument to the Christian practice of baptism, which represents our admission into Christ’s death, so that we are now living in a new humanity which is not enslaved to sin and death, but free to live towards the resurrection.

So this set of ideas revolves around Jesus as in some sense our representative and our substitute. In an obedience to the Father that contrasts with our disobedience, Jesus allows himself to be condemned to death as a sinner, condemned both by the legal authorities – the Romans – and by the religious authorities – the chief priests – and by the rest of humanity – his friends and the crowds – all of whom assume that God, too, has abandoned Jesus to his fate. He is willingly judged and willingly takes on the sentence of death. And that means that when he is raised from the dead, what he offers is a new kind of humanity – one that has been vindicated by God in the resurrection. We will explore representation and substitution in another chapter but, for the moment, in this New Testament context, what is being said is that there is a fallen humanity, represented by ‘Adam’. We all share this humanity, marked by our wilful disobedience to God, and so our sad alienation from our true selves. Whether ‘Adam’ is a mythical or historical being, the description of the humanity that we all share still stands. Jesus, the Son of God, is born into this humanity and lives it, as we do, only in Jesus’ case without disobedience to God. Since only God is ‘naturally’ alive, humanity that is not related to God dies, and Jesus accepts this death as part of his ident...

Table of contents

• CoverImage
• About the author
• Little Books of Guidance
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1. Why did Jesus have to die? The first witnesses
• 2. ‘Models’ of the atonement
• 3. The atoning God