Today people who follow Jesus remember His death.
Arrested the night before and subjected to a sham trial, Jesus was turned over to the Roman authorities and charged with sedition.
The Romans accepted the charge and proceeded to mete out Roman justice.
Jesus was stripped, beaten, mocked, spit upon, and ultimately crucified.
Israel’s Messiah.
Crucified.
Scandalous!
Soon after these events, and Jesus’ subsequent resurrection and glorification, people needed to understand what had happened.
They thought and studied and prayed.
They discussed and reasoned and argued.
They were all certain that something significant had taken place.
But, were unsure of exactly what that was.
It wasn’t long before the early followers of Jesus saw in His death a parallel to an event that had taken place more than a millennium earlier. Jesus, they deduced, was God’s own Passover Lamb offered so that Sin and Death might no longer have a hold on the Creation. It was through Jesus’ own blood that God was proven faithful to the covenant that God made with Abraham. That covenant was that God, through Abraham’s lineage, would bless the whole Cosmos. God would, in effect, reverse the curse that had hung over humanity from the very beginning.
I know that I’m not giving the best or most concise view of what took place on that hill 2,000 years ago.
That’s mostly because I simply don’t understand it myself.
Why did Jesus need to die?
Was it because of MY sins?
Was it because of some personified thing called Sin?
The writer of Genesis stated that when God confronted Cain about his anger God told Cain that Sin was crouching outside his door. But, that Cain could overcome that.
If Cain could overcome Sin, then why did Jesus need to die?
If people who don’t know Jesus or Israel’s God can live upright and moral lives apart from God, why did Jesus need to die?
If Indigenous cultures contain no concept of Sin and live quite happily, why did Jesus need to die?
I know that common theological understandings say something like the blood of Jesus cleanses us. That it makes us whole. That, somehow, the blood makes peace between God and the Cosmos.
Ok. How?
Why was that necessary?
What actually took place?
The answers that I have heard don’t ring true to me.
Yeah, some folks say I ask too many questions.
I should just shut up and accept what people way smarter than I am have to say.
Uh, no. That’s never gonna happen.
I will continue to ask.
I will continue to seek.
I will continue to knock on the door.
Maybe, just maybe, one day a light will flash in my brain and I’ll finally get it.
Maybe not.
But, that’s ok.
Because whatever actually took place in the Cosmos on that day that we remember today, I will still follow Jesus.
I will…