Why Did He Have to Die?

Tonight is a night for remembering.  Not the kind of remembering that we do when someone asks for our Social Security number or where we put the car keys or even to name the books of the Bible.  That is recalling facts that might be useful.

Nor is it the kind of active remembering we do when we think of the birth of a child the death of a loved one and recall our feelings from that event as best we can.

No, tonight is to remember by actively entering into again, by placing ourselves in the midst of the night when the first hours of the death of Jesus on the cross were ticking by with a painful slowness that only a traumatic experience can produce.

Just as we walked the Way of the Cross at noon today, entering vicariously the experience of the trauma, the shame, the ignominy of Jesus’ condemnation through the images of the fourteen Stations of the Cross, so tonight is a night for darkness and quiet and reflection.  It is a night for images and sounds and touching our deepest feelings.  Even as we enter and leave in silence, lights unlit, the quiet weeping of loss and guilt and grief associated with death infuses our time together with the haunting sense of being a part of the deepest mystery of life.

How many times have I walked into the hospital room to meet with a patient or a loved one who has just lost their child or parent or partner and heard the question, “Why?”

Picture the disciples, some perhaps now regathered in a secret room, along with others of Jesus’ friends and family on this sorrowful night.  His body in the borrowed tomb, only partially cared for as it should have been.  But the suddenness and horror of it all.  And echoing through every heart, the question of the ages,

From the earliest days of the Christian Church, the question of why has permeated the underlying issues of the nature of Jesus Christ.  How could man kill God?  The implications and theological reflections on this question reverberate to this day and tonight is not a night for that type of study.  Rather, let us simply reflect and let those feelings touch us in the depths of our hearts.

It was old Athanasius, the bishop whom Edie mentioned on Sunday that offered an answer to the question of why Jesus had to die – and on a cross at that – many hundreds of years ago.  In order to answer the question, he had to go back to creation itself.  When God separated light from dark, when he spoke existence into being from non-existence.  But to create human, it took something more than a word – it took the very breath of God.

Infused with Spirit, the life force, that which was dirt became life.  Human meant a perfect created being with place and position – in Paradise, with a child-like relationship of innocence and obedience with the Father.  But in a simple act of disobedience, what was brought into existence died – and leaving the road of existence, of place and position in God – men and women turned toward darkness, toward non-existence.

To escape the inevitable slide into darkness, God offered worship, prophets, and laws, and finally, his very Son.  Hear the words of Athanasius:

For by the sacrifice of his own body he did two things:
·    he put an end to the law of death which barred our way; and
·    he made a new beginning of life for us, by giving us the hope of resurrection.
                                            -- (On the Incarnation [2.10], St. Athanasius)

But why the Cross?  There are many answers – valid answers – that one could give but let me mention two tonight.

First the cross was necessarily violent.  The cross reveals our complicity in violence.  And it goes beyond the obvious forms of violence – murder, war, vengeance – to the more subtle ways in which we participate in violence by our judging and unforgiving spirit.  It highlights our use of violence as an answer to violence.

Christians don't have a good track record when it comes to killing in the name of the cross.  The cross shows us that God is love, but the cross also shows us something about ourselves. What we resist seeing precisely what the cross is -- not just violence, but an act of righteous violence.

Those who killed Jesus saw it as an act of justice, following the law.  God wanted them to kill blasphemers, put evil to the sword.  As someone has said, “When Christians through the ages … have killed Jews, they justified themselves by pointing to the violence that the Jews did against Jesus.  They did not see killing the Jews as violence; they saw it as purging evil. They failed to see the Passion for what it is: Jesus, himself a Jew, was willing to let himself be killed so we might see our human problem with righteous violence.  The point of the cross is to reveal the problem we have with righteous violence.”  When we criticize, reject, demean, and judge others we negate the message of the love of God for all who are created in God’s image and called to life in him.

The cross is our violence meeting God's unconditional love, forgiveness, and the power of life.  The cross is the answer we need to finally live with God's power of love and life, the answer we need to finally let God lead us into the way of true peace.

There is another aspect of Jesus’ death on the Cross that is for me, most powerful.  We hear it in Eucharistic Prayer A:

He stretched out his arms upon the cross, and offered himself, in obedience to your will, a perfect sacrifice for the whole world.

It was this same image perhaps that moved Athanasius.  Again, hear his words:

How could he have called us if he had not been crucified, for it is only on the cross that a man dies with arms outstretched?  Here, again, we see the fitness of His death and of those outstretched arms: it was that he might draw his ancient people with the one and the Gentiles with the other, and join both together in Himself.  Even so, He foretold the manner of His redeeming death, "I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Myself."
                                                    -- (On the Incarnation [4.25], St. Athanasius)

Why did Jesus die?  To open for us a door to life – of place and position – in God’s Kingdom as friends of his Son, the Christ.  To bring salvation, the great reversal. And how are we to respond?

In confession – in owning our tendency to violence, in recognizing and admitting our need for a new beginning.  In repentance – a turning around, in moving from darkness to light, from chaos to creation, from non-existence to existence.  And finally, we respond by simply falling into the outstretched arms of Jesus.

As the darkness of that Friday night so long ago deepened the sorrow, shame, and fear of Jesus’ follower, family, and friends, so it hopefully gave them the space to let the image of his death on that cross begin to do its work to prepare them for the greater truth of the dawning which would soon arrive.

Tonight we sit in the darkening hours of Good Friday but we know that Easter is on its way.  May the image of the cross prepare us for the experience of Resurrection.

The Rev. John Dryden Burton
Good Friday 2008
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