Jesus didn't die for our sins: Agape is a risky endeavor

[The Great Open Dance]

The crucifixion reveals God’s self-risk for us.

At great risk, truth became enfleshed in Jesus of Nazareth. After ministering in northern Judea for some time, Jesus went to Jerusalem. He went there in the service of life, knowing he would die:

Christ, though in the image of God, didn’t deem equality with God something to be clung to—but instead became completely empty and took on the image of oppressed humankind: born into the human condition, found in the likeness of a human being. Jesus was thus humbled—obediently accepting death, even death on a cross! (Phil 2:6–8)

As the Author of life, Abba (our Creator and Sustainer) determines that intensity depends on contrast. Light has more existence in relationship to darkness; warmth has more existence in relationship to cold. Recognizing this, Abba creates a universe of contrasts, including the contrasts of pleasure and pain, joy and suffering, celebration and grief. Christ, emissary of the Trinity, then ratifies this decision and expresses sympathy for the world by entering the human situation, as Jesus of Nazareth. Tragically, having granted us the freedom to reject truth, Jesus’s ministry leads to the passion and crucifixion.

Truth moves.

By defining Jesus as truth (John 1:14), the Bible denies truth any heavy, inert characteristics. Like a good cut that a carpenter would call true, Jesus is perfectly plumb with reality. He is truth, so truth becomes a way of being in the world rather than an unchanging thing to possess. Truth is more verb than noun: “They who do the truth come to the light, that their works may be revealed, that their works have been done in God” (John 3:21 WEB [emphasis added]).

Recognizing that truth is an activity, early Christians sometimes referred to their faith as the Way (Acts 19 ). This reference made sense, because the first Christians were Jews and practitioners of halakah, the totality of laws, ordinances, customs, and practices that structure Jewish life to this day. The term halakah derives from the root halak, which means “to walk” or “to go.” For this reason, halakah is usually translated as “the Way.” It is not an inert mass of unchanging rules. It is a way to go through life well, as community.

The way we go through life must constantly adapt to the way things are. In Judaism, this need has produced a long tradition of debate and argumentation. Jesus participated in these debates, producing his own interpretation of halakah, which his followers eventually came to call the evangelion, gospel, or “good news.” According to Jesus, the Way expresses itself through time in loving activity. In this view, an act of kindness is just as true as a skilled carpenter’s cut, balanced mathematical equation, or logically demonstrated argument.

Love suffers.

Alas, being the Way is dangerous. Prophets are always in danger: to patriots, they seem pernicious; to the pious multitude, blasphemous; to those in authority, seditious.

According to the Gospel of Luke, after a last supper with his disciples Jesus retreated to the Mount of Olives and prayed, “Abba, if it’s your will, take this cup from me; yet not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:42). The cup would not be removed. Later in the night a crowd, led by Jesus’s disciple Judas, approached Jesus to arrest him. Infuriated, one disciple swung a sword and cut off a man’s ear, but Jesus rebuked him and healed the man (Luke 22:51). Then Jesus was led away to die.

Over the next few days, Jesus was mocked, beaten, crowned with thorns, and flogged. Finally, the Romans drove nails into his hands and feet and hung him on a cross, naked and humiliated before the world, until he suffocated to death. As he was dying, Jesus prayed, “Abba, forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34a).

Crucifixion is an incomprehensibly “grotesque and gratuitous” act invented by the Romans to terrorize subjugated peoples. This torturous execution was public, political, and prolonged, reducing the victim to a scarred sign of the Empire’s power. In this instance, it also reveals the absolute participation of God in human history, in the person of Jesus.

Jesus, God’s fleshly form, is meek. Jesus is not the master of embodied life; he is subject to embodied life. He inhabits what we inhabit—the plain fact of human suffering, the mysterious joy of religious community, and the intimated assurance of a loving God. He symbolizes divine openness to the agony and the ecstasy, but also to the unresolvable paradox of faith: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus cries from the cross (Mark 15:34). He simultaneously acknowledges the presence of God and the absence of God. He accuses God of abandonment, demands of God a defense, yet dies before receiving one.

Perhaps God has no adequate answer. Theologically, the crucifixion of Jesus testifies to the unholy within the universe, useless suffering that freedom produces but God abhors. From the gift of freedom, something emerges in creation that is alien to Godself. God did not intend the unholy, but God allows it out of respect for our autonomy and moral consequence.

Love risks.

Crucially, God suffers from this demonic fault in reality. God in Christ undergoes alienation from God through crucifixion. In other words, freedom is of God, but the results of freedom may not be. Faced with a choice between freedom and insignificance, God has chosen to preserve freedom and allow suffering. We may wish it otherwise, but God prioritizes vitality over security.

Yet, God does not make these choices at a distance. In the incarnation, we see that God has entered creation as unconditional celebrant. On the cross, we see that God has entered creation as absolute participant. No part of the divine person is protected from the dangers of embodiment. God in Jesus is perfectly open to the mutually amplifying contrasts of embodied life, and God is perfectly subject to the grotesque and gratuitous suffering that God rejects but freedom allows. God is completely here; God is fully human, even unto death.

For the cosmic Artists in positions of creative responsibility, authentic love necessarily results in vulnerable suffering. Creation necessitates incarnation, and incarnation results in crucifixion. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 141-144)

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For further reading, please see:

Abraham Joshua Heschel. The Prophets. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.

Jurgen Moltmann. The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993.

Zizioulas, John. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985.