Religion: Why Did Jesus Die?

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The experience is akin to rehabbing a muscle you had forgotten you had. Thus in this Lenten season the Rev. Byron Shafer, pastor of Rutgers Presbyterian Church on Manhattan's Upper West Side, gave his first atonement sermon in "eight or nine years." Chicago First United Methodist's Blackwell found himself lined up with two other talking heads on MSNBC, debating the topic as if it were an election issue or celebrity trial. And back in Geneva, the issue continues to fascinate the Bible students and their church's associate rector, Tony Welty. "The question is," says Welty, "O.K., if this really happened, why did it happen? Why did Christ die? And if he really did die, then, my God, what does that mean for me? I'm a person living in the 21st century. Is this something I need to be taking more seriously?"

AT-ONE-MENT

Behind those questions is A sense of tragic estrangement that predates Jesus' life and death by thousands of years. Since religion has existed, God has (or the gods have) always been defined by otherness. But for just as long, humans have feared that the alienation was increasing. "Why, O Lord, do You stand aloof?" cried the Psalmist, eventually concluding that the reason was human disobedience and sin. By Jesus' time, Jewish temple ritual included regular sin sacrifices freighted with hopes for reconciliation, or atonement, with God. (The word's original English meaning of unity is evident in its three syllables: at-one-ment.) By around A.D. 57, when the Apostle Paul wrote the New Testament book Romans, it was clear that Christians would want to reconfigure reconciliation around the life, death and Resurrection of Christ. But how?

Some modern atonement theorists maintain that only one answer--theirs--flows inevitably from Scripture. But more agree with Chicago Theological Seminary's Theodore Jennings Jr. "The New Testament is just all over the map" on the question of why Christ died, he says. Its writers "are all persuaded that something really drastic, fundamental and dramatic has happened, and they're pulling together all kinds of ways to understand that."

The book Hebrews, for instance, directly appropriates the Jewish sacrificial metaphor, except this time, Jesus is both priest and sacrifice, spilling, "not the blood of goats and calves but his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption." The Gospel of Mark favors Roman legal language for the freeing of slaves: "the Son of Man came ... to give his life as a ransom for many." The First Epistle of Peter, meanwhile, takes a radically different tack, posing Jesus' trials as occasion for imitation: "because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps." And Paul's letter to the Colossians pauses only briefly at the Cross on its way to the triumphal image of the risen Christ parading demonic enemies in chains: "He disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in him."