“Jesus Died for My Sins?”

Did God have to kill Jesus for us to be made acceptable?   By Jesus’ blood we are set free?  Jesus paid my debt?  Jesus the Lamb of God who bears all the sins of the world?  By his stripes we are healed?  It seems hard to fathom that the suffering and death of Jesus on the cross had to happen to make you and me acceptable to God.  But this is how the death of Jesus on the cross has been sold to us, as a penal substitutionary atonement required by God to make we sinful humans acceptable to receive God’s grace and love.

This theology of the cross goes like this:
 God cannot forgive sin (especially original sin al la Adam and Eve) without inflicting punishment and shedding blood.
 God therefore must punish all sinners (and we all are sinners because of original sin).
 Our sin is against an infinitely holy God so our punishment must be absolute, irrevocable, and eternal.  Therefore all human beings are damned to eternal conscious torment in hell.
 The only way to avoid this punishment is for God to provide a worthy substitute for humanity’s sin, a substitute that can bear God’s infinite wrath.
 Therefore God provided Jesus who was tortured and killed on the cross so God could vent God’s infinite wrath upon a single divine-human representative or substitute rather than on us all.
 Salvation from eternal conscious torment in hell can be ours only if we believe in Jesus and his death for our sake on the cross.
But there is another way, a way as ancient as the first Good Friday and Easter, to understand Jesus’ death and the cross.

Let me be clear and state my position right up front, God didn’t need Jesus to die.  We didn’t need Jesus to die to make us acceptable to God.  God is forgiving and loving and full of grace and mercy.  I know this because I know Jesus as a definitive revelation of God showing God’s character and values.  And what I know of Jesus and therefore of God is that God abhors violence, injustice and oppression.  I know that God is not seeking payment for some “original sin”.  God doesn’t need someone to bear the sins of humanity so that we can enter into a relationship with God.  Jesus died because of human evil and not as a requirement of a bloodthirsty God.  He sacrificed himself as an act of unconditional love to show us how to love.

Why did Jesus die on the cross?  Jesus died on the cross because of human evil and the fears of an Empire and a complacent religious institution.  Jesus came talking about peace and justice without resorting to violence, manipulation or fear.  Jesus shared God’s vision of human society that works by acceptance, justice and peace.  Jesus spoke of the Law as a living thing that needed to be followed but not worshipped, needed to be practiced but within limits and common sense.  And Jesus shared his passion, God’s passion for the outcast and other in society that they might have the same peace and justice we have.

Jesus was a political and religious subversive, revolutionary, world-shattering, radical voice calling people to forget the Empire and the corrupt religious institution and instead return to God and God’s ways of justice and peace for all.  So Jesus was killed to try and silence him and to strike fear into the hearts of his followers in order to quell this subversive movement and especially to keep Rome from destroying Israel.  Jesus allowed himself to be taken and killed because he wanted to show us what it means to live out God’s grace and love; to show us what our world is now but what God wants our world to be.  Jesus as the penal substitutionary atonement sacrifice for humankind isn’t how the cross is to be understood.  It is to be seen as a way to help us know what it means to love.

Marcus Borg talks about this in his book Speaking Christian (New York: HarperOne, 2011).  He says that Jesus’ death intervenes in human history to have a curative impact on out hostility and violence, to turn us towards ways of peace.  This means that because we are hostile and violent, Christ died.  God didn’t torture and kill Jesus, we did.  And this reveals something essential about both God and us.  Can you accept that God loves you as you are and that Jesus’ death was not to make you acceptable but instead to help you understand what it means to love?

People are convinced that Jesus died because he had to so that we could be made acceptable to God.  The only way to help folks get a corrected understanding of Jesus’ death is for us to love as Jesus did, unconditionally.  Unconditionally love is the message of the cross.  Jesus was murdered by the political and religious institutions of his day.  His death was a witness to the power of love and a way of showing us all the way of love, unconditional love.  We must love unconditionally in order for Jesus’ death to make sense.  God didn’t need Jesus to die.  We didn’t need Jesus to die to make us acceptable to God.  Jesus died because the political and religious institutions of his day were threatened by his message of justice, peace and love.  He sacrificed himself as an act of unconditional love to show us how to love one another.

As The Beatles sang, “All you need is love, love.  Love is all you need.”