Crazy Catholic Question 132: Why did
Jesus have to die such a brutal death for our sins?
Theologian Fr.
James Alison describes our common misunderstanding of Jesus’ death like this: We
sinned and offended God, so God was angry with humanity and demanded justice or
some kind of payment for our blunder. But humanity couldn’t offer any kind of
divine gift big enough to diffuse God’s anger since we are just lowly humans. So,
God, needing to loose a lighting rod, sent Jesus and Jesus said, “you can loose
it on me” substituting himself for us. Lighting rod strikes; Sacrifice is
carried out; and God is again happy because He got his blood-lust satisfied.”
The problem is,
this is a very pagan idea of sacrifice. It is NOT our Catholic understanding. This
understanding of atonement goes back to the ancient Aztecs where the priest
sacrificed a person or animal to satisfy a hungry God. But the Jewish priestly
rite that Jesus grew up with was already way beyond that primitive
understanding of sacrifice.
Jesus and his contemporaries
would have understood that when the high priest entered the Holy of Holies in
the temple once a year, put on the white robe, sacrificed the lamb and then
brought the blood out of the Holy of Holies to sprinkle on the people, this was
a liturgy designed to remind us of God’s divine movement towards US to set
people free. The high priest was standing in for God who was coming OUT of that
holy and perfect place to forgive and restore the flow of creation. It was NOT
as we often imagine a priest satisfying a hungry, demanding God. The direction
is the opposite. God is healing us, not us satisfying Him…
If we cling to
the idea that God will not forgive us until his son has been tortured to death
for us then God is a lot less forgiving than even we are sometimes. St Thomas
Aquinas says that the mission of Jesus from the Father is NOT the mission to be
crucified; God’s mission for Jesus was to love us right here in our own history
and to show us a way other than violence; to encourage us to follow Him in
being merciful. Complicated theories about the Father deliberately putting his
Son to death to settle some kind of score are just nonsense. Rather the cross
is the reminder of the world WE have fashioned where it is dangerous and
sometimes even fatal to be a compassionate, courageous and loving person. God
out love for us, His misdirected people,
sent His love, embodied in the person Jesus to live with us and show us
the way and we murdered Him.
The fact that
Jesus never broke; never became bitter; never gave up or gave in to the
violence; the fact that He never stopped loving us even as we were nailing Him
to the cross but rather prayed “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they
do.” His endurance in this love is what saves us and continues to show us the
way.
In other words
“who is the angry divinity in the story? We are. We are the ones
who think we need vengeance in order to survive. God was occupying the space
of our victim so as to show us that we need never do this again…it is
quite clear that Jesus' self-giving, and the “out-pouring of His blood” is the
revelation of who God is: God is entirely without vengeance, entirely without substitutionary
tricks; and that God was giving Himself entirely for us, towards us,
in order to set us “free from our sins”…“our sins” being the way of death,
vengeance, violence.” (www.jamesalison.co.uk/texts/eng11.html).
Send your
Crazy Catholic Question to Lisa Brown at dre@ctredeemer.org or read past columns via our website
at www.ctredeemer.org.
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