Why did Jesus die?
Preparing the website this week has prompted reflection on the death of Jesus. Especially that age-old question: why did Jesus die?
In times past a kind of Gothic theology, that represented a more extreme version of scholasticism, had come up with a very contorted answer to the question.
It had to do with the complex mechanism of atonement. Jesus was God and knew in advance all that would happen in his life. He engineered the local political history of his part of Palestine to bring about a situation whereby Jesus, as God, could die for our sins. It was like Jesus being two persons rather than one, one person who observed from a distance what was happening and the other the person actually going through the experience.
In recent years I have been more persuaded by those writers who in different ways have stressed the radical humanity of Jesus. Jesus did not ‘choose’ to die. His death was the clear outcome of the social and political realities of his life. He preached a vision of life that ran counter to what the religious authorities were invested in and derived benefit from. Jesus knew that his death was a possible, even likely, outcome of his preaching and his way of life.
In Jesus we come to know God as one who suffers with us. Reading a few passages from Jacques Duquesne this week (Le Dieu de Jésus), I am more and more persuaded by the insight that the God of Jesus is not the God of the philosophers or the deists, but rather the living God whose Spirit is the dynamism of the Universe. This Spirit was in Jesus and in us. The love that underpins the Universe and guides its trajectory conspired in the life of Jesus to bring to birth a new experience of God within consciousness. What we call the New Consciousness is essentially an awareness of this new experience of God.
In times past a kind of Gothic theology, that represented a more extreme version of scholasticism, had come up with a very contorted answer to the question.
It had to do with the complex mechanism of atonement. Jesus was God and knew in advance all that would happen in his life. He engineered the local political history of his part of Palestine to bring about a situation whereby Jesus, as God, could die for our sins. It was like Jesus being two persons rather than one, one person who observed from a distance what was happening and the other the person actually going through the experience.
In recent years I have been more persuaded by those writers who in different ways have stressed the radical humanity of Jesus. Jesus did not ‘choose’ to die. His death was the clear outcome of the social and political realities of his life. He preached a vision of life that ran counter to what the religious authorities were invested in and derived benefit from. Jesus knew that his death was a possible, even likely, outcome of his preaching and his way of life.
In Jesus we come to know God as one who suffers with us. Reading a few passages from Jacques Duquesne this week (Le Dieu de Jésus), I am more and more persuaded by the insight that the God of Jesus is not the God of the philosophers or the deists, but rather the living God whose Spirit is the dynamism of the Universe. This Spirit was in Jesus and in us. The love that underpins the Universe and guides its trajectory conspired in the life of Jesus to bring to birth a new experience of God within consciousness. What we call the New Consciousness is essentially an awareness of this new experience of God.