Why Did Jesus Have to Die? His Own Answer

Last updated on: March 25, 2016 at 3:22 pm by Coleman Glenn

Why Did Jesus Have to Die? His Own Answer 2016-03-25T15:22:49-07:00 Coleman Glenn

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I put up a post last year that touched on the question, “Why did Jesus have to die?” This morning Anne asked me a question I’d already been thinking about recently: why did Jesus have to die in the way He did – violently, tortured and wrongfully accused?

Jesus Himself actually gave a clear answer to the question, but it’s one that raises questions of its own. His answer? “All this was done that the Scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled” (Matthew 26:56).

Again, this answer raises questions. If Jesus had to follow a certain script because it had been prophesied that He would, why was the script written he way it was in the first place? Why not have the prophecies predict that the Christ would live to an old age, or never die at all?

Adding to the perplexity of the answer is that Old Testament Scripture is NOT crystal clear on the way that the Messiah would be put to death. Jesus’ own disciples missed it despite His many attempts to show why He had to suffer and die and rise again. Why did He have to fulfill the Scriptures if it wasn’t going to be in an obvious way that unequivocally demonstrated that He was the Messsiah?

What I think these questions miss is what it means that Jesus had to “fulfill Scripture.” Other passages (especially in John, but see Richard Hays’ excellent Reading Backwards for many more throughout the gospels) make it clear that Jesus was not simply doing things that the Scripture predicted; instead, He embodied the heart of Scripture, the Spirit that He summarised as the two great commandments: love God and love your neighbour. He was the embodiment of all the love, mercy, justice, truth and faith of the Old Testament (which people tend to miss when they only go to the Old Testament looking for a “wrathful” God).

He was the love and wisdom of Scripture incarnate. And what happens when people meet that love and wisdom incarnate? They do everything they can to murder it. If Jesus was going to fulfill the Scripture, it was inevitable that people would do to Him what they had done to the spirit of Scripture. This is one of the key principles in a Swedenborgian view of Christ’s death: Jesus died as a perfect embodiment of what had already been done and was still being done to the Word.

Did Jesus have to die in the way He did? Yes – but only because He had to live in such a way that He knew evil men WOULD put Him to death, and in allowing them to do so He would hold up a mirror to the powerful and greedy and corrupt (which is in all of us) and say, “If this is who you are, this is what you do to God when He stands in your midst.” Or, in Johannine terms, “This is the condemnation: that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19).

A quote from Brian Zahnd’s blog post from earlier today captures this pretty well, although he sees it as a condemnation first of society’s systems of evil rather than the evil in individuals :

[W]hen the satanic system of civilization sacrificed the holy Lamb of God, it crossed a threshold of gargantuan self-condemnation. On Good Friday we come to the devastating realization that our violent system of blame and collective killing is so evil that it is capable of the murder of God.

Jesus had to die as He did to show each of us what is in our hearts to do to Him if we neglect the heart of His law: to love Him above all else, and our neighbor as ourselves. And He rose again to give us the power to keep that law.

(Image is “Ecce Homo!” by Munkácsy Mihály)

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