Why I am a Christian (13)

Jesus’ Death Solves the Problem of Sin and Changes History Forever

In 2012 I jotted down all the reasons I could think of why I am a Christian. I found 26 so I decided to serialise them in a blog every fortnight for a year.

The first four explain why I think belief in a creator is compatible with science. The next two examine the human condition and find that it is consistent with the Bible. Then there were three theological considerations that added further weight to the case for Christianity.

This is now the fourth of five posts on Christology. The first three looked at Jesus' remarkable fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy, his compelling persona and the unique appeal of his teaching.

But the symbol of Christianity is not a manger or any feature of Jesus' itinerant ministry; it's a cross. For Christians, the central feature of Jesus' time on earth is not his unusual birth, or his amazing miracles, or his revolutionary teaching; it's his ignominious death. And for Christians, Jesus’ death is of more than mere personal interest - it's bigger than just 'saving my soul' - it is the very fulcrum of human history.

At one level, you could say there is nothing remarkable at all about Jesus’ death. Roman occupied Judea in the first century saw dozens of young Jewish revolutionaries making a bit of a stir, exciting a popular following and ending up on a cross when they unsettled the pax romana a bit too much for comfort. To the Romans, Jesus was just another would-be messiah who was ruthlessly silenced for disturbing the peace. All these popular movements subsided immediately following their hero's demise and nothing more was heard of them. This one would no doubt follow the same script.

But on another level, the events surrounding Jesus’ last 24 hours are quite unique. Rome didn't quite get what it bargained for this time. Why has the judicial murder of Jesus of Nazareth become by far the best known tribunal and execution in human history?

And why is it that the popular following centred on this Galilean carpenter-turned-preacher is the only one that did not collapse and fade into obscurity on the death of its leader; in fact, quite the reverse? Why did it explode into life and conquer the ancient world - and in the face of severe persecution moreover? Mostly, that was to do with the resurrection which I’ll come to in the next post, Reason 14. But, even putting that to one side for a moment, Jesus' death itself has immense significance. The resurrection would not mean at all the same thing if Jesus had just died of some illness or of old age.

Much ink has been spilled on the subject of who should shoulder the blame for Jesus' death. The Gospels show that no one comes out of the narrative well.

- The Jewish leaders were guilty of pursuing Jesus to death because he was such a threat to their religion and their positions of power.

- The Roman procurator Pontius Pilate was guilty of condemning him, knowing full well he was innocent.

- The Roman military was guilty of acting with excessive, sadistic cruelty when its soldiers met no resistance from the condemned man in their charge.

- Judas was guilty of betraying Jesus for a bag of coins and the other disciples were guilty of deserting him and denying knowledge of him having sworn just hours earlier that they never would.

But the matter of finding a scapegoat for Jesus' death is of no real interest to the Gospel writers - and we should not be distracted by it either. The Gospels are much more interested in stressing Christ’s innocence than finding someone to blame.

And Jesus' innocence was beyond doubt. Not a single charge stuck. No two witnesses were consistent. Not a shred of damning evidence for any crime was produced. Nothing in cross examination added up.

Pilate would have been delighted to have been able to find Jesus guilty of something - anything; it would have kept the excitable rabble outside his palace quiet. He could have gone to bed and been done with it. But, the closer Pilate examined the case, the more persuaded he became that Jesus was being framed.

In all four Gospels, Pilate tries to reason with those baying for his blood. Wary of getting drawn into an internal Jewish squabble he doubtless had little appetite for, he tries on four occasions to avoid sentencing Jesus. At first, he just declares the case closed, finding the charges frivolous and a waste of his time.

When that doesn’t work, he tries to pass the buck to Herod who happened to be in town for the Passover. Let him sort his squabbling fanatics out. But Jesus didn't cooperate at all, completely blanking the vain, self-important fool who had stupidly executed his cousin John the Baptist.

When that doesn’t work, Pilate tries to bargain with those intent on doing away with Jesus, offering the obviously out of the question option of releasing a violent insurgent onto the streets instead.

When even that doesn’t work, he has Jesus beaten to within an inch of his life, hoping the Chief Priest and his cronies will agree that it's enough to make Jesus go away quietly. No chance.

Only when the mob blackmails Pilate with the threat of reporting him to Caesar for weakness and disloyalty does he give up and sign the death warrant they demand.

Never has anyone been so manifestly innocent. And yet never has a miscarriage of justice been so inevitable. No ingenious scheming or herculean effort could have stemmed the inexorable tide of events.

It wasn't an accident. Jesus had to go to the cross. Nothing could have stopped it. It was God’s sovereign resolve to proceed with the unthinkable. This is why he came.

The crucifixion itself makes upsetting reading. The positioning of a man's body on a cross made it difficult to breathe. The Victorian author Frederic Farrar described this graphically in his book Life of Christ: "A death by crucifixion seems to include dizziness, cramp, thirst, starvation, sleeplessness, traumatic fever, tetanus, shame, publicity of shame, long continuance of torment, horror of anticipation, mortification of untended wounds, all intensified just up to the point at which they can be endured at all, but all stopping just short of the point which would give to the suffer the relief of unconsciousness."

According to the prominent expert in forensic pathology Dr. Frederick Zugibe, the piercing of the median nerve of the hands with a nail can cause pain so incredible that even morphine is of little use, "severe, excruciating, burning pain, like electric shocks traversing the arm into the spinal cord." Rupturing the foot's plantar nerve with a nail would have a similarly unpleasant effect.

Such is the uniqueness of the pain and distress of suffering crucifixion, that the English language accommodated a new word in its vocabulary to adequately express that agony. We call unbearable suffering “excruciating” – ex meaning “from” or “out of” and cruci meaning “cross." Excruciating means “out of the cross.”

Dr. Zugibe concluded that Christ probably died from heavy loss of blood and fluid, plus traumatic shock from his injuries, plus cardiogenic shock, causing Christ's heart to pump weakly, then fail altogether.

But interestingly, there are no details whatsoever about what the crucifixion actually looked like in the Gospels. They don’t say, “There was so much blood…” or anything of that sort. There is no description of his physical suffering at all.

Nor is there the slightest speculation among the Gospel writers about what Jesus may have died from. Was it cardiac rupture, shock, asphyxiation, dehydration? That may be our interest, but it wasn’t theirs.

The New Testament doesn’t tell you what it was like; it tells you what it means.

All those Old Testament sacrifices, so laboriously prescribed, all that shedding of blood (to show that sin is deadly serious), all that offering your very best lamb (to make the point that forgiveness cannot come cheap) looked towards this moment.

All those obscure prophecies in the Old Testament about a suffering - yet triumphant - Messiah come into focus here.

Like an unexpected twist in the last chapter of a great novel in which the seemingly incidental subplots all find satisfactory resolution, the cross makes sense of everything.

In Reason 7 I argued that sin offers the best explanation there is of what’s wrong with the world. It deforms us. It leads to untold misery. It estranges us from God. It messes up all relationships. It fractures our vision of all that is good and true. It spoils everything. I’m a Christian because I believe that is true.

And I’m a Christian because I believe the cross of Christ is the one and only way to right the wrong of sin. Through the cross we can be reshaped, we can be reconciled to God, we can enjoy truly wholesome relationships, we begin to see goodness and truth the right way up and our eyes become opened to anticipate the renewal of all things.

Perhaps the best known verse in the Bible, John 3.16, says “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

The cross means this: because God loves us, he didn’t just leave us just to make a mess of our lives and assume the consequences. He came to sort it all out.

Sometimes people misunderstand the New Testament message and suggest that God is in some way unfair. “How can God punish an innocent man on behalf of other people? That's unjust and immoral." Some have even called it "cosmic child abuse" and condemned it as sadistic or sick.

But that is a gross misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the atonement. The point is (as the Bible specifically claims) that "God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself." God himself came in the person of his Son Jesus Christ, to die in our place and to make it possible for us to be forgiven and restored.

And anyway Jesus was not an unwilling victim. "No one takes my life from me" he said, "I lay it down of my own accord" (John 10.18).

Amazing love! There is nothing that lights up my life more brightly than an insight into the sheer majesty and wonder of the cross. It's like a brilliant shaft of sunlight that suddenly breaks through heavy blanket cloud on a grey afternoon. The experience of knowing myself to be - and truly feeling - cleansed, loved and forgiven is sheer delight. It is health to my soul. Nothing compares. It’s the 13^th reason I am a Christian.

So Jesus' bursting onto the scene in about 30 A.D. wasn’t just another of those failed 'Messiah movements', here today, gone tomorrow, squashed by the ruthless might of Rome. No. Jesus’ death, grimly unexceptional in its day, became world history's best known trial and execution for a very good reason.

Not least because this particular Messiah movement remains to this day the only one that provoked a massive public disturbance about the body of the executed man going missing three days later. Some even said they'd seen him alive again and nothing, not even the threat - and meting out - of violence, could silence them.

And that's when this small, defeated, ragbag collection of lame ducks and small town losers became an unstoppable force all over the then-known world, growing faster than the empire could throw them to the lions. "He is alive and has appeared to us" they claimed. Many thought they were completely barmy and dismissed them as an eccentric irrelevance. But those who embraced the movement found the force within it changed their lives beyond their wildest dreams.

And that’s what I’ll write about in two weeks’ time.