We, Not God, Were the Authors of Christ’s Passion

In one of the most profound and mysterious passages in the New Testament, Paul tells us, “For our sake [God] made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21). Elsewhere, reflecting on the same mystery, he speaks of God “sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin.”  In doing so, “he condemned sin in the flesh” (Rom 8:3)

This lands us in one of the most profound mysteries of the gospel and we must tread carefully because it is fraught with land mines and is impenetrably strange, for it is about the interplay of human and divine freedom, as well as human evil and divine love.

Perhaps a look at the Greatest Story Ever Told can be approached via some of the other great stories of antiquity. One of the most popular sorts of story in the world is the “Cheat the Oracle” story. The idea is that Heaven decrees the hero’s fate and nothing can change it. The hero (or perhaps the hero’s parents or guardians if the hero is an infant) then attempts to cheat the oracle by hiding the hero in a distant land or selling him into slavery or something. In so doing, this sets in motion the fulfillment of the very prophecy the cheaters hoped to cheat. And so, in ancient Greece, Oedipus is fated to kill his father and marry his mother. In ancient Israel, Joseph is fated to rule over his brothers and father (Genesis 37-48). Oedipus’ guardians and Joseph’s brothers labor to thwart their respective oracles, but every step they take is just one step closer to the fruition of the prophecy.

Notably, it is the pagan story which describes Heaven in sinister conspiracy against man. The gods pull what amounts to a sick practical joke on Oedipus. In contrast, the Jewish story of Joseph is, if anything, merry. God “conspires” to rescue everybody—Israelite and Egyptian–from starvation by his choice of Joseph. It is Joseph’s brothers who connive and plot to sell him into slavery in Egypt. God simply takes all the human plotting and “dooms” everybody to reconciliation and joy that makes for perhaps the sweetest ending to a story in all of pre-Christian antiquity.  Joseph winds up as Pharaoh’s Right Hand Man, saves Egypt (and his family) from famine, and sums up the happy interplay of human cunning for evil with God’s will for our joy this way: “As for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today” (Genesis 50:20).

This notion of the “positive cheat the oracle story” is very present to the minds of the gospel writers and the whole early Church. As with Joseph, rejected by his brothers but chosen by God as the redeemer of the very human race responsible for his death, Jesus jiu jitsus the whole monstrous travesty of his passion and death into the great act of redemption.  What we meant for evil, God meant for good.

Sinners Were the Authors of the Passion

It is vital to get this clear in our minds, because far too many people have very distorted ideas of the reason for the Passion of Christ.  Dorothy L. Sayer sums up one very popular notion that is, curiously, shared by many atheists and by many Protestant Fundamentalists:

Q.: What is meant by the Atonement?

God wanted to damn everybody, but his vindictive sadism was sated by the crucifixion of his own Son, who was quite innocent, and therefore, a particularly attractive victim.

The vision of God that lies behind this picture of the Crucifixion is that sin does not so much consist of doing things that fundamentally hurt ourselves and other persons, leading ultimately to our self-destruction, but rather that sin is simply the breakage of arbitrary rules laid down by a domineering and vindictive autocrat who keeps a little list of everybody who has ever crossed him and who devises nasty punishments to pay them out for not respecting his authority.  As some sort of weird form of anger management for his occasional bouts of world-destroying fury, he sent his Son to earth so that, instead of smashing billions of humans like a divine Hulk, he could instead self-medicate his uncontrollable and inexplicable rage over petty rules and pointless superstitions by having himself one really titanic orgy of child abuse against Jesus and getting it out of his system. Then, after cooling off for three days, he would raise him from the dead and tell the rest of us he was okay and ready to forgive us for our sins.  He still hopes to damn at least some of us, but he promises that he we accept Jesus in our hearts or do sacraments or oppose abortion (it varies), he will let us off the hook for Jesus’ sake.  The main thing, though, is that Jesus has posted himself between us and his Father’s hungry desire to hurt and punish us.  Jesus protects us from the Father, whose “love” for us is mostly expressed in only pouring out his wrath on us a little bit.

You’ve probably noticed that this is a pretty sick picture.  You’ve also probably noticed that it or something close to it is remarkably widely believed and that much of the world is divided between those who think they have to knuckle under to it and those who say they do not believe in God because of it, but who really are simply mad at the God they say they don’t believe in.

Some of the confusion arises because some Christians in past centuries, reading the Old Testament a bit too literally, misunderstood certain prophetic passages about the Passion.  So, for instance, when Isaiah describes the Suffering Servant, he says, “Yet it was the will of the Lord to bruise him; he has put him to grief” (Isaiah 53:10), some too easily concluded that God wanted Jesus to suffer, the more sadistically the better.  But as James reminds us, “God cannot be tempted with evil and he himself tempts no one” (James 1:13).  Likewise, as John points out, “God is light and in him is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5).  Any way you slice it, deliberately willing that an innocent man be tortured to death is sinful, and God does not sin. How then are we to understand the apostles when they tell us Jesus was handed over to “Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place” (Acts 4:27-28)?

We begin with two facts that have to govern our understanding.  The first and most foundational is that God is love (1 John 4:8), all the way through, from the beginning of time to the end of eternity.  His unwavering purpose for us is our complete happiness. The second is that we are punished by, not for, our sins. God forbids sin, not because it breaks some arbitrary “rule” but because sin hurts us and eventually kills us. It is we who perversely visit troubles on ourselves when we sin.

It was to save us from this self-destruction that God sent his Son.  The Father and the Son together will nothing but our salvation and the Father loves the Son as the Son loves the Father completely and utterly.  It is to bring us into that love that the persons of the Trinity broke into our world in the Incarnation.  And in doing so, the Son “having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end” (John 13:1).  So he handed himself to our species completely and without reservation of any kind.  God said, in effect, “Do with me whatever you like.” And we, pathetic creatures that we are, freely chose to perversely pour out our all our rage, perversity, spite, and evil on him.  That is why Peter sums things up, not by speaking of God “punishing” Jesus but by placing responsibility for the crucifixion squarely on our shoulders: “This Jesus… you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men” (Acts 2:23).