Months ago, someone I am connected to on Facebook posted one of those memes about this or that and asking you to share on your wall. This one depicted Jesus carrying the cross to the spot where he was to be crucified. The message urged recipients to re-post to their walls, “if you would help Jesus.” The implication, of course, is that if you don’t share, you don’t care about Jesus.
Now, I am not a theologian but I do pray daily and try to listen and keep my eyes open. I even read most of the Bible about 30 years ago. I can’t say that I made much sense of its obtuse parables and contradictions, but in augmenting that reading with other reliable sources including attending church irregularly I came to a basic understanding that the story (whether it is historical fact or not) has it that Jesus was God’s ultimate lamb. The story of his sacrifice was prophecy ordained as necessary by the ultimate authority.
To “help” Jesus was to assume that God wanted our intervention and even needed it. So many people profess to be “Christians” but I want to challenge them to cut out the middleman and look within their hearts. The purpose of Jesus was that his corporal demise was a necessary sacrifice to illustrate how death could be overcome and to cleanse the world of human sin.
This is where I have struggled to make sense of the story. God so loved the world he gave his only begotten son…
How is it that Jesus should be humiliated, spat on, jeered, tortured, and killed in a horrible death in order to give the rest of us a path through the eye of the needle? Granted, in this primitive era of social development, many believed sacrificing livestock upon the altar was sufficient penance to be absolved of whatever action you felt guilty about. Still, it made zero sense to me that God would inflict this misery on Jesus and in so doing somehow forgive the world.
The following is what has evolved in my brain over the last two years or so. As far as I know, it is a completely original idea, which, coming from someone such as myself — relatively unheralded in any circle — will almost surely be held to be preposterous or even blasphemous by those more Godly reading it.
I don’t present this in some kind of fundamentalist spirit, as if it were doctrine. I don’t even push the idea that Christianity or the Bible represents the truth, or “The Way.” This is for your consideration as perhaps a conversation starter. You can say you don’t believe in God, or you don’t believe Jesus was the Son of God. I just offer what I say here as the only plausible explanation of why Jesus not only had to die, but be killed in the manner he was — if we start with the premise that he was the Son of God. Just humor me by starting with this premise and proceed logically from there — like a lot of science fiction stories ask fans to do.
Biblical scholars and the pious who read Bible passages to find meaning or to prove a point, will, if they bother to comment on this, undoubtedly quote scripture to prove how ignorant and off-base I am. The problem with their argument is that I take nothing literally, especially the Bible. I think it is challenging and thought-provoking reading but in no way the definitive source on anything.
Have I offended you yet? Well, here goes…
If we accept the story that Jesus was God’s sacrifice, this is how it makes sense to me. Let’s understand that my premise is that God is evolving. He knows everything, but he does change. He knows that people are capable of good, which through his spirit there is imbued in each of us a better angel. He also gives us the Free Will to listen — or not.
Still, our Human Nature is such that none of us escape life without doing wrong — to each other, to ourselves, and to all of God’s creation. God certainly knew all about this throughout the eons from the dawn of the universe and leading up to Jesus’ birth.
My contention is that He knew the way humans are, but He had not felt the way humans are. He had made us, He had lived within us, but He had not been us. In considering how it was people could choose to be so selfish, mean, and even murderous He decided to come to Earth as a human. That is, He decided to live in the blood and flesh vehicle of a human body.
Enter Jesus.
God’s choice of Jesus was significant. His perspective had to be from the bottom of society up, that is, to be counted among the number of the unremarkable, the unheralded, those of most humble circumstances. That is his first lesson, to demonstrate that all life is worthy.
Not much is written of Jesus after the advent of his birth until his final days. He was “just” a poor carpenter’s son, born to an uneducated teenage mother. They were the kind of disenfranchised people most of us walk past every day without thinking. Such people are the least among us.
My view is that during Jesus’ childhood, God, an immensely patient being, laid dormant in his host like a virus that hasn’t quite made itself known. The important thing was to gather data. More than what it felt like to skin your knees, what did it feel like to be discriminated against? How about being bullied or made fun of? How about occasionally being hungry and frequently underfed?
Whatever his experiences, Jesus, who is interchangeably referred to as “Son of God,” and “Son of Man” in the Bible, was just a boy growing up. The fact of the matter was, out of necessity for this miraculous plan, he had to be both man and God. While he might have occasionally done something extraordinary as a child, Jesus, the human, had yet to recognize what was within him. What was a part of him, the Jesus part was thoroughly human, the God part unfathomable.
Indeed, in today’s world young Jesus might have been prescribed Ritalin or some such pharmaceutical because that’s what we do to people we don’t understand. Jesus, even as he matured, might have been diagnosed today as a person with psychological issues.
Jesus did hear voices in his head. There was his own, and then this haunting, infinite wisdom. Finally, through his natural maturation and not through an act of God that rushed it along, but through Jesus’ free will, it struck him that he was different. He listened to the voice of God. He conversed with God. Yeah, I guess he was talking to himself.
From that time God drug him along. Jesus undoubtedly asked from time-to-time, “Why me, why does it have to be me?” This was the walk in the wilderness. God is compelling and was so infused in Jesus that the Son of Man complied even when the task seemed senseless and impossible.
The end game of the great mission was taking shape and its culmination could only come through sacrifice. God had felt what it was to grow up in humble circumstance but he had yet to feel what it was like to experience Human Nature at its worst.
Jesus was a threat to the norms of the day not so much by what he did or the miracles he performed, but by whom he was. His messages of love, mercy, and living a righteous life that would not only be rewarded on a spiritual level, but in the worldly context as well, earned him a vast and growing number of genuine supporters. It happened organically because he was authentic and righteous.
Such a development was alarming to imperialist Romans, and the established religious leaders of the day. Both sought to manipulate the ignorant — either by intervening as the channel to God or simply overrunning them with military force. Those strategies remain powerful today.
Jesus reached a tipping point when his appeal was so extensive and obvious that the vested interests had to destroy him. Yes, this was God’s plan. He knows everything and knew the reaction to his example would bring horrible wrath of society on Jesus.
I imagine Jesus realizing this, too, and questioning if there could be any other way. There wasn’t. For God to feel the ultimate humiliation, physical pain, and isolation a person could experience, the sacrifice had to happen. God felt through the flesh of Jesus — the sting of the whip, the puncture of the thorns, the strain of carrying the giant cross, the piercing, bone-breaking pounding of nine-inch nails, and finally the slash of the spear to his side.
Jesus was human — the Son of Man. God resided in him so he could feel what it was like to be a human at the most inhumane moment. With God resident within him, Jesus, who was afraid, had the faith he needed — despite human doubt — to fulfill the prophecy. God’s experience through Jesus — as Jesus — earns us infinite understanding, infinite forgiveness.
Is this what I believe as fact? Not necessarily. I am still on my journey, striving to be closer to God, whoever He is.
This is my best attempt to explain a story that has been presented to us by people who have not in my experience demonstrated a thoughtful consideration of a fantastic tale. Want to help Jesus? Help the least among us.
Pray every day for your own answers, which is where God lives.
Merry Christmas.
