The Father Did Not Want the Son to be Crucified

God Glorifies Himself in the Human: A Christological Anthology

Kenneth Jerome Teal Head of Christ 2010

God Glorifies Himself in the Human: A Christological Anthology

1. God Glorifies Himself in the Human (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christology Lectures)

2. He is God, He is All Things (Melito of Sardis, On Pascha)

3. God Could Not Not Save Us (Athanasius, On the Incarnation)

4. What Happens with Jesus is How God is God (Jenson, Systematics Vol 1)

5. He Does Not Suffer the Fact That He Suffers (Cyril, On the Unity of Christ)

6. Christ is Not a Principle (Yannaras, Elements of Faith)

7. The Israelite Heals—That’s All You Need to Know (McCarthy, The Passenger)

8. Jesus is Not Christ Without Us (Symeon the New Theologian, First Ethical Discourse)

9. Empty Tomb, Empty Throne (Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology)

10. Holy Jesus, Gentle Friend (Broom of Devotion)

11. He Makes Us by Simply Being Himself (Eriugena, Homily on the Prologue to the Gospel of John)

Since it is Holy Week, I’ll be publishing several new entries in the anthology, including this one by Herbert McCabe. (To learn more about him, start here and here). In the mid 80’s, he published a long—very, very long, in fact—sermon for Holy Week, published in three parts in New Blackfriars. The second part was focused on the mystery of the cross; all of the following excerpts are from that part of the sermon.

Why did Christ die? This tries to answer the question: What had the death of Christ to do with us; why is it important to us? One such answer which has been very influential in the past is that by his death Jesus paid the penalty for the sins of the world. The idea, I'm sure you will remember, was that sin had offended God and since God is himself infinite such an offence has a kind of infinity about it. It was within the power of the human creature to offend by disobedience to God but it was not within our power to restore the balance of justice by any recompense we could pay to God. So God the Son became man so that by his suffering and death he could pay the price of sin. This seems to be based on an idea of punishment as a kind of payment, a repayment; the criminal undergoing punishment 'pays his debt to society', as we say. It takes a divine man, however, to pay our debt to divine justice.

Now, I can make no literal sense of this idea, whether you apply it to criminals or to Christ. I cannot see how a man in prison is paying a debt to society or paying anything else at all to society. On the contrary, it is rather expensive to keep him there. I can see the point in the criminal being bound to make restitution to anyone he has injured, when that is possible; but that is not the same as punishment. I can see the point in punishment as something painful that people will want to avoid and so (we may reasonably hope) something to encourage them to avoid committing crimes; but this is not paying a debt. It is impossible to see Christ on the cross as literally engaged either in making restitution or in serving as a warning to others. If God will not forgive us until his Son has been tortured to death for us then God is a lot less forgiving than even we are sometimes. If a society feels itself somehow compensated for its loss by the satisfaction of watching the sufferings of a criminal, then society is being vengeful in a pretty infantile way. And if God is satisfied and compensated for sin by the suffering of mankind in Christ, he must be even more infantile…

Well, then, did the Father want Jesus to be crucified? And, if so, why? The answer as I see it is again: No. The mission of Jesus from the Father is not the mission to be crucified; what the Father wished is that Jesus should be human. Any minimally intelligent people who are proposing to become parents know that their children will have lives of suffering and disappointment and perhaps tragedy, but this is not what they wish for them; what they want is that they should be alive, be human. And this is what Jesus sees as a command laid on him by his Father in heaven; the obedience of Jesus to his Father is to be totally, completely human…

Jesus had no fear of being human because he saw his humanity simply as gift from him whom he called 'the Father'. You might say that as he lived and gradually explored into himself, asking not just the question 'Who do men say that I am?' but 'Who do I say that I am?', he found nothing but the Father's love. This is what gave all the meaning to his life—the love which is the ultimate basis and meaning of the universe. However he would have put it to himself (and of this we know nothing), he saw himself as simply an expression of the love which is the Father and in which the Father delights. His whole life and death was a response in love and obedience to the gift of being human, an act of gratitude and appreciation of the gift of being human…

So my thesis is that Jesus died of being human. His very humanity meant that he put up no barriers, no defences against those he loved who hated him. He refused to evade the consequences of being human in our inhuman world. So the cross shows up our world for what it really is, what we have made it. It is a world in which it is dangerous, even fatal, to be human; a world structured by violence and fear. The cross shows that whatever else may be wrong with this or that society, whatever may be remedied by this or that political or economic change, there is a basic wrong, persistent through history and through all progress: the rejection of the love that casts out fear, the fear of the love that casts out fear, the fear that without the backing of terror, at least in the last resort, human society and thus human life cannot exist.

A few reflections:

1. The heart of the heart of McCabe’s argument, it seems to me, can be stated like this: the Father does not want, much less need, the Son to be crucified; what the Father wants and needs is for the Son to be himself—the one whose life is given for us freely and without reserve.

2. Like Anselm no less than Aquinas, McCabe is clear that Jesus’ mission is not to get himself killed as some kind of “payment” for our supposed “debt” to God. Our “debt,” if we’re going to use that metaphor, is simply to be who and what we’ve been made to be. Doing that is what got Jesus killed.

3. We need to be as clear as we can on this too: Jesus did not in any straightforward sense suffer “the lightening-bolt of the Father’s wrath on the cross” (as I once heard a preacher put it); his death simply was the fire of the Father’s wrath consuming death and all that death had done to us and the world entrusted to our care. The cross is a mystery of divine-human intimacy, not a mechanism for God to excuse himself for loving us despite our unworthiness. This truth cannot be overstated: Christ is not unequally yoked in his marriage with us.

4. While it’s important to affirm that because Jesus was fully human he of course grew into an understanding of himself and his mission, it’s equally important to avoid projecting onto his experience our own struggles. As McCabe says, Jesus came to know himself as the Father’s beloved. Yet for him such self-understanding came naturally. as it should, without interruption or rupture, while for us such understanding does not come naturally; it must be given and received by grace—that is, by the Spirit who makes what is true of Jesus true of us as well.

5. McCabe’s way of speaking about Jesus’ life brings to light a truth we often let ourselves forget: he loved life, loved living and being alive. He was at every moment glad to be alive and grateful to be himself. Despite what our preaching often suggests, he did not have a death-wish. He was not gloomy or dour. He did not live with the shadow of death hanging over him. His countenance was not fallen. Is this not obvious from the fact that little children as well as at-risk women were so drawn to him, felt so at ease and safe with him, and recognized him in ways no one else could? We should think long and hard about what that means.