Today’s Scripture Reading (January 27,
2018): Romans 4
“What I don’t get
is why any parent would allow their child to die on behalf of someone else. It is just not what a parent does.” She
looked at me wanting desperately for me
to answer her biggest objection to Christianity; the death of Jesus on a cross
almost 2000 years ago. Unfortunately, it is a question that I think we should
struggle with, and many simply choose not to enter into that struggle. Why
would God the Father allow Jesus the Son to die on a cross? There are many answers. Among the strongest, and one that
has been used in some form by many Christian
heresies is that this portion of Christianity is fiction. Jesus didn’t die. How
could he, you can’t kill God. It would be like a common housefly deciding to
kill a man. It just can’t be done. But the problem with that response, and many
like it, is that it lessens the sacrifice of Jesus. It leaves us in the
position where Jesus sacrifice on the cross logically means less because it
wasn’t real. Again and again, theologians throughout history have rebelled
against that easy answer.
Jesus suffered
and died. We repeat the mantra; we draw
pictures with our words of the agony of God as Jesus died on the cross. Yes, it
was all according to plan, but we must not lessen the sacrifice, we cannot
allow ourselves to stop asking the question, “why would a parent allow a child
to die when the parent had the power to stop it?” I know that if I have the
power to stop the death of my children or grandchildren in some nightmarish
future, I will use that power. God had the power to stop the death. So why didn’t
he use it?
And the answer is
uncomfortable. I stopped the hand of God. I didn’t know that I had that kind of
power, but apparently, I do. We repeat it
over and over again in church – the wages of sin is death. Paul has already said
that wages are not voluntary; that they are an obligation. Wages must be paid. And on the cross, our wages were paid. The sin that I have committed, that you have committed, as well as
your next door neighbors indiscretions, have been paid by God in the form of
Jesus’s very real sacrifice. The death that I
earned was paid by a perfect Jesus. As painful as this moment was for
God, it had to be that way. Now I am free to move into the future without guilt
(there is way too much guilt inside the church for a group of people who believe
that Jesus has died for their sins) knowing that the price has been paid.
But Paul argues
that that is only step one. Death freed
us from the penalty or the deliverance of the appropriate wage for our sin, but
his raising from the dead justified us. Resurrection allowed our records to be erased and we are left just as if our sin
never happened. The resurrection of Jesus erased his death, the cross, the
penalty and our sin. In one act it was gone.
I get that the
crucifixion is uncomfortable, but without it,
there would have been no resurrection and
no erasing of our sin. And God allowed his son to die a horrible death because
he just couldn’t leave us in that hideous position.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Romans 5
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