Why'd he die?
An outline for Good Friday, both religious and political
I hope you’re having a good Good Friday! If you’re not otherwise engaged, please help me mull over the question Good Friday seeks to answer: why did Jesus die?
Most answers I’ve heard seem inadequate. They’re often doctrinal or trite (or both). They’re usually either exclusively theological or exclusively historical and political. And neither of these two approaches alone does justice to the Gospels’ passion narratives, which are at once religious, historical, and political.
In considering why Jesus died, much of Western Christianity tends to make what N.T. Wright calls an "anachronistic distinction" between "politics and theology.”1 This false distinction often leads to the exclusion of politics from what motivated Jesus to accept his crucifixion. The exclusion of any political motives, in turn, makes Jesus's acceptance of his death seem “weird” to many, something Wright, a New Testament scholar and Anglican bishop, also addresses.2 Jesus's death may feel a bit weird because, in an obviously political setting, why would Jesus willingly die merely to create or advance a theology?
No matter what choice we make among what Wright calls "the pre-packaged theologies of atonement or justification normally on offer,”3 our dismissal of Jesus's possible political motives for accepting crucifixion warps how we understand Jesus's humanity (or perhaps even his sanity). Even though we might not wish to admit it, our “pre-packaged” theologies tend to view the Gospels’ passion narratives through something like this overlay:
God tricked or manipulated the Romans into crucifying Jesus for their own political reasons, even though Jesus was determined to die for solely religious reasons.
Our modern distinction between religion and politics, anachronistic when applied to first-century Palestine, thus excuses the civilization—the empire—because the Roman Empire claimed to be ignorant of Jewish religious matters. The empire becomes simply the narratives’ only licensed killing authority. Beneath our overlay, the empire appears something like a large, masked executioner, just doing its job.
So how could religion and politics come together on Good Friday? How, for instance, could "Jesus died for our sins" not just coincide with, but also benefit from "Jesus was turned over to the Romans by Jewish authorities to be crucified"?
It takes work to deconstruct our Good Friday apolitical distortion, and I outline the work of others here. But as experts or not (and I'm not), we all might participate in this good work of identifying and challenging our possible misconceptions about why Jesus died.
A short overview of the Bible's basic narrative may help us put Good Friday in its political and religious context. Also of help: New English translations and recent scholarship. We'll start our overview and scholarship with "Jesus died for our sins." Wright helps to wean us from a purely apolitical notion of sin, pointing out that God's Old Testament promise to forgive Israel's sins is inextricably tied to the intended political outcome of that forgiveness, Israel's full return from exile.4 Each of us, of course, experiences God’s forgiveness on a personal level. On a political level, God’s forgiveness means justice and political freedom in an earthbound context.
By extension, God's promise to forgive the Gentiles' sins includes their return from exile, too.5 Civilizations and empires have removed us from our lands and, more generally, from our relationship to land, to one another, and to the rest of creation. They have disrupted kinship politics and kinship justice, and they have disassociated us from our own political lives.
Abraham walked away from empire—returned from exile, in a sense—when he left Mesopotamia and by faith founded a new nation. Israel, his seed, received an international calling to bless the other nations, the ones through Noah's progeny that God blessed before Israel came along (Genesis 9, 10, 22). These nations were not yet ruled by others.6
The Bible may be understood as an account of Israel's struggle to establish and maintain a just and participatory form of politics, and to model it for the surrounding nations, including the empires that eventually swallowed Israel.7 Israel’s calling and struggle express themselves in the Bible's messianic texts about God's own return from political exile. One of my favorites, found in Malachi, begins like this:
“Behold, I am going to send My messenger, and he will clear the way before Me. And the Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly come to His temple; and the messenger of the covenant, in whom you delight, behold, He is coming,” says the LORD of hosts.8
The New Testament's messianic texts also find God moving in this same direction—from heaven to earth. The New Testament’s frequent promises of "eternal life," better translated in modern English versions as "life of the Age"9 and "the life of God's new age,”10 refer to neither heaven above earth nor heaven after earth but heaven to earth. The earth was intended as God's temple, and mankind is pictured in Eden as the priests—the custodians—of that temple.11 As Malachi suggests, God will return to that temple and restore it.
The restoration of this temple—this "life of the Age," also referred to as the "kingdom of heaven" and the "new creation"—isn’t all in the future. It was inaugurated at Jesus's crucifixion. So was the judgment against the temple’s current mismanagement. Paul's apocalyptic writings, Wright points out, suggest that the political judgment against the "rulers of this world"—both the flesh-and-blood rulers and the spiritual forces behind them—began on Calvary.12
The nature of that victory at Calvary and Jesus's earlier claims relating to that victory would, I think, lead to many Good Friday devotions. As Wright points out, Jesus’s claims that led to his death were neither purely religious nor purely political, but both:
For Jesus to claim the status of Messiah, or to be the representative of the true people of God, or to have authority over the Temple, was to make at the same time a statement of the greatest possible political and religious significance. It was to claim that God’s plans, and Israel’s national destiny, revolved around him and his fate. There were only two courses open to his hearers: either believe him and accept the consequences, or get rid of him – both courses involving, again, theological belief and ‘political’ action.13
Jesus’s claims, in other words, forced people into public spaces that they may have wished to avoid. For Jesus’s hearers, religion and politics joined, for better or for worse, in public action.
Jesus’s own public actions also place his death in relief. During his life, Jesus championed the Mosaic covenant as a means of returning Israel’s villages to community life and politics, and as a means of countering the economic and political stranglehold of empire.14 Jesus healed the sick and raised the dead to signal that the messianic times—the "life of the Age"—had come.15 It’s true that, as Wright points out, Jesus allowed himself to be called Messiah, the king of the Jews, challenging Rome's legitimacy as Israel's ruler and setting up his trial before Pilate for sedition.16 But Jesus also taught and practiced passive resistance against Israel's overlords.17 He warned against political zealotry and its misguided violence. He warned Israel about what would happen to Jerusalem within a century of his crucifixion.18 In all of these actions, Jesus called Israel back to being Israel, the political and religious light of the world.
Jesus’s crucifixion was also part of that calling. On the cross, Jesus in a sense became the political zealot he had warned Israel about. We know that Jesus died a political death because crucifixion was always a political death. Rome didn’t crucify mere thieves. Also, Jesus was crucified between two “brigands”—two political revolutionaries19 —and Jesus was crucified for a political crime similar to the presumed crimes of those two brigands. Jesus had claimed to be king,20 challenging the empire’s monopoly of public space.
But the kind of revolution matters. A lot. The New Testament acknowledges that other, more traditionally violent “messiahs” had come and would come.21 Jesus, in a sense, even stood in for one. On the cross, Jesus took the place of Barabbas, a famous and violent revolutionary.22 All four Gospels make the point of implying that Israel, by insisting on Barabbas’s release over Jesus’s, chose Barabbas's approach to political revolution over Jesus's.23 The consequence, the Gospels imply, was the fulfillment of Jesus’s warnings—Jerusalem’s destruction.
Jesus died as Israel's peace-giving Messiah so that Israel wouldn't have to die of its own zealotry contrary to its Abrahamic calling. He died as the Messiah should, Wright says, fully identifying with Israel:
Just as Jesus identified himself with Zacchaeus, becoming a ‘sinner’ by eating with him in order that Zacchaeus might become ‘a son of Abraham’; just as Jesus touched those from whom he ought to have contracted uncleanness, but instead healed them; so now he becomes a zealot, a rebel against Rome, identifying himself with the national disease he had himself diagnosed, in order that it may be healed.24
Jesus died, then, for Israel.25 He died for the world, too, by extension of Israel's calling through Abraham to bless all of the world's nations. He died as Israel's Messiah, practicing biblical religion and biblical politics. He died to inaugurate the proleptic new creation, spoken of in both testaments, so that we could walk, speak, and act, privately and publicly, in newness of life.
This Good Friday post is, perhaps, more deconstruction than devotion. But even that writerly self-assessment may suggest a false distinction. After all, devotion is both a means to, and the end of, deconstruction. Devotion drives us to give up the privileges that afford us an apolitical crucifixion—an oxymoron—or perhaps worse, a shallow, anachronistically political crucifixion taken on by a "conservative" Jesus or a "liberal" Jesus. Deconstruction at times generates pain and shame, but the greater pain that our cultural and religious misapprehensions have given us—and given others through us—helps us to persist through the pain and shame involved in moving away from them.
I’ll end this post, though, with a devotional text and some questions one might use to reflect on it. We sit in on an emergency meeting of the chief priests and Pharisees right after Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead:
“What are we doing? For this man is performing many signs. If we let Him go on like this, all men will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.”
But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all, nor do you take into account that it is expedient for you that one man die for the people, and that the whole nation not perish.” Now he did not say this on his own initiative, but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but in order that He might also gather together into one the children of God who are scattered abroad. (John 11:47-52 NNAS).
Why doesn't John, our narrator, challenge the chief priests and Pharisees' assumption that the Jews' growing belief in Jesus as Messiah would make the Roman Empire feel threatened? In what sense, if any, would that growing belief have been a legitimate threat to Rome?
What aspect of Caiaphas's response does John find prophetic? Does John simply use Caiaphas's purely political strategy to segue into God's purely religious strategy?
Why did Jesus die?
The footnotes refer to full citations in the manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.
Wright, Interpreting Jesus, 31.
Wright, 35, 77.
Wright, 36.
Wright, Day the Revolution Began, 107-19.
Jesus took "upon himself the consequence of Israel’s idolatry, sin, and exile, which itself brought into focus the idolatry, sin, and exile of the whole human race. Expelled from Eden, the human race ended up with Babel. Expelled from Canaan, Israel ended up in Babylon. After Babel, God called Abraham and made covenant promises to him; after Babylon, those promises were made good." Wright, 337.
See gen. Cassuto, Commentary on Genesis, Part 2, 181, 188.
More information on this aspect of Israel’s story is available in any number of works by theologian Walter Brueggemann, perhaps most notably in God, Neighbor, Empire: The Excess of Divine Fidelity and the Command of Common Good.
Malachi 3:1 NNAS. Verses 2-4 keep up the fine messianic momentum.
Hart, New Testament, 174 (from his translation of John 3:16).
Wright, Kingdom New Testament, 176 (from his translation of John 3:16).
See gen. Morales, Cult and Cosmos.
For example, Paul writes, “. . . we speak God’s wisdom in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God predestined before the ages to our glory; the wisdom which none of the rulers of this age has understood; for if they had understood it they would not have crucified the Lord of glory . . .” 1 Corinthians 2:7-8 NNAS. Here’s Wright’s helpful gloss on this passage: “Assuming that by ‘the rulers of the present age’ Paul means Caiaphas, Pilate and the power-systems which they represented, what this seems to indicate is that when these ‘rulers’ crucified Jesus they were, in fact, signing their own death warrant.“ Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness (Pts. 3 & 4), 1068.
Wright, Interpreting Jesus, 29.
See gen. Horsley, You Shall Not Bow.
Wright quotes fellow New Testament scholar and historian Dominic Crossan: Jesus’s “exorcisms and healings ‘were what the Kingdom looked like at the level of political reality.’” Wright, Jesus and the Victory, 93.
Wright, Interpreting Jesus, 26.
Brett, Decolonizing God, 141-42.
Wright, 14-25. Jesus’s apocalyptic warnings of Israel's destruction are frequently taken literally by a Western world that has felt little need to speak indirectly about political matters. As Wright points out, many Western Christians think that Jesus and the prophets before him spoke of the end of the space-time continuum, an end in which the sun would literally be turned into darkness and the moon into blood. Wright, Jesus and the Victory, 72, 443-44. Living under the thumb of an empire made the original readers of the New Testament's Gospels and epistles better readers of that political genre known as apocalyptic speech or writing. See also Scott, Domination and the Arts, 5-6.
“These ‘brigands’ or ‘bandits’ were not mere highway robbers out for what they could get (though no doubt such people existed too). They were revolutionaries. Barabbas, the leader of a murderous civil uprising in Jerusalem, was a lestes. So were the two who were crucified with Jesus. Crucifixion was the punishment reserved, not for thieves or swindlers, but for revolutionaries.” Wright, Jesus and the Victory, 533. “Rome crucified many Jews around the time of Jesus. All of them were guilty of insurrection, and some of them had been hailed as messiahs prior to their death.” Sprinkle, Exile, 57.
“Now Jesus stood before the governor, and the governor questioned Him, saying, ‘Are You the King of the Jews?’ And Jesus said to him, ‘It is as you say.’” Matthew 27:11 NNAS.
Matthew 24:5; Acts 5:33-37.
Wright, 533.
Matthew 27:16-26; Mark 15:7-15; Luke 23:18; John 18:40.
Wright, Interpreting Jesus, 30.
Wright: “I am not, then, claiming that Jesus died for an abstract doctrine, whether of atonement, justification or whatever, but for a concrete reality: Israel.“ Wright, 34.