Jesus Did Not Run
The Monday Mystery Part 15: The Crucifixion
Welcome to the fifteenth entry of The Monday Mystery. Each week I will write a reflection on a mystery (i.e. an episode in the life of Jesus or Mary) from the Rosary. My hope for this series is to provide fuel and inspiration for your own meditations. When you finish reading the reflection, I encourage you to do a ‘test run’ of the mystery by praying a decade of the Rosary (i.e. one Our Father, ten Hail Marys, and one Glory Be) while meditating on the mystery.
Three weeks ago I suggested that Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ may have been too violent in certain parts. Some hold that position even more strongly, others emphatically reject it. Battle lines are drawn in the typical spots we’d expect from similar controversies in the Church. While it’s certainly a polarizing topic, I think if we zoom out, we’ll see a striking commonality: both sides are arguing about the best way to show a nearly naked dead man nailed to a piece of wood through his hands and feet. No matter how much you tone that down, it’s still an extraordinarily violent and grim image. Two thousand years of having the cross so deeply embedded in our collective memory may have worn away any shock value for most people. But that doesn’t change what it is, and how we’d react to it if the person on the cross wasn’t Jesus.
With that in mind, an undeniable benefit of The Passion of the Christ was that it helped people to actually see the crucifixion for the first time. Their minds had become so saturated with stylized devotional images that they unconsciously lost track of the fact that the images represent actual historical events involving flesh and blood human beings. Devotional images have other advantages, and in many ways they can help get to the heart of the matter in ways that a ‘realistic’ depiction can’t. Overall, I think Gibson struck a stunning balance between realism and devotional artistic flourish. That balance awakened and strengthened faith in countless people.
While seeing the crucifixion strengthened the faith of many, it left many others numb. Like other presentations of the Gospel events, The Passion shows that Jesus died for our sins, it doesn’t delve too deeply into why Jesus died for our sins. Not knowing the story of Christian salvation history, The Passion can come across as a senseless masochistic slog through endless scenes of gruesome torture to no obvious purpose.
That’s not entirely Mel Gibson’s fault, bloodthirsty as he may be as a director. This kind of reaction has always come with the territory when proclaiming the Gospel. Before The Passion, and probably even before any serious artistic depiction of the crucifixion, Jesus’ passion was notably incomprehensible to the outside world. In his first letter to the Corinthians Paul writes,
For Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Cor 1:22-24).
What explains this disconnect? The short answer is that the Greeks and Jews didn’t understand that Jesus’ crucifixion reflects the cost of sin. In their defense, that’s not obvious - and it’s impossible to truly grasp without the grace of supernatural faith. Nevertheless, I think it’s highly worthwhile to give explaining it a shot. I’ve found it profitable to meditate on the following question: why did Jesus have to die? Couldn’t God have just forgiven us?
God was certainly willing to forgive us. But sin has a price, and someone had to pay. What was the price? Paul famously wrote that “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). Death entered the world through sin, and this death was not merely physical but also spiritual, culminating in eternal separation from God in Hell.
In the past I’ve struggled with this idea. In our day to day life, a wage is something someone decided on. It’s often negotiated, but the employer and employee could just as easily agree on any number of other wages. Did God choose death? I think that some Christians can get a little tone deaf when they attempt to explain the connection between sin, death, and Hell. In seeking to emphasize God’s justice and human evil, they give explanations which make God sound like a mobster, or an abusive Father venting his rage on his helpless children.
For this reason I think it’s important to emphasize that while death is a punishment and a just penalty for sin, it’s not something that God arbitrarily tacked on to sin just because he felt like it. It’s rather something that happens by the very nature of the action.
An analogy that has resonated with me is this: if I steal a hundred dollars from someone, I owe them a hundred dollars. My actions led to a consequence (the person I stole from is a hundred dollars poorer) and they created a debt (I owe that person a hundred dollars). Notice how no one decided on these. Although a court may give legal validation to the debt and add on additional sanctions, the consequence and debt doesn’t depend on legal fiat. They are as automatic and natural as the law of gravity.
Now the person I stole from could forgive me, and release me from my debt. But forgiving the debt doesn’t remove the consequence, it just changes who experiences it. Instead of forcing me to pay for the consequences, the person who forgive me takes them on themselves; by allowing me to walk away free without paying them the a hundred dollars they are entitled to, they make themselves a hundred dollars poorer.
Sin mysteriously functions the same way: by its very nature sin leads to a consequence and it creates a debt. The consequence is death, both spiritual and physical. The debt created was perfect love owed to the Father. Adam and Eve’s catastrophic decision to let the trust of their creator die in their hearts opened the floodgates of evil and suffering into the human experience.1 It fractured our relationship with God in a way we couldn’t hope to repair. As we have seen earlier, the Father’s love is the very reason we exist. It is the source of our life; we cannot live without it, and we certainly cannot live in a communion of perfect love without it.
Like in the money example, God’s choice to save us didn’t get rid of the consequence of sin, it just changed who experienced them. As we’ve discussed previously, this is why God became man: “the debt was so great that while man alone owed it, only God could pay it” (St. Anselm). Try as we might, we could not make restitution for the debt of perfect love. Once you’re below a hundred percent, you can never make it back. No matter how many more shots you make after your first miss, you will always be ninety nine point nine percent.
How did Jesus’ death make up for our lack of perfect love? Because of his human nature he could really and truly act on our behalf. Because of his divine nature, he could really and truly absorb the full consequences of every sin ever committed on the cross. In the garden of eden, the devil awakened a fear in the heart of our first parents that God was not trustworthy. Since then, we have all lived lives poisoned by that lie, and the devil could triumphantly point to terrible good people endured as validation of his first whisperings. But Jesus was the first to call his bluff - the first born among the dead (Col 1:8).
As you do your test run, place yourself at the foot of the cross. When we choose to sin, we do so because we are afraid that if we don’t, we will end up where Jesus is right in this moment: suffering, humiliated, dying, and abandoned. But Jesus did not run. He knew that sin was never worth it, even if it led to the cross. Ask him for the strength to face all of the sufferings of this life, especially the ones we will endure as a direct consequence of loving the Father and following his will.