Their sins and ours
Their sins and ours
We have looked at the three individuals – Pilate, Caiaphas and Judas – on whom the evangelists fasten the major blame for the crucifixion of Jesus, and at those associated with them, whether priests or people or soldiers. Of each person or group the same verb is used, paradidōmi, to ‘hand over’ or ‘betray’. Jesus had predicted that he would be ‘betrayed into the hands of men’ or ‘handed over to be crucified’.22 And the evangelists tell their story in such a way as to show how his prediction came true. First, Judas ‘handed him over’ to the priests (out of greed). Next, the priests ‘handed him over’ to Pilate (out of envy). Then Pilate ‘handed him over’ to the soldiers (out of cowardice), and they crucified him.23
Our instinctive reaction to this accumulated evil is to echo Pilate’s astonished question, when the crowd howled for his blood: ‘Why? What crime has he committed?’ (Matt. 27:23). But Pilate received no rational answer. The hysterical crowd only shouted all the louder, ‘Crucify him!’ But why?
Why? What has my Lord done?
What makes this rage and spite?
He made the lame to run
And gave the blind their sight.
Sweet injuries!
Yet they at these
Themselves displease,
And ’gainst him rise.
It is natural to make excuses for them, for we see ourselves in them and we would like to be able to excuse ourselves. Indeed, there were some mitigating circumstances. As Jesus himself said in praying for the forgiveness of the soldiers who were crucifying him, ‘they do not know what they are doing’. Similarly, Peter said to a Jewish crowd in Jerusalem, ‘I know that you acted in ignorance, as did your leaders.’ Paul added that, if ‘the rulers of this age’ had understood, ‘they would not have crucified the Lord of glory’.24 Yet they knew enough to be culpable, to accept the fact of their guilt and to be condemned for their actions. Were they not claiming full responsibility when they cried out, ‘Let his blood be on us and on our children!’?25 Peter was quite outspoken on the Day of Pentecost: ‘Let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.’ Moreover, far from disagreeing with his verdict, his hearers were ‘cut to the heart’ and asked what they should do to make amends (Acts 2:36–37). Stephen was even more direct in his speech to the Sanhedrin which led to his martyrdom. Calling the Council ‘stiff-necked people, with uncircumcised hearts and ears’, he accused them of resisting the Holy Spirit just like their ancestors. For their ancestors had persecuted the prophets and killed those who predicted the Messiah’s coming, and now they had betrayed and murdered the Messiah himself (Acts 7:51–52). Paul was later to use similar language in writing to the Thessalonians about contemporary Jewish opposition to the gospel: they ‘killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and also drove us out’. Because they were trying to keep the Gentiles from salvation, God’s judgment would fall upon them (1 Thess. 2:14–16).
This blaming of the Jewish people for the crucifixion of Jesus is extremely unfashionable today. Indeed, if it is used as a justification for slandering and persecuting the Jews (as it has been in the past), or for anti-Semitism, it is absolutely indefensible. The way to avoid anti-Semitic prejudice, however, is not to pretend that the Jews were innocent, but, having admitted their guilt, to add that others shared in it. This was how the apostles saw it. Herod and Pilate, Gentiles and Jews, they said, had together ‘conspired’ against Jesus (Acts 4:27). More important still, we ourselves are also guilty. If we were in their place, we would have done what they did. Indeed, we have done it. For whenever we turn away from Christ, we ‘are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace’ (Heb. 6:6). We too sacrifice Jesus to our greed like Judas, to our envy like the priests, to our ambition like Pilate. ‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord?’ the old negro spiritual asks. And we must answer, ‘Yes, we were there.’ Not as spectators only but as participants, guilty participants, plotting, scheming, betraying, bargaining, and handing him over to be crucified. We may try to wash our hands of responsibility like Pilate. But our attempt will be as futile as his. For there is blood on our hands. Before we can begin to see the cross as something done for us (leading us to faith and worship), we have to see it as something done by us (leading us to repentance). Indeed, ‘only the man who is prepared to own his share in the guilt of the cross’, wrote Canon Peter Green, ‘may claim his share in its grace’.26
Horatius Bonar (1808–89), who has been called ‘the prince of Scottish hymn-writers’, expressed it well:
‘Twas I that shed the sacred blood;
I nailed him to the tree;
I crucified the Christ of God;
I joined the mockery.
Of all that shouting multitude
I feel that I am one;
And in that din of voices rude
I recognize my own.
Around the cross the throng I see,
Mocking the Sufferer’s groan;
Yet still my voice it seems to be,
As if I mocked alone.
The answer which we have so far given to the question ‘Why did Christ die?’ has sought to reflect the way in which the Gospel writers tell their story. They point to the chain of responsibility (from Judas to the priests, from the priests to Pilate, from Pilate to the soldiers), and they at least hint that the greed, envy and fear which prompted their behaviour also prompt ours. Yet this is not the complete account which the evangelists give. I have omitted one further and vital piece of evidence which they supply. It is this: that although Jesus was brought to his death by human sins, he did not die as a martyr. On the contrary, he went to the cross voluntarily, even deliberately. From the beginning of his public ministry he consecrated himself to this destiny.
In his baptism he identified himself with sinners (as he was to do fully on the cross), and in his temptation he refused to be deflected from the way of the cross. He repeatedly predicted his sufferings and death, as we saw in the last chapter, and steadfastly set himself to go to Jerusalem to die there. His constant use of the word ‘must’ in relation to his death expressed not some external compulsion, but his own internal resolve to fulfil what had been written of him. ‘The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep,’ he said. Then, dropping the metaphor, ‘I lay down my life...No-one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord’ (John 10:11, 17–18).
Moreover, when the apostles took up in their letters the voluntary nature of the dying of Jesus, they several times used the very verb (paradidōmi) which the evangelists used of his being ‘handed over’ to death by others. Thus Paul could write ‘the Son of God...loved me and gave (paradontos) himself for me’.27 It was perhaps a conscious echo of Isaiah 53:12, which says that ‘he poured out (LXX paredothē) his life unto death’. Paul also used the same verb when he looked behind the voluntary self-surrender of the Son to the Father’s surrender of him. For example, ‘he who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up (paredōken) for us all – how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?’28 Octavius Winslow summed it up in a neat statement: ‘Who delivered up Jesus to die? Not Judas, for money; not Pilate, for fear; not the Jews, for envy; – but the Father, for love!’29
It is essential to keep together these two complementary ways of looking at the cross. On the human level, Judas gave him up to the priests, who gave him up to Pilate, who gave him up to the soldiers, who crucified him. But on the divine level, the Father gave him up, and he gave himself up, to die for us. As we face the cross, then, we can say to ourselves both ‘I did it, my sins sent him there’ and ‘he did it, his love took him there’. The apostle Peter brought the two truths together in his remarkable statement on the Day of Pentecost, both that ‘this man was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge’ and that ‘you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross’.30 Peter thus attributed Jesus’ death simultaneously to the plan of God and to the wickedness of men. For the cross which, as we have particularly considered in this chapter, is an exposure of human evil, is at the same time a revelation of the divine purpose to overcome the human evil thus exposed.
I come back at the end of this chapter to the question with which I began it: why did Jesus Christ die? My first answer was that he did not die; he was killed. Now, however, I have to balance this answer with its opposite. He was not killed; he died, giving himself up voluntarily to do his Father’s will.
In order to discern what the Father’s will was, we have to go over the same events again, this time looking below the surface.