Jan 3 Friday focus

If you struggle with the common Christian claim that Jesus suffered and died to make good for all of our sins, then here we are, faced with it in the Hebrews text. No sooner do we celebrate the fat, little, happy baby Jesus than we jump right to the bloody, horrible part. But it’s important to understand that all of Jesus’s life—birth included—is framed by death, or at least mortality. If we’re honest, all of our lives are framed by the same thing. Life is precious in large part because it is finite. While we do risk losing sight of the significance of Jesus’s life in focusing too much on his death, we can’t ignore its importance either. 

We also have a long-running and insatiable need to find an answer for suffering. From the first book in the Bible, we’re presented with the correlation between our sins and our suffering. Adam will labour and Eve will endure labour (the childbirth kind) because they sought to know the mind of God. David and the Israelites determine that their many misfortunes are because they’ve screwed up in God’s eyes. So why do we suffer? One time-tested explanation is that we deserve it. While I don’t contest the idea that much of our suffering is brought upon ourselves, I will push back against the notion that God places suffering on us as a price we have to pay for offending God. Also, this exposes the problem of why Jesus, supposedly without sin, also had to suffer, just like us. 

Kind of blows the whole “We suffer because God is punishing us” hypothesis out of the water, doesn’t it?

 So rather than reframing our entire understanding of the entirety of Scripture as a collection of texts gathered from imperfect people, recording glimpses of their imperfect efforts to understand and explain a perfect God, we try to make a suffering Messiah make sense. In this scenario, Jesus suffered and underwent death—entirely undeserved—in order to take on the weight of our collective sin and conquer death. Seems neat, straightforward, and consistent with all of the rest of the texts, right? 

But we need to look more closely at the words toward the end of the Hebrews text. Hebrews 2:17–18 specifically:

 Therefore he had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested. 

It doesn’t actually seem to say here that Jesus’s blood, suffering, or death particularly satisfied God in any way. In fact, the only mention of God is regarding Jesus’s merciful and faithful service to the world for God. Yes, it does say that a sacrifice atones for our sins, but in the next verse it explains why that suffering was atoning.

 Jesus was tested just like we are by both the prospect and the real experience of suffering. He would have been happy to take a pass on the whole agony-and-death thing; he said as much in the garden at Gethsemane. But although he was tempted to run away or fight back, he faced the threat head-on, refusing to waver in his commitment to living out his conviction that love was more important that even life itself. Jesus was tested and prevailed because he was unmoved in his commitment. Love would redeem him, and us, even in the face of the worst moments imaginable. Maybe then—just maybe—we’d get it. Yes, God/Jesus really meant all that stuff. It wasn’t just talk. It was actually enough to outweigh all of the pain of living and, even the prospect of death itself. The terrible beast was declawed, leaving something real but without power to be the Prime Mover in our existence.

 Jesus finally knew it was possible and that the thing in which he placed all of his faith pulled him through. And now, thanks to him forging that path, he can show us how to get there. In doing so, Jesus’s life is no longer framed by his death. His grasp of the true fullness of what existence is, and that’s liberating.