Easter 2010 Article from Aelred

In Agatha Christie's novel Five Little Pigs, Poirot has accepted an invitation to find out the truth about a case of a woman who, sixteen years previously, was convicted of poisoning her husband although she persisted in saying that she didn't do it. When he interviewed the prosecuting counsel in the case, Poirot said to him,

' ... you remember it amazingly well. ... When you talk, the picture is there before your eyes ... It would interest me, my friend if you could tell me why? What do you see so plainly? The witnesses? The counsel? The judge? The accused standing in the dock?'

Fogg said quietly, 'I shall always see her ... half the time, she wasn't there. She'd gone away somewhere, quite far away - just left her body there, quiescent, attentive, with the little polite smile on her lips. ... She was never defeated because she never gave battle.'

(In the novel she died in prison after a year of a life sentence.) Poirot then proceeds to elucidate who the real murderer was through patient investigation of the five other people involved - and of course, through his use of the 'little grey cells'!

When we turn to the passion and death of Jesus we are at a grave disadvantage when we want to find an answer to the question, 'Why did Jesus die?' We do not know what Jesus was like apart from the accounts in the gospels. We do not even know who the authors of the gospels were apart from a reasoned guess that they represented the traditions of different Christian communities in about 60-90 AD. Paul had written earlier than the gospels but we are not at all sure that he had known Jesus - he rarely writes about him. We have two options - to make a case for the death of Jesus from isolated texts both from the Old Testament and from the New Testament. Or we can look more deeply into the whole history of the Jewish faith in God and the relationship between Jesus and God - making use of the 'little grey cells' in rational argument - and the help of our faith and trust in Jesus the risen Lord.

Let us look at what we might call 'the biblical option.' This implies that what we read in these ancient texts is the equivalent of legal depositions in our law courts. And there is another problem. Unlike Poirot, we cannot interview the authors of the biblical texts! This didn't deter many generations of Christians coming to conclusions about the passion and death of Jesus. On the one hand, they surmised, Jesus either vanquished the forces of evil (which Paul does write about) or the flesh of Jesus was used as a bait to entrap the devil who found that he was outwitted by the fact that Jesus was also divine. There was also the later theory of Abelard in the 11th-12th century that Jesus' death was a pure example to humankind of the innocent sufferer. And to bring this brief historical outline up todate there is the modern protestant theory that Jesus' death was a sacrifice to God for our sin and even that Jesus was 'punished' instead of us.

In arguing a case for the death of Jesus through manipulation of biblical texts the emphasis nearly always highlights our human shortcomings. The death of Jesus becomes in some way all about us. Yes, we are undoubtedly fragile humans and can be convicted, reasonably, of what the texts call 'sin'. But we have to ask whether that is the real story that the gospel accounts narrate. The theory goes back a long way into feudal times when Anselm produced his famous treatise on why God became man. But in modern terms, what has been called the 'penal substitutionary' theory of atonement, rests more on our psychological awareness of 'guilt' rather than on any reaonable understanding of Jesus' life and death.

In the late fourth century there was another variation of the 'biblical' theory of the death of Christ, when the liturgical sequences of what became Holy Week and Good Friday became a sort of re-living of the passion and death of Jesus. We know that a person called Egeria visiting Jerusalem in 385 experienced these 'exciting' ceremonies, which we may compare to a sort of passion play. Today, this 'biblical' option is continued in the 'catholic' traditions of the churches. It has as its basis the idea that Jesus' death was some sort of sacrifice offered to God which we may continue today in the offering of eucharist. To that extent it circumvents the New Testament concern to represent Jesus' death as made 'once for all' - 'apax in Greek.

Now let us look at the second option. This is a matter of inference from the gospel accounts while accepting that the early Christians did look at, for instance, the writings of Isaiah 53 and many of the psalms. But in taking this line we try to see what was Jesus' understanding of the God whom he called 'Father'. In the gospels there are indications that Jesus intuitively knew that he would die at the hands of his enemies in the Jewish hierarchy. There is a good case to be made that Jesus viewed his mission as the one who would fulfill the ambitions of Israel and of God but in a way quite different from what his contemporaries understood. While Jesus did not underplay the idea of judgement, he expressed in his life - and prayer - the idea of God who loved all humankind and not only the Jewish nation. This was reflected in Jesus' own relationships with the outcasts of his time. The new mission of God was, in fact, a positive one - the concept of a new creation of which Jesus was the 'leader'.

This positive understanding of Jesus' death rests on the divine initiative of love. Our acceptance of this 'solution' depends upon an acceptance that Jesus was raised - as the forerunner of this new creation of God. In one sense one can say that it is 'texts' versus 'faith'! While we can understand the texts to give us this solution it is really faith in the Lord who is alive and present in a transcendent presence which enables us to persuade everyone that this is the real heart of the Good News. In doing so, our 'little grey cells' enable us also to interact with our contemporaries today - faith expressing itself in reasonable arguments. But we are not the first to do that! As Paul wrote to the Corinthian Christians -

For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For consider your call, brethren; not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth; but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption; therefore, as it is written, "Let him who boasts, boast of the Lord." (1 Corinthians 1: 25-31)