Jesus didn't die for your sins and the Jews didn't kill him

The idea that before God could forgive us, Jesus, his only begotten Son, had to be nailed to a cross and hang there until he died, never made much sense to me. But, if Jesus didn’t die for our sins, why did he die?

It’s a good question to ponder as we turn into the stretch of our journey through Lent and head for the finish line on Easter Sunday.

"The time has come," the Walrus said, "to talk of many things: of shoes, and ships, and sealing-wax, of cabbages and kings--and why the sea is boiling hot--and whether pigs have wings."

For centuries, only the church had the bible. The bible was not accessible to the folks in the pews and the scholarship was limited to the religious elite. The people were told what to believe. Questioning was frowned upon.

However, in the last half-a-century, biblical scholarship exploded largely through the work of the Jesus Seminar as lay folks began to read  theologians like Marcus Borg, John Domic Crossan,  and Bishop John Shelby Spong.

They took an approach to studying the Bible that had never been taken. Instead of reading it to confirm church doctrine, they analyzed church doctrine and scripture based on history, anthropology, linguistics, and culture. Their work was highly controversial.
What emerged are new and exciting  ideas about old creeds and foundational Christian thought. In many ways they redefined what it means to be a Christian by making room for questioning. They were among the first to believe that the folks in the pews had the capacity to think for themselves as they encouraged us to wrestle with the scripture and the ancient teachings.

It’s time we had a talk. The truth, as I understand it is…well, here goes…pigs do not have wings…and Jesus did not die for your sins. Of the first, I am absolutely certain. Of the latter, I have only my faith, my years of study and thought and an educated guess, the best any of us get no matter how certain we claim to be.
On the day about which Lewis Carroll wrote, he said the sun was shining on the sea, shining with all his might. He did his best to make the billows smooth & bright & this was odd, because it was the middle of the night.

More preachers than you might think have thought and studied and prayed in the middle of the night about this question and we’ve done our best to make the billows smooth and straight by doing so. Too often, we avoided talking about what we believe. Others filled the void with harmful interpretations of the defining event of Christianity…the execution of Jesus. They told you that Jesus died for your sins and it was the Jews who killed him.

Lent is the time to talk about shoes, and ships, and sealing-wax, of cabbages and kings” and whether Jesus died for your sins and was killed by the Jews. He didn’t. They didn’t.

Lewis Carroll said, "It's very rude of him to come and spoil the fun!" His poem continued, they were walking close at hand; they wept to see such quantities of sand. "If this were only cleared away," they said, "it would be grand!" So, let’s clear away the sand.

It’s what’s called “atonement theology,” the belief that we are all wretched sinners from the day of our conception until the day of our death. They call it “original sin.” It requires converting the story of Adam and Eve from the myth it was intended to be into a literal interpretation of scripture and then using it to create church doctrine.

It goes like this. A talking snake tricked Eve who tricked Adam and the bite of an apple became a hole in the soul of every man and woman who ever lived. It followed that creeds and hymns and sermons were written about how Jesus shed his blood to save a wretch like me.

“My point,” to quote John Dominc Crossan, a former Catholic priest, “is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.”

“Atonement” is the reconciliation of God with man that can only be attained by the awful suffering and brutal death of Jesus Christ.

Bishop John Shelby Spong calls atonement theology the “deepest distortion” of Christianity. It makes no sense, he says, that a loving God created humans with the inability to be free of sin and arranged to have his only son killed violently in a rescue mission.If Jesus’s violent death was a part of God’s plan, Judas should have been sainted, not vilified. Am I right?

If this idea that Jesus died by direction of God to save us from the original sin committed by mythical characters is to be the basis for what we believe, why is nothing mentioned about Jesus dying for our sins until Paul comes along three or more decades later? In 1^st Corinthians, Paul wrote “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.”

Jesus had no expectation we could be perfect; he knew we had logs in our eyes when he said we should not judge others who have a splinter in theirs. Are we sinners? Of course, we all sin and fall short. That truth does not sustain a belief that we are preordained by the sins of Adam and Eve to be hopeless sinners. It does mean that following Jesus is a good way to avoid sin and hit the mark a little more often.

The Presbyterian Book of Order tells it this way. “God sends the church in the power of the Holy Spirit to proclaim in deed and in word that Jesus gave himself to set people free.” Scripture supports that.

John’s Gospel blamed the desperation of the Jews to save themselves from the Romans. John’s Gospel says, some of them, referring to those of the Jews who were worried about the fuss being made over Jesus,  went to the Pharisees and told them how Jesus was stirring discord.

Religious leaders knew discord among the people posed great danger to all. The Romans would become involved if a zealot was stirring the masses. Revolts could result. The Romans would never let it get that far. They would go after the leaders of the synagogue. Jesus was committing a crime against Roman power. What Jesus was doing was considered seditious and the Romans had a specific penalty for sedition. Execution by hanging on a cross.
Thus it was that the Bible says the chief priests and Pharisees called a meeting. “What are we going to do? If we let him go on like this, everyone will follow him. The Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.” If you want to know why Jesus died, look first at the words of the high priest. Caiaphas said “it is better that one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.”

It was Rome, not God, demanding a blood sacrifice. It was Rome and Rome alone, not the Jews, with the authority to put a man to death.

Make your own judgment. This I believe. Jesus did not for our sins. That diminishes the significance and the impact of his teachings, how threatening his teaching were to those with political, economic, and religious power. It diminishes his concern for the least of these, what he meant when he said that to follow him, we must pick up his cross, and how it mattered to Jesus that we love one another as God loves us.

The idea that God ordered the murder of his only begotten Son raises questions about the nature of God that I can’t begin to answer. To argue that Jesus came to earth to atone for an original sin committed by mythical characters gives far too much credit to a talking snake and far too little to Jesus of Nazareth.

In Roman occupied territories, the sure-fire way to get hung from a cross was to threaten those in power. Jesus knew what he was doing. He was a threat. He knew where it would lead and yet he said, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

“Why did Jesus die on a cross?” Jesus died on the cross because he threatened the power of those with the authority to kill him. Jesus died on a cross because he challenged the oppressors who would far better like to blame his death on your sin than on theirs.

As the Book of Order says, “Jesus gave himself to set people free.” Jesus died on a cross to prove that even the threat of death held no power over God’s hopes for the world. Jesus died on a cross to show us what love looks like when God’s hopes for the world are at stake.

Jesus died for the same reason Christianity faces death today…because fundamentalist religionists and those with political and economic power still conspire to erase his message.

The truth can be a cross to bear in our times. Questioning the ancient doctrine that has been used to define what it means to be a Christian will not be well received among many of your family and friends. So we have a choice. Will we allow the title “Christian” to be hijacked by the literalists or will we open our minds, use our reason, and say, “You know, pigs do not have wings?”

If we are Christians, that’s the cross we have to bear, the one Jesus said to take up and follow him. AMEN