Redemption is not sealed in one event during Holy Week. It is a continuum from the Incarnation, through the ministry of Jesus which was to establish the Kingdom of God, to humanity's attempt to overthrow that Kingdom which is the death of Christ on the cross, to Christ's resurrection which empowers those who desire to follow him to continue the work of making that Kingdom of God intelligible. If that's not the core of the Gospel, I don't know what is…
Some questions have been raised regarding my post that offers an alternative on the reason for Christ's death counter to the penal substitutionary or judicial theory of the atonement in which Christ dies in order to pay the debt of sin that humankind "owes" to God. I figured this is a better way to clarify since I am unpacking some things and it got lengthy.
Can humankind actually "kill God?"
If Jesus as fully God and fully man died on the cross, and "emptied himself" (Paul's use of kenosis), then I think we can say that the second person of the Trinity was indeed dead at that point. The point with that statement is that human rebellion of God ends with humanity's ultimate rejection of God. The ultimate rejection of anything is to kill it. I want to push the notion of rebellion further than a simple explanation of a child refusing to listen to a parent. More than that happens between humanity and God in Scripture.
Rebelliousness is an act of idolatry, the act of replacing the true God with something else. Rebelliousness is thus the desire to kill God as seen in Jesus who humankind clearly did want to see dead, with the exception of very few. Theoretically it is impossible to kill God. Yet, if Jesus was fully God and truly died on the cross what do we make of it then? Was the cry of dereliction a ruse or was it the ultimate division within God's own being? The reality is that God as revealed as Triune in the person and work of Jesus did die on Good Friday.
Was not Christ's death voluntary?
Christ submitted voluntarily to the sin of the world which is precisely what I am saying. I think that if we want to become God, that is absolutely an act of killing God as an any act of idolatry is. Here is yet another way to look at it:
Think of the force of what the younger son says to the father in the Prodigal Son. When he demands for his inheritance, it is the same thing as telling his father that he wants him dead so that he can receive the inheritance. An inheritance would only be given to a son after the father dies.
The force of our rebellion towards God is to kill him. That is the legacy of the power of sin that Jesus shows us in his own willful submission to our rebelliousness. Another way to think of it is that killing God is the logical outcome of sin. If we want to be not just like God, but God, where does God go? To replace one thing, you have to remove it. We, the human race, tried to remove Jesus, God in our midst by literally killing him. With the Prodigal Son we often jump too quickly to the end when the father greets his son with a bear hug. Before that happens, the son requests that his father die so he can satiate what sin can offer him in this world.
Without the notion that the cross is the event where Christ repays humanity's sin-debt, is the message of the Gospel void?
As Paul might say, by no means! In no way am I implying that the cross has lost efficacy. I am arguing what that efficacy might actually mean before we get to Easter. What the sin-debt-repayment formula misses is the power and force of the Incarnation of Jesus the God-man, and how humanity reponds to the presence of this God-man. If Christ was without sin, and he was, then redemption of the flesh begins with his very presence as full God and fully human. Before the cross happens, God was among us. Humankind was simply a lousy host to the one who they believed created them.
The point here is that I do not agree that Christ came only for the purpose of dying "for" sin. He came foremost to reveal the Kingdom of God as God in the flesh – a Kingdom that would knock asunder all systems and kingdoms of humankind. Jesus was not on a suicide mission, he was on a Kingdom building mission and the Gospels are quite clear about this. Rather than help him to build that Kingdom, humanity killed him because of his revelation of the Kingdom in the ultimate act of rebellion – killing God in the flesh. Before Easter happens, Jesus as the revealed Messiah to many was literally dead and gone. Therefore, Jesus died because of humanity's rejection of his, of God's, Kingdom. Maybe we too often skip to the good parts before dealing with this primal aspect of humanity.
Rather than accuse humanity for such an horrific and egregious crime, God sealed a new covenant of life in the resurrection. It is the Christian responsibility to continue building the Kingdom Jesus began through the power of the resurrection given by the Holy Spirit – even to the point of our own sacrifice to make it so. This is how we participate in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
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