[This sermon will be updated with more notes as time progresses, but I wanted to ensure it was released before the end of the day, that the effort should not be vain.]
Why did Christ die? The Romans. If any complicity can be identified from those of his own people, it is not “the Jews” considered as some indiscriminate mass, as though all Jews in antiquity were present in Jerusalem that day (the city would have burst), as though all Jews of the time were of one mind on any particular issue in halakha, politics, or theology, or as though “the Jews” could or would perform a judicial killing of a criminal by means of crucifixion. It is instead the priestly hierarchy and the lay aristocrats, those whose wealth and power invest them most in the status quo, whom the Gospels and Acts depict as involved in Jesus’ death; hardly representative of most or all Jews, as an elite, hereditary minority with economic stake in the success of the Roman project at the expense of the horrific poverty and debt slavery of the majority of those living in Judea, Samaria, and Galilee at the time, still less the majority of Jews generally who lived in Diaspora cities like Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, or Babylon. At the time, Judea, Samaria, and Idumaea were under direct Roman rule, via a procurator, as they had been since the deposition of Herod Archelaus in 6 CE; Jesus’ crucifixion sub Pontio Pilato, as the Gospels and the Creed tell us, should be understood as his execution by the most brutal and bloodthirsty of these Roman middlemen, known for the exquisite excess of his violence and pitiless disregard for the value of Jewish ancestral customs or day-to-day concerns. Jesus’ death at Pilate’s hands, too bloodied to ever be truly cleansed by the water with which he washes them in the Passion narrative, would have read minimally as yet another instance of the gentile oppressor overseeing the death of a Jewish peasant for fidelity to Jewish law and Jewish hope. Jesus is a Jewish martyr like other Jewish martyrs of antiquity, suffering under imperial bullies with dreams of cultural hegemony, like the seven brothers of 2 Maccabees 7 or the wise of Daniel who all suffer at the whim of Antiochos IV Epiphanes. When Jesus says in the Synoptic Gospels that his disciples must take up their crosses and follow him (Matt 16:24), we should understand him quite literally as commending the martyric path at Rome’s man-killing hands, what later Jewish tradition would describe as kiddush HaShem, “sanctification of the Name” of God by spilling one’s own blood rather than profaning Israel’s faith.1 And it is of course martyrdom by dying with Christ—in baptism, in bodily suffering, indeed, in actual death—which is commended by the bulk of the New Testament, in the Pauline and Catholic Epistles and the Johannine literature, as well as by the Apostolic Fathers in the School of John like St. Ignatios of Antioch or St. Polycarp of Smyrna. Martyrdom for the faith of Israel as carried forth in Christ is the example set by Sts. Peter and Paul, the principes apostolorum, and the other Christians who died in the persecution following the Great Fire in Rome in 64 CE. While Christians were not under universal, public, formal persecution, but rather generalized, informal cultural pressure that periodically erupted into violence against Christian individuals and communities,2 claiming the lives of, among others, some of the addressees of the Johannine Apocalypse and of Ignatios and Polycarp in the second century. More or less contemporaneous with them, and with the Second Jewish-Roman War or Bar Kokhba Revolt (132-136 CE), the real object of Roman ire were the Jews; martyrdom for the cause of Jewish liberation was the fate, famously, of the great sage Rabbi Akiva, whose skin was flayed by the Romans while he recited the Shema in the sight of his horrified students. Formal persecution of Christians would follow under Emperors Marcus Aurelius (161-180), Decius (249-251), Gallus (251-253), Valerian (253-260), cut short only by his capture by Persian emperor Shapur I, and finally Diocletian (283-305). Rome had persecuted other cults at different times and for different reasons, but the point from the Jewish and ante-Nicene Christian perspective is simply that Rome was indeed the great chaos monster, the great gentile oppressor whose destruction in vengeance for the blood of the martyrs could only mean the liberation of God’s people in his Kingdom, and therefore the vindication and glorification of the martyrs themselves. Jesus’ crucifixion stands in this wider history of Jewish suffering for fidelity to Judaism, and the hopes that suffering rouses for the coming of God’s Kingdom, which in the aftermath of Jesus’ life also became the grounds for Christian martyrdom as well. In the Johannine school in particular, as John Behr has argued at length, the Passion, Jesus’ martyrdom, is the very moment of the Logos’ becoming flesh: the Johannine Prologue (Jn 1:1-18) which is read at Pascha is about Pascha, Jesus’ Passover through suffering and death to resurrection life, not about the Nativity with which we commonly conflate it (except insofar as the Nativity presages the Passion, as the ancient iconographic and homiletic construal of the Feast often insisted). Through martyrdom, the Apocalypse promises, its readers will in fact become conquerors of the kosmos like Christ, the conqueror of the kosmos, and will therefore live and reign with him over the world, sharing his glory; Ignatios hopes to become a true human being through his martyrdom, to become truly and fully alive paradoxically through his death. When St. Irenaeus of Lyons later writes that “the glory of God is the living human being,” it is this sort of living human being that he means: not a person who has successfully realized their life’s purpose and potential isn’t he world, but who has, in imitation of Christ, laid down their life in martyrdom so as to take it up again with Christ in the resurrection. It is by this, one might wager, that Origen of Alexandria’s teaching that in the Kingdom of God death is defeated by being transformed from a principle of dissolution and decay to one of change and ascent is to be understood: death is defeated each time it becomes the pathway to life, each time it is witness to Christ crucified.
But it is indeed Christ who is crucified. So why did Christ die? What was it that provoked the Romans about Jesus, who by every available historical datum did things the Romans would not have been terribly interested in, like preach, argue over how his people should observe their indigenous legal code, the Torah, perform healings and exorcisms that restored people to ritual purity and therefore the ability to go to the Temple, and advocate for provision for the poor and the marginalized? Jesus the prophet—even Jesus the apocalyptic prophet of God’s coming Kingdom—was not a threat to the Romans the way that, say, Judah the Galilean or Theudas were: Jesus was not trying to raise an army to overthrow the Romans, an option he rejected crucially at his arrest, and yet he received a sentence the Romans reserved for seditionists, and he was crucified between two lēstai, “brigands,” and he is crucified as “King of the Jews” in all four Gospels, for which mashiach or christos, Christ or Messiah, is the indigenous honorific. Jesus does not publicly own this title, nor is it a cornerstone of his public preaching; Jesus does not generally go around calling himself the messiah, and he tells his disciples to shut up about it when they figure it out at the crucial juncture in the Synoptics (Mk 8; Matt 16; Lk 9). This so-called “Messianic Secret” might have many meanings, of which two predominate. The first possibility is that Jesus did not think he was the messiah, but that upon his resurrection and glorification after the crucifixion, his followers awarded him this title. This seems unlikely, though, since ancient Jews had categories for divine or deified humans that were non-messianic: on that model of things Jesus should simply have been thought of like a New Moses or Elijah, to whose pattern of suffering and vindication Jesus is indeed explicitly conformed in the Synoptic scene of the Transfiguration. Why a messiah, and not simply a paradigmatic prophet vindicated by God like other prophets of Israel? This raised possibility number two, that Jesus and/or others did think of him as messiah in his lifetime, but that Jesus kept quiet about this (whether due to a changing sense of his own identity or for tactical reasons, to avoid Roman retribution), and Jesus’s followers did not publicize it until, especially, the last week of his life, until his Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem, staged as an intentional fulfillment of the prophecy in Zechariah 9:9. And in Roman eyes, even if, as Paula Fredriksen has argued, Pilate and the high priests knew that Jesus did not really have designs on the kingship (otherwise, why were his followers not crucified with him as fellow seditionists?), all could agree that the state of things was safer with a dead Jesus, a symbol of Roman victory over would-be kings, than with a living one whose every breath might potentially bring the spark of revolution, whether Jesus was interested in that kind of thing or not.
Incidentally, the messiah that Jesus seems interested in talking about and identifying with—the Son of Man—is a heavenly judge and king, not a strictly terrestrial one. The New Testament authors insist that Jesus is a messianic Son of David, and when the title comes his way, Jesus does not reject it, but it is clear that he subjects its importance to that of the Son of Man figure, variously conceived in Early Jewish literature. It might also be added though that the Petrine confession which occasions the Transfiguration in all three Synoptics also posits a redefinition of the meaning of messiah, one that perhaps also contributed to Jesus’ messianic secrecy and the initial confusion and disappointment of his death: the centering of messianic identity around martyrdom. The way that Jesus reads Scripture, looking to the figure of the messianic Son of Man from Daniel 7:9-14 and probably also from the pseudepigraphal Parables of Enoch, is that the messiah, the Son of Man, will have to suffer, die, and be raised to fulfill his messianic mission. This is genuinely new in the history of Judaism: no Jews before Jesus that we know of had read Scripture this way, though the paradigms that Jesus draws on to make this conclusion certainly preexisted in Jewish texts and experience; the insistence of the risen Jesus in Luke’s Gospel that the Paschal Mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection is the fundamental though cryptic theme of Jewish Scripture, unlocked only by the inspiration of the risen Christ who, elsewhere, in 2 Corinthians, removes the veil from the eyes of those who read the Law of Moses (2 Corinthians 3), presumably to see the hidden truth of the paschal mystery. So Jesus redefines messianic kingship away from the interests of, say, the author of Psalms of Solomon 17, or the Messiah Son of Israel (i.e., David) spoken of at Qumran, the glorious warrior king who overthrows the gentile oppressors by violence and institutes the Davidic empire envisioned in classic royal oracles like 2 Samuel 7:1-17, Psalm 2:7-9, 18, 20, 21, 45, or 72. Jesus does not come to Jerusalem to overthrow the gentile oppressor by military might: his mission is, as prophet and as messianic king, to suffer the fate of his people and their holy city past and future, and archetypically in the tragedy of 70, which Jesus himself prophesies. Jesus’ crucifixion and vindication by resurrection are, as Mark Kinzer has argued, the last of his own sign prophecies, his great signification of Jerusalem and Israel’s death and resurrection at the hands of their gentile persecutors. Of all the varieties of messiah belief in Early Judaism, then, the distinctively Christian concept of messianism has always revolved around martyrdom—Jesus’ martyrdom, extended in our own.
One may of course object that the traditional messianic violence in some texts and tropes is simply deferred, not denied, here. Paul’s Jesus will, after all, return to overthrow cosmic gods opposed to the Kingdom of God precisely as a thoroughly Davidic messiah; the Synoptic Jesus speaks of the future parousia of the Son of Man to judge the world with angelic assistance, with promised suffering for the wicked, defined here as the rich and the mighty who persecute the Jews and the poor and powerless more generally; the Johannine Apocalypse is nothing less than an urgent prophetic hope that this should come to pass “swiftly and soon, and in our days,” in the words of the Mourner’s Kaddish, bringing a violent end to the Roman Empire whose own violence corrupts the earth. What to do with a nonviolent messiah that acts violently, other than to dismiss violence to the realm of the divine economy, leaving the ahimsa of the divine nature, the peaceable Kingdom, intact? Minimally we may take from this paradox that the only ones God has authorized to execute violent judgment on the world are the martyrs themselves; maximally, though, we may perhaps wish to follow John’s Gospel and say that the world’s very krisis and creation are taking place on the cross, in Christ’s martyrdom.
Why did Christ die? “For sins,” say the New Testament and the Creeds, in John’s Gospel, as the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (Jn 1:29), a paschal reference to Jesus’ blood as like that of the Passover Lamb which protected the children of Israel from the Destroyer in the Exodus. That the death of a martyr could turn divine wrath from the nation is attested in the Maccabean literature; it seems somewhat prefigured in the representative suffering of paradigmatic figures in Jewish Scripture to whom Jesus’ image is conformed by the Evangelists, like Elijah, David, and Moses. Christ’s martyrdom is conditioned by the sin of the kosmos, but it also takes that sin away: just as Christ in his ministry forgives sins and cleanses ritual impurities, an inexhaustible source of holiness as God’s “holy one,” so now, too, his death provides the opportunity to expiate the sin of the entire universe. Here the themes of martyric prophecy and kingship come also to encompass the hieratic office, here is Christ the Priest and Victim: that Israel’s final prophet and king, in dying for the nation, “saves his people from their sins” (Matt 1:21) and is thereby empowered to offer the same cleansing power to the nations. Christ was of course not a Levite; were there to be a Messiah Son of Aaron, as the yachad expected, one would perhaps expect it to have been John the Baptist, though no such role is offered him by the Evangelists. Instead Jesus is the high priest “according to the order of Melchizedek” (Ps 110:4; Heb 7:17), the priest-king of patriarchal Salem (later Jerusalem) invoked by Genesis and the Psalmist probably to explain David’s own priestly prerogatives (1 Sam 21; 2 Sam 6; 8:18) despite his non-Levitical status. Without abolishing the professional priesthood that developed in the premonarchic period but did not achieve dominance or officialization until the late preexilic and early postexilic periods, defined by the Holiness Code in the pentateuchal Torah (recall, an exilic and postexilic construction), by descent from Levi, Aaron, Phinheas, and Zadok, and by the kingless Jerusalem cult of the Second Temple, Jesus restores the sacral kingship of ancient Israel in his self-offering on the cross. Without abolishing the cult of the Temple which he loved, Christ institutes the cult of the renewed covenant, the memorial sacrifice of the eucharist commemorating his own offering; by his Pascha Christ takes Israel’s sin and the world’s away forever and anon.
I am of course engaging both in a bit of historical reconstruction of what the early Christians, and potentially Jesus himself, thought his death meant as well as in a bit of actively synthesizing theology. Christ the Prophet, Christ the King, and Christ the Priest appear together only at a fairly late stage in the organization of the apostolic kerygma and its earliest witnessing literature, and not all of these concepts appear together equally stressed or in the way I here suggest in every text. But this is perhaps a useful closing thought, by way of observation: the question “Why did Christ die?” has not one but many answers; it has been answered differently by every generation of Christians, with different framing assumptions, language, concepts, and goals; it has been answered with different and sometimes incompatible and sometimes damnable rhetorical aims. History and theology are often elided from homiletics because they take time to explain and because they are thought too inaccessible for the ordinary layperson, and neither can finally answer the question “Why did Christ die?” for me in a fully comprehensive and personally meaningful way. But without them, we may well be doomed to misunderstand and misrepresent Christ’s death, to construe its meaning according to our preferences and prejudices. It is important to get right that Christ was killed by the Romans, not by the Jews, because failure to get this right—too often intentional—has led to horrific violence against Jews, directly and indirectly, for most of the last two millennia; for the same reason, it is essential to get straight that Christ dies for his devotion to Judaism, for his project of Israel’s renewal, for the apocalyptic and social prophecy of the Kingdom that was good news to poor Jews and bad news to rich and powerful oppressors, and not for designs towards a new religion. It is essential to see that Christ’s martyrdom is neither the first nor the last, though for Christians it is of course the very paradigm of those before and after, the logos of the false world’s judgment and the true world’s creation. It is essential to see that the causes of his death are revelatory of the ambiguity and pluralism of the expectations that surrounded Jesus, his own aims, and the traditions and texts that fueled both, and the cosmic volatility of all such aspirations in a world of empires human and divine. But it is also essential to see that it is precisely that opening, that indeterminacy, that divine transfiguration of death into conquest and life, which makes possible and invites the whispered confession, “For me.”
On martyrdom in ancient Judaism and Christianity, see Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Friedrich Avemarie and Jan Willem van Henten, Martyrdom and Noble Death: Selected Texts from Greco-Roman, Jewish, and Christian Antiquity (London: Routledge, 2002); Candida R. Moss, Ancient Christian Martyrdom: Diverse Practices, Theologies, and Traditions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); eadem, The Other Christs: Imitating Jesus in Ancient Christian Ideologies of Martyrdom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
See Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (SanFrancisco: HarperOne, 2013).
I had to come back to this a year latter because it one of my favorites on the whole news letter many thanks for this and all your great stuff.(and because I have a gud memory of cutting class and driving around on the 14th the day before break in senior year.)
Did you like Moss' book? It's been a while, but I remember thinking it was mostly conjecture and seemed to have a real axe to grind. I love a good counter-narrative in historical endeavors, but my impression was mainly irritation. Maybe I'd be more open to the arguments and less threatened or attacked these days?