Thanks for raising this question, Rick!  Given that the dominant paradigm of Christianity in America hinges on Jesus’ blood sacrifice to atone for our sin, it’s no wonder that people who question that dogma might then ask why Jesus was crucified.

You can read the Bible and conclude that his death wasn’t a sacrifice at all.  Jesus was tortured to death by the Romans because they believed he was a threat to their rule over the Jewish people.

But of course the blood sacrifice idea is biblical as well.  In the first century all around the Roman empire, it was part of the culture.  In 1 Corinthians 8, Paul addresses a problem with which early Christians grappled, “concerning food sacrificed to idols”.  In that era before industrial agriculture, everyday people raised animals to slaughter and sell and eat.  They had a personal, visceral relationship with those animals.  To kill them was to break the bond they had with them.  So they developed rituals to remember the sacredness of the lives of the animals that had to be sacrificed in order for people to eat. They would offer animals to the gods who had provided them, to make things right between them.  Early Christians worried that by eating food that had been ritually offered to other gods, they would be violating their relationship with their God.

Today, unless we’re vegetarians, we go to the supermarket and buy steaks in shrink-wrap and (unfortunately) have no personal, felt relationship with the animals from which the meat derived.  The idea of blood sacrifice is as gross and bizarre for us today as its absence would have been for people in the biblical era.  And the idea that a loving God would demand that his son be brutally killed in order to save us all from hellfire is a contradiction that just won’t go away.

Fortunately, the Christian story offers a very different interpretation. In John 3:14, we read: ^“And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up…”  Moses made a bronze serpent to lift up and show to the people, to heal them from snakebites in their desert exodus.  It was homeopathy – the ancient concept of medicine in which a dose of that which ails you is the cure.  (The symbol of medicine to this day is a pole with snakes on it.)  The gospel of John says that looking at the cross is homeopathic salvation from the human condition.  We see our own suffering, and the sufferings we impose on others, as we gaze at Jesus’ cross – and this is the first step toward our healing and reconciliation.

Jesus was willing to face death in order to spread his movement of radical compassion.  And contemplating his death has the paradoxical but real power to bring us more fully to the life to which he called us.  I hope this perspective is life-affirming for you!

~ Rev. Jim Burklo