\n<\/p>\n
Ever wonder what it means for Jesus to die \u201cfor\u201d others? Yeah, me too.<\/p>\n
I get how someone can take a bullet for his buddy, or pleading with the kidnappers to\u201ctake me instead,\u201d but\u00a0I\u2019m talking about Jesus and the cross, which is more than just Jesus filling in for someone else.<\/p>\n
According to the New Testament<\/a>, Jesus\u2019s death \u201cdoes\u201d something. The common way of putting it is that Jesus\u2019s death \u201catones\u201d for our sins.<\/p>\n What does that mean?<\/p>\n That\u2019s actually a very good question that is hard to answer in a few words.<\/p>\n The New Testament writers tie Jesus\u2019 death, understandably, to animal sacrifice in the Old Testament, where the blood of a slain animal removes the guilt of the sinner (among other things). Now, what exactly\u00a0that<\/em> means isn\u2019t the easiest thing to wrap our heads around, either, and doing so would be beside the point here.<\/p>\n I\u2019m more interested in how in the world any Jew at the time would ever be comfortable with the idea of\u00a0a person\u2019s\u00a0<\/i>death doing what an animal\u2019s death did\u2014especially if that person is called \u201cGod\u2019s Son.\u201d After all, child sacrifice is a pretty major no-no in the Old Testament. Other people may do that, but Israelites don\u2019t.<\/p>\n And yet, here we are, God sacrifices his own son for others.<\/p>\n And so this brings me to my point.<\/p>\n The idea of a person\u2014not an animal\u2014dying for others wasn\u2019t taken from the Old Testament, but neither did the New Testament writers make it up.<\/p>\n Rather, it\u2019s an idea that arose in Judaism in the centuries after the return from Babylonian Exile (538 BCE).<\/p>\n Well . . . in a way . . . \u00a0something like it is<\/em> found in the Old Testament.<\/p>\n In Isaiah 52:13-53:12, we read of God\u2019s \u201cservant\u201d who suffers on behalf of others. This is the passage that a lot of us know. This servant is described as: \u201cdespised and rejected\u201d who \u201chas borne our infirmities . . . wounded for our transgressions,\u201d and so forth.<\/p>\n In fact, this passage sounds a lot like Jesus, so much so that Christians have tended to read this as a prophecy of Jesus.<\/p>\n But two things. First, note that the servant doesn\u2019t actually die for anyone. He suffers. So that doesn\u2019t quite get us where we want to go, though it\u2019s moving in the right direction.<\/p>\n Second, even though the \u201cservant\u201d is referred to as he\/him, the \u201cservant\u201d isn\u2019t a person but the nation of Judah\u2014or better, that part of the nation that was taken to Exile. Many more were left behind.<\/p>\n The Exile was understood as punishment from God for disobedience, and so this group of exiled Jews suffered for the people as a whole. So like I said, this is getting close, but not close enough.<\/p>\n To see the fuller picture, we need to look at later Jewish thinking.<\/p>\n In 4 Maccabees 17 (one of the books of the Apocrypha<\/a>), we read that the Jewish martyrs who died under Antiochus in the early 2nd century BCE were a \u201c. . . ransom for the sin of our nation,\u201d and \u201cthe blood of those devout ones and their death [was] as an atoning sacrifice\u201d (verses 21-22).<\/p>\n These pious ones would rather have died a cruel death than disobey God\u2019s Law at the command of Antiochus. Their pure and noble character \u201ccarried over,\u201d so to speak, to others. So precious and powerful is the blood of martyrs.<\/p>\n To put it another way, Jesus\u2019s death is more than simply \u201cfulfilling\u201d of the Old Testament in and of itself, but a step in an evolving Jewish tradition that owes much to relatively recent developments in Judaism.<\/p>\n Or think of it this way. The notion that the death of some atones for the sins of others is a 2nd century\u00a0adaptation<\/em> to Israelite faith in response to martyrdom. The atoning death of Jesus is a further adaptation to\u00a0that <\/em>idea.<\/em><\/p>\nBut the gist of it is that the death of Jesus does something to restore our relationship with God.<\/h2>\n
What makes the Gospel stand out here is not the idea of dying for others, but the idea that one man\u2019s<\/em> death atoned for the sins of the world.<\/h2>\n