Could Jesus have saved the world by dying from fulminant pneumonia rather than writhing on the Cross? The question see
ms idle—one of those non-issues that theological academics high up in the rarefied atmosphere where none else breathe from write about in treatises that none else will read! But as we commence the rites and rituals, the solemnities and the commemoration of Holy Week, it is a question that beguiles, because it has to do with my salvation, our salvation. While every child who has been catechized will unctuously repeat the ancient words of the Catechism—by his death on the cross, he saved us all—it is expected that, in our maturity, we ask the mature Christian question: But how so?
It starts to my mind with making less use of the bad analogy of a debt. When humankind sinned, so goes the favored account, we all incurred a tremendous debt that, of ourselves, we were unable to pay because it was nothing less than Divine Majesty that we had offended. The trouble with that version of things is that a debt can be remitted by the creditor. One word of condonation, and that is it! So it was that as late the time I was in the minor seminary, we were still taught in our religion classes that had God wanted to, by one omnipotent word, he could have redeemed us all without the gore of Calvary. But, of course, this makes matters more troublesome again, because it triggers the next question: Then why would God have preferred the whole drama of what we commemorate in the Holy Week?
Matters become more understandable when we think of salvation as the offer of life, God’s own full and eternal life. Spanish uses a beautiful word: Compartir—to share with. And that, to me, is the more useful concept for salvation: The Father’s offer to share his fullness of life with us. When the Spanish crown prince announced his engagement, he referred to his fiancee as she “con quien quisiera compartir mi vida”… she with whom I would like to share my life. That is exactly the point, and as anyone will tell you who has ever attempted to make the supremely human and quite Divine gesture of offering someone else a share in his life, it cannot depend on the offeror alone. It must be met with the acceptance of her to whom the offer is made. So, no, God, not even with all the omnipotence commonly (but rather incorrectly) attributed to him, could have saved us by decreeing: “Ye shall be saved!”
God had to be part of the human narrative more intimately than he ever was, and that is what the incarnation is all about: The interweaving of the stories of God and of humankind in an irreversible manner. Had God been making the offer of a share in his Divine life to thoughtful, loving and spirit-filled children, we surely would have said “yes”—and readily. The problem though is that that is not what our story tells us about ourselves: We are obstinate, as promiscuous about the gods we adore as with the persons we bed, vacillating, unreliable and really quite sinful! God’s generous offer had to meet the entire panoply of human stupidity. It had to be a painful, bloody encounter!
“He came unto his own, and his own received him not”, so go the lines of John’s soaring theology. But that was true not only of the Jews of Jesus’ time who rejected him but of all of humankind, at least most, the notable exception being Mary and her cosmic renewing “fiat.” Because that is essentially sin: the rejection of the summons of goodness. And human power exhibits itself most vividly in human institutions, social and political—and that is why Jesus’ most dramatic encounters were with the key leaders of the institutions of his time. In bringing God’s final and fullest offer of life and love, Jesus had to make his way through the formidable phalanx of human institutions by which we had perpetuated our selfishness, our hatred and our violence.
And so it could not but be that the final battle would play out not on some hospital bed, nor by a bad fall from the Mountain of the Beatitudes or from Tabor, but in the corridors of human power, the seats of human arrogance, and the public squares of human obduracy and thoughtlessness. The Divine offer of life in abundance had to be brought to bear on the terrifying array of arrogance and institutionalized sin!
Jesus was crucified and in his cry “Quare me dereliquisti…Why have you abandoned me?” we hear echoes of the cry of all the just who are made to suffer so unjustly. Jesus took that feeling of abandonment upon himself too, and he did feel abandoned, even by the Father. That was the depth to which he went. The Incarnation was no charade. It was full identification with the human situation with the result that the cries of despair from the lips of the many desperate men and women of all time, like the Syrians in our day and perhaps the families of victims of summary executions as well, were on Jesus lips too.
No, it could not have been pneumonia that did Jesus in, nor bangungot nor diabetes. He had to die a violent death not because the Father gleefully plotted the bloody death of his Son, but because no offer of love is ever without costs—and here, the costs were very high, for so deep was the Divine thirst for the human response to his invitation, once it had been freed from selfishness, and power-tripping, cruelty and arrant petulance.