Why did Jesus have to die? His busy last week explains it

I have been retelling the story of Jesus Christ’s life, step by step, on my podcast The Extraordinary Story but it all came to a crashing halt last fall, right as Jesus arrived at the precipice of Jerusalem, and his fateful last week on earth.

As of Aug. 25, though, it’s back. Finally. The first episode of the fourth season starts Holy Week, which I am now seeing in a whole new way.

Jesus did a lot more in Holy Week than I realized, and I wondered why: He cursed a fig tree, compared himself to plants, told parables about weddings and work, spelled out the limits of political power, challenged the Sadducees and Pharisees, described the end times, and gave a new Law of Love. 

Then he died for our sins, and that part truly stumped me.

The redemption of mankind by Jesus Christ makes a lot of sense — until you try to explain it to a general audience. Then you start to wonder: Why did Jesus have to die? Jesus says he ransomed us by his death, but why would he have to ransom us if the whole world and everything in it already belongs to him?

The analogies for the redemption I had heard didn’t help. 

In his book No Greater Love, Edward Sri describes a typical one: A child disobeys his father and deserves a spanking. — but then his innocent brother steps forward and says, “Spank me instead!” — and the father does. That may be a noble sacrifice on the part of the good son, but it makes the father look terrible — like a tyrant who is so filled with petty anger that he has to lash out at someone, anyone, and an innocent boy will do as well as a guilty one. 

Sri quotes St. John Paul II saying that the redemptive value of the cross comes not that way but “from the fact that the innocent Jesus, out of pure love, entered into solidarity with the guilty and thus transformed their situation from within.”

That started to make sense when I found an analogy that works for me: The story of Tom Vander Woude.

It’s a story I have told before: In 2008, a Virginia father’s 19-year-old son (who has Down Syndrome) fell into a septic tank on his Virginia farm and couldn’t get out, so Tom literally jumped into sewage, held his breath to go under, hoisted his son on his shoulders and pushed him out, before he succumbed to the fumes and drowned in place of his son.

The story changed my life, as I describe in the episode — and now it’s changing my life again by describing the redemption: Jesus jumped into the sewage of sin to get under us and lift us out of it.

But before I could get started, I still had to grapple with the end of the week: the Resurrection.

In discussing the faith with my children, I inevitably face the question, “Why are we so committed to the Catholic faith? If we were in some other country, wouldn’t we be committed Muslims or Hindus?”

It’s an excellent question, one I have faced before, but my new answer to it is the Resurrection. Why do I follow Jesus, and everything he said? Because Jesus rose from the dead — and Mohammed and the author of the Bhagavad Gita didn’t. 

And how do I know he rose from the dead? My confident answer was my “10 Reasons We Know Christ Rose From the Dead” — until I got hit with another crisis. A theologian at Benedictine College shared a book with me, by a rigorous, honest historian and theologian, that calls each of the typical apologetic reasons into question. 

So before relaunching the Extraordinary Story, I had to rebuild my understanding of the resurrection, too!

I went on a quest to find the answers and read and listened to lots of scholars: Scholars who believed in the Resurrection even though they didn’t want to, and scholars pointing out what the Resurrection means for us here and now, long before we die.

I’ll go into the details on the podcast when I get there, but for now, I am convinced  by Brant Pitre’s “sign of Jonah,” explanation, with an assist from Protestant N.T. Wright’s “On Earth As It Is In Heaven” vision filtered through Bishop Robert Barron’s explanation that Jesus has come to “re-Edenize” the world.

Jesus came not for us to escape, but for us to remake the world — and that is exactly what Christianity has done. How did we know how? Because Jesus spent his busy last week on earth telling us everything we need to know to bring each aspect of the Garden of Eden back, from its plants to its marriage and from the work of “tilling the garden” to the power of “having dominion” over it.

It has been one of the most exciting times of my life as I go on a journey of re-discovering all of it through new eyes. Join me, if you like, here.