Abandoned to die: love and forgiveness served on the cross

When we accept the notion of a life-creating God, death becomes a puzzle. Why create life only to end it? It doesn’t make sense.

Moses’ Genesis account introduces death as sin consequence. More than a diet change, the serpentine deception pandered to pride and lust: “You surely will not die! For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Having partaken the forbidden, the death penalty was at once relational. The knee-jerk of the first human offenders was to hide from God because of guilt. Humans are familiar with relational death. When they offend or sin against each other, they drift apart. And if God were the life-creating Source, drifting away from the Source ushers another kind of death that is physical. Like a leaf cut off from its tree, the withering starts until it crumbles to dust. Humans are also familiar with this death. They live daily in its shadow.

Normally, familiarity mitigates fear. But it is the unfamiliarity of what happens after death that daunts mortals. The quest for the afterlife has thus birthed rituals and gods. Once a year, the penitent who believes Jesus of Nazareth to be the prophesied Christ observes the Holy Week to celebrate a promised afterlife. It involves two elements: justice and love. When a debtor cannot pay what is owed, it is only just the bank forecloses. Another person who desires to pay the debt of the bankrupt cannot because he, too, owes the bank a debt he cannot pay. It is, thus, not counterintuitive that the only one who can pay is someone without debt—someone without sin. Since all humans have sinned, not one qualifies to pay. When tried before the Sanhedrin, Jesus affirmed he was the Christ, the Son of God—a blasphemous claim to sinless divinity deserving death by Mosaic law. Through proxy judgment crafted by his envious detractors, an empire’s governor orders to nail him mutilated and naked.

Isaiah prophesied accurately: “He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities, by His scourging we are healed. The LORD has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him.” Jesus’ virginal incarnation from an eternal spirit ends calculatedly in a brutal execution. The penalty of sin of physical death falls on the sinless Christ. All throughout his earthly sojourn, Jesus addressed God as his Father. As a young lad of 12 who went missing, he reasoned he had to be in “my Father’s house.” When he went public at 30, he enters the same house, irate and uncompromising, overturning tables to rid “my Father’s house” of crass commerce. In front of a winter crowd at Hanukkah, he declares he and his Father are one. In the garden, before the arresting posse arrives, he cries “Abba! Father!” entreating that the cup passes from him. And now, in unbearable torment, jostling against nailed feet just to heave in air, his body weight tearing his spiked hands, with eyes blood-stained by a thorny crown in mockery of his kingship, he scans the darkened heavens and questions loudly why he had been abandoned.

Where are the more than 12 angelic legions at his disposal? And where is Abba Father? The anguish in Gethsemane gnawed in full force. Like a child in pain, expecting the assuring presence of daddy or papa, the endearing onomatopoeic “abba” would have been uttered more needfully now than in the garden agony barely a day ago. But no. He borrows instead a line from the psalmist David : “My God, My God, why have you forsaken Me ?” To have cried “My Dad, My Dad, why have You forsaken Me?” would have been absurd. No good dad, or mom, abandons a child, much less a suffering one. But a sinless God separating from sin can make sense. It made sense to an erstwhile church persecutor Paul. He proffers to those in Corinth: “God made Him who knew no sin to become sin on our behalf so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” Hence, the cry of the sinless who became sin.

The element of justice was served on that cross that fateful Friday. Jesus speaks, “It is finished”—sin’s penalty paid in full. There could only be one motive for this: the element of love.

Human parents would readily die for their children. But to give up their own for a stranger on skid row or death row is beyond human. It is this love that astounds. Paul tells the believers in Rome: “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” When the eyes of the guilt-ridden are opened to this forgiving love, Paul adds: “The kindness of God leads one to repentance,” the only appropriate response by faith that Jesus is indeed the Christ. With the sting of physical death quashed by his resurrection, repentantly allowing Jesus the Christ into one’s life transforms the relational death between God and man into that of a father and child. The apostle John asserts, “But as many as received Him, to them, He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name.”

One cannot get any closer to God other than by becoming His child—a spiritual rebirth made possible because an only begotten was once abandoned to die.

Joseph Christopher N. Barrameda,
The Abba’s Orchard