Why Did Jesus Have to Die? | S4 E1

This is The Extraordinary Story, a podcast that tells the story of the life of Jesus Christ. God himself entered the confusing maze that is our world to transform it into a path that leads to him today and always. The Extraordinary Story is brought to you by Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. I’m Tom Hoopes. I’m writer in residence here at Benedictine College.

And so, we come to it at last. This is the big climactic week in Jesus Christ’s life. The week that changed everything about the world and I’ve got to say it’s going to change this podcast also. I’m finally going to embrace the maze and let him lead me where he will. We’re entering season four of The Extraordinary Story and I hate to admit it, but I’ve been wrong in one way about Jesus’ life and mission. That’s why it’s been so long since the last season ended. Here’s what happened.

The more I pursued this podcast, the more I wished I had started the whole thing differently. I wish I had started by talking about why you should believe any of this stuff to start with, by listing all the ways the resurrection is believable, because that’s why I believe all this stuff. I saw how credible the stories of the resurrection were, and I figured I’d better believe in Jesus and the full nine yards. So I started to research to help you see how believable the resurrection is. In fact, I read a book by a great historian who slowly and methodically offers the best arguments he can against all the typical ways we try to prove that the resurrection really happened. But the crazy thing was, he only made my faith stronger, but more on that later on in this season. I then started studying what the great Protestant theologian N.T. Wright has to say about the resurrection. That sent me back to what Brant Pitre says about it in my favorite book, “The Case for Jesus” and my second favorite book, “Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist.” And then I noticed what Bishop Barron has been saying and what Pope Benedict XVI teaches, and I felt like I’d missed a crucial thread all along in the story of Jesus.

And that thread is this: the resurrection isn’t about escaping the world, it’s about perfecting and re-edenizing the world also. But how to get started on this? I think what needs to happen is I need to explain the best I can, what Christ’s redemption means, so that as we go forward through Holy Week, we know what we’re talking about. And so that when we get to Easter, we know what we’re talking about. So I can’t think of a better way to explain this to you than to tell you the story that has shaped my life, the story of the death of Tom Vander Woude.

I’ll never forget the story that came across my desk when I was editor of the National Catholic Register in 2008. A 66-year-old man named Tom Vander Woude had been working on his rural Virginia property with his son, Joseph, who was 19 years old at the time and had Down syndrome. Well, Joseph fell into the property’s septic tank. Tom Vander Woude tried to pull his son out, but couldn’t. He called for help. When a neighbor came, he realized Joseph’s head was submerged below the surface of the eight feet of sewage. So he said, you pull, I’ll push. Then he jumped in after his son, and then holding his breath, went down into the sewage, hoisted his son onto his shoulders, and pushed upward. The neighbor was able to pull him out. Joseph gasped for air and was fine. But those four words, you pull, I’ll push, were Tom Vander Woude’s last words. After going below, he never came back up. He succumbed and drowned in the septic tank.

The story riveted me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. My newspaper covered Tom Vander Woude’s life, and it was fascinating. His story also caught the attention of the secular media and has been covered in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Bloomberg News and elsewhere. The details of his life showed me that this was a man totally dedicated to his vocation to raise his family and the faith. He had coached his kids in basketball and even soccer. He didn’t even know soccer, so he went to clinics to learn how he could coach his sons at Seton School in Manassas, Virginia. The school’s director, Ann Carroll, told us he never took a cent for it, and he mentored the players. His neighbors saw the same thing in him. One told The Washington Post, he’s the kind of guy who would give you the shirt off his back, and if he didn’t have one, he’d buy one for you.

A young man told The Washington Post, when my wife and I got married, we were trying to buy a townhouse. We didn’t have any credit. Tom Vander Woude, he ended up co-signing our loan for our first house. It seemed like his whole life, he was taking people onto his shoulders at personal cost and boosting them up just like Joseph. His son said, quote, when others asked about the secrets of success for raising Catholic families, he was always quick to point to the family rosary. He was definitely devoted to Our Lady. But not just that, he said, he also did a holy hour between two and three in the morning every week and was a daily communicant. Those were the things in front of us that we saw in our father. In this culture, which is selling a lot of stuff, I had a father on his knees who was showing me how to be a man of God. In other words, every day in the rosary, Tom Vander Woude was asking Mary to be with his family now and at the hour of our death. And every day at Mass and every week at Adoration, he went where she sent him, to her son in the Eucharist. And the hour of his death came on September 8th, Mary’s birthday. His funeral Mass was seven days later on September 15th, the feast of the Mother of Sorrows. It’s like the Blessed Mother herself wanted us to look at this man.

Bishop Paul Laverde said that funeral Mass and in his homily, he said that Tom Vander Woude’s dying act was, “truly saintly, the crown of a whole life of self-giving. May we find in his life inspiration and strength.” Well, I totally found inspiration and strength in his life. He was literally on my mind every day for years. And now he has kind of become a way of life for me. Literally, every day for years, when I was tempted to cut corners with my own children or in my spiritual life, I actually said to myself, that won’t make me more like Tom Vander Woude. Then I would do the harder thing to be more like Tom Vander Woude. He said the rosary on his knees every day with his family. So I started doing that too. I never let my kids see me saying the rosary in any way but on my knees, even when I was sick or tired, because that is what Tom Vander Woude did. He took a 2 a.m. holy hour, and so I took a 2 a.m. holy hour. I can’t coach a sport to save my life, but I deliberately planned other events I could do with my children, taking them out one at a time on Saturday mornings for breakfast and an adventure, climbing up the bluffs of the Missouri River or exploring Independence Creek Trail or something like that. I was ending up at the chapel for a few minutes where I try to teach them to pray.

Now, 15 years after his death, I realize I haven’t thought of him much at all for the past few years, but my whole life has been changed to look more like his. He started habits in my life that have lasted since 2008 and will last many more. I’ll say more. His life changed my life, but it also changed my children’s life. Because of the practices I learned from him, I taught them practices that they learned from me. And now I have grandchildren, and I bet Tom Vander Woude has indirectly touched them also. Some more than others for sure, but he’ll probably touch the next generation also. His good example will have repercussions for decades in my family alone, and I didn’t even know him. I tell that story because it’s a key to a question I’ve had for some time now.

We all know that Jesus died for our sins, and we should be really grateful for that. But theologians have never been 100% sure exactly how to explain that. In Matthew 20, 28, Jesus says it this way. “The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.” In 1 Peter 1, St. Peter said, “You know that you are ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your fathers, not with perishable goods such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. He was destined before the foundation of the world, but was made manifest at the end of times for your sake.”

Okay, so Jesus died to ransom us. He bought us back with a price, the price of his own blood, like the Passover lamb did. That’s all well and good, but a few things about it don’t make sense. Why did Jesus have to ransom us? We already belong to him, right? He made us, he owns the universe. So why does he have to ransom us? We’re often told to be careful about making Satan and God equals. God is infinitely more than Satan. So why would Jesus have to undergo a horrific experience to get us back from Satan?

Then there are many false ways we tend to look at the redemption. One common way is for us to think that God is this infinitely angry being who has been offended by our sin.And so the harsh way to put it, he wants blood. And only an infinite amount of blood will satiate his infinite thirst, so he needs the blood of the Son of God. We are the ones who deserve it, but Jesus steps forward to do it for us. The harsh way to put it sounds pagan. Jesus slakes God’s terrible thirst for blood.

Theologians have tried various answers throughout history, including Aquinas and many other church fathers talking about Jesus substituting our punishment. Justice demands that the law be paid, so Jesus pays what is demanded by justice. But it’s hard to understand, and if we don’t understand it, we miss everything. Because Jesus also said, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish, but might have eternal life,” and “God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.”

Those don’t sound like they are describing an angry God who wants blood, but a loving God who wants to save those who have gone astray. So, then, what does redemption look like? Well, you know where I’m going with this. I think the story of Thomas VanderWoude is a great example of what Jesus Christ did in our redemption. So consider some ways that they are the same. First, the shape of the story is the same. Each of us has caught in slavery to sin, and could put it this way. I’m drowning in sewage, the mess my sins have gotten me into, by miring me in the cultures’ sins. I’m unable to pull myself up and out of the filth, when the one whose image I bear, the one who gave me everything I have, including my very life, plunges down into the muck and hoists me onto his shoulders, pushes me up and out with the help of the church into the fresh air and sunlight like a second birth, while he drowns in the sewage in my place. This is what Tom Vander Woude did, and this is what Jesus does. Also, I love that the young man who was saved had Down syndrome. By the world standards, he was damaged or second best, but his father loved and died for him anyway. That’s what we are, damaged and second best, but Jesus loves us anyway.

Also, like Jesus, Tom Vander Woude, he gave his life for his son, not to satisfy some legal requirement, but directly, to push him up and out of the sewage. Jesus didn’t pull us up from above into heavenly light. Jesus went down lower than we are, took our sin onto himself and suffered things we never suffered in order to save us. I love what Bishop Barron says about how Christ goes all the way down to retrieve us from our sins. If you look at the crucifix, you can see how he goes down into the muck of our sin. Look at the crucifix and see how bad the sewage was that he drowned in. He’s ridiculed on the cross, spit at, humiliated and betrayed by his friends. So, if your friends have let you down in that way, you are not alone. Enemies spread lies about him and took away his good name so that the crowds turned against him. So if people have poisoned others against you unfairly, you would know that he was there first. Institutions that should have protected him teamed up to hurt him, both the church or the temple of the time, and the state. So if you feel you’ve been wronged by the system, whether it’s the church or the state or the health care system or corporate America, Jesus went there too. Jesus is even stripped naked by men who do violence to his naked body. So even victims of sexual violence are not alone. He even suffers spiritual deprivation, saying, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” So those who feel abandoned by God can find Jesus there, too.

In the crucifix, you see Jesus entering the sewage of the worst of life, plunging even lower than us and hoisting us on his shoulders to lift us up over the sewage of the world and pushing us back up again. You can never say he didn’t go far enough. Just like Tom Vander Woude. There’s even a slight, though inadequate, comparison to the resurrection here. Tom Vander Woude lives on in one sense. He inspired me directly to change my life to become more like him. He doesn’t live, but his 2 a.m. holy hour lives on in me. His family rosary lives on in me, and probably in others who were moved by his story, too. But let’s face it. Tom Vander Woude didn’t die for me, and Tom Vander Woude is still dead. Tom Vander Woude didn’t rise from the dead. And while his example helps me, Tom Vander Woude himself is not available to help me now. So I want to talk about Jesus and what he did for us. And if I’m right, and if it isn’t just about Jesus teaching us how to live our life and hold on for a new reality that will come after death, then you can expect Jesus to have made it very clear to us what he wants. And he did.

I think the best recounting of what Jesus intends for us and what he uniquely does with us is the Our Father. Now think about it. If Jesus truly did want something very specific from his death and resurrection, wouldn’t he be sure that we all knew what it was? Wouldn’t he build it into the very center of our Christian lives so it’s something we think about, not only once in a while, but something we memorize and think of every day? That’s what he did with the Our Father. He taught it to his disciples when they asked him how they should pray. So it’s a guide for what we should ask him for. But in describing what we should pray for, he reveals what he expects from his coming to earth in the first place, which makes the Our Father a kind of a Magna Carta, a declaration of intent for us, a guide to what the Christian life is all about.

So it starts, “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” And that means great father, creator, the one who lives outside of time, the one who lives outside the maze, the one who is in our true home. And what is his name? Moses heard it from the burning bush, and it is simply, “I Am.” He is being itself, the ground of all being, the non-contingent cause, to use philosophical language, which in non-philosophical language simply means “Our Father who art in heaven.”

Next comes, “Thy Kingdom Come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” And what is he describing here? He is describing exactly what humanity experienced in the Garden of Eden. Whatever the details were, in the Bible’s symbolic language, the Genesis story shows a reality where in Eden, God was king and he walked with Adam the bridegroom and Eve the bride in the garden, and they did his will in harmony with the loving Father on earth as it is in heaven. But they rejected him in a terrible sin when they agreed with the serpent Satan that God was not a loving Father, but a tyrant who wanted to hold back good things from them. At that point, God started his plan to win us back. And you can see him trying to make this happen, wanting this “Thy Kingdom Come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” world, to come back again, just like when he walked with Adam and Eve in the garden. Bishop Baron calls it the re-Edenization of the world. Noah walked with God and got Eden reconstructed on the ark. Then the first covenant pieced with God the Father as a new family of God to try to do God’s will on earth. Abraham walked with God when he greeted three angels who were identified together as the Lord and got the second covenant as head of a new people with countless descendants to do God’s will on earth. Moses walked with God at the burning bush and later on Mount Sinai. He received the next covenant, the Passover lamb to save them and the Ten Commandments to teach them to do his will on earth as it is in heaven. David walked with God, dancing before the ark of the covenant and received kingship from God and the promise that his kingdom would last forever.

So when Jesus prays, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” he is God walking with us, wanting to restore Eden finally to institute a new covenant, a new kingdom that will transform the earth at last.

Then the prayer goes on to say, “give us this day our daily bread,” which is a prayer for the new manna, as we’ll see when we get there. A new manna, a new covenant, a new bread of life. The last petitions are all about restoring us to Eden also. First, there is, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” which is a petition to restore our innocence, to return us to the state Adam and Eve were in. Then, “deliver us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” which is in the original, “deliver us from the evil one.” And this is the Father asking us to please go back and do this over. Or do Eden over again and refuse this evil one this time?

Isn’t that just like a father? If you’re a dad and one of your kids does something horrible, yes, you’re angry and yes, you do want to punish them. But even more so, you just wish you could go back and make it not happen. Well, if you’re that kind of dad and you’re God, you can go back and make it not happen. In a way, you can restore innocence. You can put things back the way they should be. Jesus has us praying to our father for that every day. And that’s what the resurrection and redemption is all about. It’s about satisfying the father’s longing, not for blood, but satisfying the father’s longing for that real relationship with his children that he had once before in the Garden of Eden. Our father sees us going deeper and deeper into the sewage. He can’t boost us out because he made us free to love him or not. And we freely chose the sewage because we convinced ourselves that he is worse than sewage, that he is a tyrant, that he wants to keep us from what we really need and want. But he doesn’t just helplessly watch us make a bad choice. He sends his son to teach us about him. And his son drops down into the sewage, lifts us up on his shoulders, and with the help of the church, pulling with him, pushes us out. Then he will rise from the dead on Easter Sunday to start a new life. He doesn’t just give us the ability to imitate him, the way I imitate Tom Vander Woude. He gives us real grace, real power to live differently.

And I’ll give you at least one proof of the resurrection for now. It’s the sign of Jonah. When Pharisees complained about him and demanded a sign from Jesus to prove that he had the authority to teach what he was teaching, Jesus said, “A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign, but none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.” And what was the sign of Jonah? I explained half the story before in this podcast. We tend to think of Jonah living for three days in the belly of a whale, but that’s not what the Old Testament says, according to Brant Pitre. It says, “the Lord sent a great fish to swallow Jonah, and he remained in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights.” At the very end of that time, we hear Jonah’s description of what happened. “Jonah prayed to the Lord, his God, from the belly of the fish. From the womb of Sheol, I cried for help, and you heard my voice.”

And what does that mean? It means “I was in the land of the dead. I was dead.” It goes on, “the deep enveloped me, seaweed wrapped around my head. I went down to the roots of the mountains, to the land whose bars closed behind me forever. But you brought my life up from the pit.” And that means “I was in the land of the dead, dead forever, but you brought me back.” Then the text continues, “the Lord commanded the fish to vomit Jonah upon dry land.” In other words, this is the story of Jonah’s death and resurrection. After Jonah lands on dry land, we hear the Lord say the same word Jesus said when he rose the little girl from the dead.

Jesus said, “Talitha koum,” “little girl arise.” That word “koum” is arise. The Book of Jonah says, “then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying arise, “koum,” go to Nineveh, the great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.” And here comes the second part of the story. Then Jonah went to Nineveh and preached his message to them and had the most remarkable response imaginable. People converted left and right. The king had everybody put on sackcloth and ashes. The great pagan city of Nineveh was utterly converted. That’s the story of Jonah. The resurrection of Jonah, followed by a miraculous, wide scale conversion.

And this is what happened after Jesus’ resurrection. Christianity spread like wildfire. Our Lord started with 12 apostles and a number of disciples. By the year 100 AD, that had become 7,500 Christians. And by the year 150 AD, it was 40,000 Christians. And by the year 200 AD, it was 218,000 Christians. And by the year 250 AD, there were 1.1 million Christians. And by 300 AD, there were 6.3 million. And by 350 AD, 34 million. That’s astonishing growth. And it’s growth that exists to this day. The great untold story of the 20th century was the enormous growth of the church in Africa from 10 million Christians in 1900 to 400 million in 2000. The church is growing in many parts of the world to this day. India now has five times as many Catholics as Ireland. China will soon have more churchgoers than America. God’s grace multiplies much faster than we give it credit for, and it always starts small.

And more than the sheer numbers of Christians in the world is the way Christians have shaped the world. Historian Tom Holland has written popular histories of both Sparta and Rome. His deep dive into those ancient cultures made him realize how distasteful he found the morality of his chosen subjects. He writes, “It was not just the extremes of callousness that unsettled me, but the complete lack of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value. Why did I find this disturbing? Because in my morals and ethics, I was not a Spartan or a Roman at all.” He realized that even though he was not a believer or a churchgoer, his worldview was Christian. Then he realized the whole world had switched to Christian values. The old values were selfish and all about might making right. He said, “The heroes of the Iliad, favorites of the gods had scoring the weak and downtrodden. The starving deserved no sympathy. Beggars were best rounded up and deported. Pity risked undermining a wise man’s self-control. Only fellow citizens of good character, who through no fault of their own, had fallen on evil days, might conceivably merit assistance.”

He said, “In a city famed for its wealth, Paul proclaimed that it was the low and despised of the world, mere nothings who ranked first. Paul’s words meant a new equality for slaves.” In a world that took for granted the hierarchy of human chattels and their owners, he insisted that the distinctions between slave and free, now that Christ himself had suffered the death of a slave, were of no more account than those between Greek and Jew. Holland said respect for women and refraining from mistreating them was unheard of in the ancient world. Christianity brought that practically single-handedly, we live in a world so transformed by Christianity that people don’t even realize how Christian they are.

He gave the case of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Its artists satirized Jesus Christ and his mother for years, without consequence. But when they began satirizing Muhammad, gunmen broke into their headquarters and killed 12. They discovered that the tradition that allowed Charlie Hebdo’s satire to exist was not that they were breaking free from Christianity, but was only possible because Christianity had so ingrained in people the idea of giving freedom and treating them decently and accepting it when they attack you. The gunmen taught them the hard way that non-Christians don’t have those values, said Holland. To imagine otherwise, to imagine that the values of secularism might indeed be timeless was ironically enough, the surest evidence of how deeply Christian they were.

So this is what happened. Jesus died and rose from the dead, leaving fishermen in charge of his project. The most powerful philosophies in history were toppled as Christianity spread like wildfire and took hold for millennia, such that now all the world’s morality has been transformed. As St. John Chrysostom pointed out, in human terms, it was not possible for fishermen to get the better of philosophers, but that is what happened by the power of God’s grace. That’s what the Sign of Jonah means. It means that Jesus’ resurrection is proven not just in that he rose from the dead, but also in what happened afterwards.

What happened afterwards? The repentance of much of the world. So think about it. In a beautiful act of self-sacrifice, Tom Vander Woude took one of his sons and pushed him to safety, and inspired me. Well, Jesus took all of humanity on his shoulders, and heaved us up into a new way of living, a new way of loving, a new way of building the world, and changed everything. In Jesus, God the Father saved us all, and his new way of living, which is the oldest way of living, the Garden of Eden way of living, has spread so that much of it is just assumed to be the way things are by people who don’t even share that faith anymore. Thomas Vander Woude transformed my life to be more like his. God the Father in Jesus transformed my world to be more like God’s, including by giving me Tom Vander Woude and countless other saints who live his life on earth as it is in heaven. That is an extraordinary story, and it isn’t over yet.

The Extraordinary Story is written by Tom Hoopes and produced by Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. Benedictine College is transforming culture in America through our mission of community, faith, and scholarship. If you enjoy this podcast, please follow us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Leave a review and share with a friend. Help us tell others about The Extraordinary Story.