Palm Sunday

I went to church again this week with my husband and given that it was Palm Sunday, I expected to hear a sermon about how the Jewish people welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem at the beginning of the week and somehow managed to turn against him five days later; a cautionary tale about how our hearts can quickly turn against God. However, I guess our church doesn't do a Good Friday service because the sermon was centered around Jesus' painful death. The basic message was 'do you trust God in difficult circumstances?' and that Jesus had to die on the cross to pay for our sins. It was so interesting to me that this message, which really outlined the tenets of the Christian faith, made no sense to me anymore.

First, the very idea that Jesus' death is a demonstration of God's love and justice seems ludicrous. We are told that we are sinners from birth, that no matter how good you think you are, you have a deep, evil, sin-nature which eternally can separate you from God. (This is also used in the argument for the justice of having a hell, but I'll save that for another post) We are born sinful and there is nothing we can do about, and therefore all of us deserve the punishment of death. This theology creates the necessity of Jesus. Can't ever remember lying or cheating? Never committed murder or adultery? Doesn't matter; you're still just as bad as everyone else and without Jesus, you're going to die. Now, if we are born this way and can do nothing about our condition, who's fault is that? Didn't God create me? Didn't he give me this sin nature? One could argue that it's Adam and Eve's fault; that they introduced sin into the world and now we are all born this way, but if one man can doom us all without our consent, why doesn't Jesus save us all? Why must we choose Jesus but had no choice in Adam?

Second, Christians are faced with an interesting dilemma regarding sin nature and babies. I don't know of any Christian who believes that if a baby or young child dies, they will go to hell, and rightfully so. Who would tell a grieving parent that through no fault of their lost child, he or she will be suffering for all of eternity? While there is little scripture to support this, Christians recognize the cruelty and injustice of that position and since God is good, he clearly can't send babies to hell. If he can forgive their original sin without them accepting Jesus, why can't God do that for the rest of us? Also, if the next life is the only thing that really matters, and dying as a child or baby is a guarantee into heaven, why are Christians so worked up about abortion? All those babies now have a ticket to heaven whereas if they were allowed to live, they may have chosen otherwise.

Getting back to the role of Jesus, I feel that most Christians tend to flow back and forth on exactly who He was for the sake of any particular argument. Was Jesus the son of God, an offspring produced by God who is separate, or is he God who has come down to earth? When reading the accounts of what Jesus did and said, it would make much more sense if we all believed that he was a literal son of God who had privileged communication with Him. If they were the same person, why did Jesus always ask permission from the Father, and talk about how he was in his father's will? Some Christians will say either that was the human part of him (because apparently he is 100% human and 100% God, which makes no sense) that talked to the Father or it was God modeling for us how we should act. But then why, when Jesus was about to die, did he cry out "God why have you forsaken me?" Can God forsake himself? Jesus seemed to be unsure of the future or what was happening to him at the time. Was that the human side of him just taking over? Did he pretend to be in anguish for our benefit, so we would know its alright to cry out "why?" to God in distress?