One question that I've thought about quite a bit over the years is this: Why did Jesus die on the Cross? I grew up in a good Catholic family and have long known what Jesus did for our salvation, but the question of why his death was part of God's plan is a bit trickier, isn't it? 

One Common Explanation 

One popular rationale for the death of Jesus goes something like this: 

1. "[A]ll have sinned and fall short of the glory of God..." (Romans 3:23 NIV) - All of us are guilty of rejecting God through sin. 

2. "For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Romans 6:23 NIV) - The punishment for our sins is death and damnation, but God has a plan to give us eternal life through Jesus Christ. 

3. "But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." (Romans 5:8 NIV) - In his justice and anger, God cannot simply ignore our sins against him. To satisfy the justice and anger of God, Jesus chooses to save us by taking upon himself the punishment that all of our sins deserve. God the Father pours out his wrath upon Jesus on the Cross, as if he were the one who had committed all of our sins.  

4. "If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." (Romans 10:9 NIV) - If we accept Jesus as our Savior through faith, then the punishment for all of our sins is taken away by Jesus. Jesus has traded places with us: God has looked upon Jesus as if he were guilty and is now able to look upon us as if we are innocent. 

These particular Scripture verses are often referred to as the "Roman Road" by Evangelicals, because they draw from St. Paul's Letter to the Romans to explain the road to eternal life. The Scripture verses themselves, of course, are completely true, because they are the inspired Word of God, but the explanation that accompanies them leaves a bit to be desired. This explanation is known as "penal substitution," because Jesus simply serves as our substitute in taking the penalty of death that we deserve. 

The Problems with Penal Substitution 

The theory of "penal substitution," which is probably taught more than any alternative here in the United States, particularly among Evangelical Protestants, has some issues worth addressing. These problems have been pointed out not only by Catholics, but by other Evangelical Christians. 

First, this explanation seems to imply that all we need to do is sign on the dotted line, accepting Jesus as our Savior, and nothing else matters. It seems to imply - even if unintentionally - that a believer has the freedom to sin without any consequences and that moral conversion is really optional for believers, because the punishment for all of our sins is already taken care of by Jesus anyway. In this view, Jesus' call to “take up your cross” (Luke 9:23) doesn’t make sense, does it? If Jesus suffered on the Cross instead of us, why would we take up a cross? 

Second, it wouldn’t really be just for God to punish someone innocent and just let the guilty go free. It implies that God is just really angry and needs to punish someone but he doesn’t really care whom. This seems to me to give us a distorted vision of God and makes the moral teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount seem out of place: Jesus says to "love your enemies" (Matthew 5:44) and he warns against anger (5:21-26) and retaliation (5:38-42). If the Father can only love us because he's vented his anger on his Son, then it seems that he's not living up to Jesus' moral standards, and the call to "be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect" (5:48) no longer makes much sense. 

A Better Explanation 

If Jesus’ death isn’t primarily about providing God with an outlet for his anger, what is it about? Pope St. John Paul II, in his Wednesday Audience on October 26, 1988, offered an explanation of the Cross that has been extremely helpful to me as I tried to make sense of Jesus' sacrifice over the years. He said: 

What confers on [Jesus’] substitution its redemptive value is not the material fact that an innocent person has suffered the chastisement deserved by the guilty and that justice has thus been in some way satisfied (in such a case one should speak rather of a grave injustice). The redemptive value comes instead from the fact that the innocent Jesus, out of pure love, entered into solidarity with the guilty and thus transformed their situation from within. 

Let's break that down a bit – especially the words that I've italicized. 

First, as we've seen, the punishment for our sins is death. Even though Jesus, unlike us, is completely innocent, he chooses to experience death in solidarity with us. He's not just any one of us, though – As the Son of God, he establishes himself as our head or representative before God and dies on our behalf. 

When Jesus is on the Cross, however, God the Father doesn’t pour out his wrath on the Son. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 603 states: 

Jesus did not experience reprobation as if he himself had sinned. But in the redeeming love that always united him to the Father, he assumed us in the state of our waywardness of sin, to the point that he could say in our name from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Having thus established him in solidarity with us sinners, God “did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all,” so that we might be “reconciled to God by the death of his Son.” 

In other words, it’s not so much that Jesus switches places with us, but that Jesus becomes one with us in the punishment of death, so that united with him we might receive the rewards of eternal life.  

What makes Jesus’ death valuable isn’t just that his blood was spilled, but that he died out of pure love of God and us. The Catechism 616 says, "It is love “to the end” that confers on Christ’s sacrifice its value as redemption and reparation, as atonement and satisfaction." God the Father was never just looking for just the spilled blood of a sacrifice, but for what that blood represents – love, a heart that gives itself completely, just as God gives himself completely to us.  Jesus solved that problem by giving himself wholeheartedly, perfectly, and completely out of love for God and for us, more than making up for our sins. The Cross redeems us not because the Father pours out his wrath on the Son, but because the Son pours out his love to the Father. 

Finally, in rising again, Jesus brings about a new way of life for us, transforming us from within and conforming us to his own holiness. St. Paul emphasizes this in Romans 6:3-4 this when he talks about what Jesus does through the sacrament of Baptism, saying, 

[A]re you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life. 

In Baptism we are buried with Jesus and rise again with him to a new way of life. The punishment of our past sins is no longer an issue, because it’s as if our old sinful self has died with Christ, and we’ve risen to a new life of grace with him, the life of the children of God.  

In this new life of grace, we called to be more and more conformed to Jesus as St. Paul says in Romans 8:29, "For those he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, so that he might be the firstborn among many brothers." Some Christians seem to speak as if Jesus was holy so we don’t have to be. Instead, Jesus was holy so that we could actually be made interiorly holy, not by our strength, but by his.  

As we commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus once again this year, let's ask for the grace that only Jesus Christ can give – the grace to live as he lived and to love as he loves. Then we will have begun to experience the reason for Jesus' death for us.