Is death willed by God? No, but our faithfulness is willed

We ask the question about many different people. “Why did he or she have to die?” The question grips our hearts especially when the person who died was young or a great leader or a good person.

Jul 17, 2014

By Fr Lawrence Mick
We ask the question about many different people. “Why did he or she have to die?” The question grips our hearts especially when the person who died was young or a great leader or a good person.

Older readers may have asked the question when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Others asked it when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed or when Sen. Robert Kennedy lost his life to an assassin’s bullet. Still others asked it when Archbishop Oscar Romero was gunned down while celebrating Mass in El Salvador. Many people ask it when a young person dies.

Often we are tempted to put the blame on God: “Why did God take him or her?” or “Why didn’t God protect these people?” It’s a natural impulse, but it can lead us down the wrong path.

In Christian history, some theologians suggested that Jesus died because God required his death to bring about forgiveness of human sinfulness. That approach led to a view of God as vindictive and cruel. We ask, “How could the Father do that to the Son?”

A better approach begins with an understanding of God that Jesus reveals. Think of parables like the Prodigal Son or the lost sheep. God is a God of love and mercy, seeking out the lost and forgiving sinners even before they ask.

God did not wish Jesus to be crucified. The Father sent the Son to share our human condition, in order to bring God’s love into every part of human existence. As Hebrews 4:15 puts it, “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way, yet without sin.”

God’s love accompanied Jesus through the door of death, but it did not have to be a violent death.

Jesus died on the cross because human beings decided to get rid of him. His preaching and his life challenged the accepted wisdom and practices of his time. He upset both religious authorities and civil powers. Like many of his followers after him, Jesus upset the status quo, and those who felt their vested interests were threatened decided to do away with him.

Perhaps the most quoted verse in the New Testament is from John 3:16: “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.”

The Gospel continues in John 3:16-17,19 “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. ... And this is the verdict, that the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil.”

God did not will Jesus’ crucifixion, but God willed his Son’s faithfulness. And that is what led Christ to the cross and to the resurrection.

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