Holy Week has begun for those of us who are Christian (and not Orthodox). Usually, Holy Week lands just as I am preparing students for Confirmation; this year it came early, and Confirmation will come very late.

When I ask Confirmation students, “Why did Jesus suffer and die?” they are very quick to answer, “To save us.” But when I ask them what that actually means, how it works, they are not able to answer me. Even the very rare students who know the theory of substitutionary atonement still struggle to see its relevance to them. And so I offer them this way of looking at it, out of the myriad of ways that Christians have done so.

“We have spent weeks learning what Jesus taught and modeled during his brief (1-3 year) ministry. And now we discover it was threatening enough to those in authority to get him killed. Did he know that? Looks like it. Did he want to be killed? According to his prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, No, he did not. And so, after he was arrested by the Romans, when they gave him multiple opportunities to recant, why didn’t Jesus do that? Why didn’t he say, ‘I take it all back, none of what I taught was true’? It would have saved him from a very public and painful death.”

The story of Holy Week is that Jesus did not recant: he stayed on message, all the way to the end. He endured pain, humiliation and death so that what he had taught would live, because he knew that his teachings about the Kingdom and the Father were more important than he was. They had to survive intact: they were life-giving and soul-saving; they had the power to save us from sin and death. And so yes, he died to save us.

This, they understand.

--The Rev. Barbara Talcott

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