Do Christians worship a suicide victim?

[Ignorant]

Some things I've often wondered about Christ's death:

1.  Why was the sacrifice of God incarnate even necessary?  God could simply have said, 'Ok, humans, here's the deal - love me big bunches and you'll get to go to heaven.  Don't love me and you get punished.'

2.  Why all the tedious mucking about with the Passion?  If it was necessary for Jesus to die, couldn't he have simply thrown himself under an oxcart or something?

3.  Since Jesus was (according to the fable) 'God made flesh', he was immortal, so his 'self-sacrifice' would have been about as troubling as a hangnail.

4.  How exactly did Jesus' brutal murder make eternal life possible?  In the context of an omnimax Being, couldn't eternal life have been an option without snuffing Jesus?

5.  Jesus knew who and what he was - his words and actions clearly demonstrate it.  He also knew what was being demanded of him.  So why did he wail and moan about being 'forsaken'?

6.  Wouldn't the Passion have made a better film if, on the Via Dolorosa, Jesus had manifested a Thompson submachine gun and sprayed his tormentors, shouting, 'You'll never take me alive, coppers!', a la Jimmy Cagney?

7.  Continuing the Cagney motif, how cool would it have been if, from the cross, Jesus had shouted, 'Top o' the world, Ma!'?

This is how my mind works when the wife's out of house and there's nothing good on telly.

Boru

Well, here are my own thoughts:

1) It wasn't "necessary". It was the way God wanted to reconcile the world to himself. As it turns out, it simultaneously serves as a model of loving God big bunches, even when you suffer unjustly, because God is there suffering unjustly with you. He promises that death is not the end, and that loving him big bunches actually makes you divinely human (like Christ). If you don't love him big bunches, the best you can do is make yourself into a full and happy human. Think: Dante's first circle of hell "only so far afflicted, that [they] live desiring without hope".

2) In the passion, Christ is suffering every evil the world has and will ever know. That includes every death, every injustice due to war, every natural evil and every moral evil. All actual historical evil concurring with the suffering of Jesus in the passion. It wasn't necessary. He wanted to do it, and he wanted to do so in that way. You may not think it gets the point across, and that's fine, but dying in front of the oxcart wouldn't either.

3) Jesus is the Word-made-flesh. He was a man just as truly as he was God. Insofar as he is God, he is immortal. Insofar as he is man, he is mortal. The man-who-is-united-to-God-in-person, Jesus, actually suffered and died. In other words, the human nature which is united to God in the person Jesus actually suffered and died. As said above, his suffering was not merely his own individual suffering, but his individual suffering concurred with the entirety of suffering within the cosmos past present and future. The point being: God suffers with us [in his passion] any evil we experience and every evil which exists, and he promises to give us divine life after we die (and demonstrates that through Jesus's death and resurrection).

4) Eternal life could have been an option without Jesus's passion. God chose to reveal eternal life to us in this way. How does it work? There are several theological traditions which attempt an account (even within the Catholic tradition there are several).

5) First, read Psalm 22, especially the turn of tone at verses 23 and following. Also, since he suffered all evil concurrently, his humanity even suffered the experience of being abandoned by God. Even within that experience of abandonment, he entrusts himself to the Father's plan => in his abandoned humanity, he trusted the Father's promise to raise him up.

6) Ha. That certainly would have been more in line with Mel Gibson's film history.

7) Well, while there was no gas explosion, at least there was an earthquake. AND his mom was there.