WHY DID JESUS SUFFER AND DIE?

Traditional clergy Christianity found the convenient answer to the reason for Jesus' death: he died to pay for the sins of humankind.

However, first-century Christianity did not find this so convenient, as, for the early Christians, the passion and death of Jesus was an incomprehensible enigma. And how he managed to victoriously defy the snares of his enemies, and surrender, in the last days, to the fury of his captors, and still saying: "This is your hour and the power of darkness", allowing himself to be bound voluntarily.

Even Paul of Tarsus, after his dramatic conversion at the gates of Damascus, was perplexed by the reason for the voluntary death of Jesus. To try to solve the riddle, he retired to the deserts of Arabia, and for three years, he meditated on this mystery. Finally, Paul believed that he had found a plausible solution: he associated the death of Jesus with the millenary ideology of the Israel synagogue, which annually killed the “scapegoat”, judging that with the death of this innocent animal, the sins of Israel would be forgiven. Paul thought he discovered that Jesus gave himself to death to pay with his blood humankind's debt to an offended God.

However, this solution was not accepted by early Christianity. Jesus himself, who many times predicted his death and resurrection, never claimed that he would suffer and die for the sins of humankind. Many Christians saw in his death a continuation of the fate of almost all ancient prophets: the righteous is not tolerated by the sinners, among whom it lives, and suffers a violent death. The idea of an expiatory death was not the general opinion in the first century.

This acceptance was also opposed by the idea that God could be offended by sins and cause the only sinless man to suffer and die for the sinners' guilt.

Only many years later, the idea became widespread that, as Paul says, “the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sins”.

The idea of redemption by external factors, of an expiatory death, as it turns out, originated in Judaism, not Christianity. Neither Jesus nor the four evangelists refer to this idea that he died to pay for the sins of humankind – for, according to Christian theologians, every man, even today, is born in sin, hence baptism to redeem original sin. Not even the Fifth Gospel, by the Apostle Thomas, discovered in 1945 in Egypt, refers with a single word to the death of Jesus because of sinners.

When the disciples of Emmaus, on the afternoon of the first Passover, were disappointed by the cruel death of an innocent man, Jesus, who accompanied them incognito in spirit, did not answer that it was to pay for the sins of humanity, as any theologian would have said today, but said: “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?”

With these words, Jesus suggested the true signal of his trial: he suffered and died voluntarily to realize himself, to enter into even greater glory.

This idea of future self-realization is incomprehensible to many theologians today, for they think that a man like Jesus would not achieve his personal goals in the future. In reality, he hinted at this future realization.

Every creature, however evolved, can evolve even more because evolution is an indefinite and never finished process. Christ Jesus, according to John, the beloved disciple, was the “Only Begotten of the Father”, and, according to Paul of Tarsus, was the “First-born of all creatures”; that is, he was generated, he was a creature, and every creature, even the firstborn, is finite and can perform its evolution in the future, being able to enter into greater glory. Jesus, even though being highly evolved and entering terrestrial life, could evolve even more, under the protection of the divine Christ, as he implies on Golgotha, when he says "it is finished", terminating his terrestrial evolution, because he entered into his glory.

Jesus suffered and died voluntarily in order to complete his earthly realization.

And, since all the fullness necessarily overflows – “from his fullness we all receive, grace and more grace”, as the beloved disciple wrote – the overflowing of this fullness of Christ reverts to the benefit of all humanity, which thus benefits from Jesus' self-realization.

The main reason for his voluntary death was not the redemption of humanity, but the fullness of Christ's self-realization, as he himself points out to the disciples at Emmaus.

When highly evolved and freed from his ego, every avatar feels the need to voluntarily serve those who are still in the primary school of spirituality, and all service rendered to humanity reveals itself in voluntary suffering.

By comprehending the nature of Jesus, one also comprehends the reason for his suffering and voluntary death. The entrance into his glory is his superior evolution, the fullness of the self-realization of his Christlike being, because in him “dwells all the fullness of God”, and, in order to realize this divine fullness, he integrated the entire human ego of his Jesus in the divine Self of his Christ, and at the end, sacrificing his own body.

When will Christianity comprehend the true Christ?