ISLAM AND THE DEATH OF JESUS

Some years ago I was visiting the National Portrait Gallery in London, which was showing an exhibition of Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawings. There was one unfinished painting entitled The Descent from the Cross, which portrayed Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, John and James, their mother, Mary the mother of Jesus, and other women who had followed Jesus from Galilee: Mary Magdalene, and another Mary, the mother of James and Joses. It is a powerful rendition of a grieving family, friends and disciples taking down the mutilated body of their beloved Master. I also viewed a red chalk drawing on pale buff paper by Michelangelo, on the same subject, entitled The Deposition.

Probably no event, apart from the Nativity of Jesus, has inspired more artists than the Crucifixion and the Descent from the Cross. All of the four Gospels contain an account of it. It is at the heart of the Christian faith. The Gospel writers made it very clear that Jesus died and was buried. The apostles made the fact of his death a central part of their preaching. The Cross became the chief symbol of Christianity. Everywhere we turn in the New Testament there is an insistence on the cross, the death, and the burial of Jesus, as the central act of our salvation. He died to make atonement for our sins.

The letter to the Hebrews sees the death of Jesus as the perfect offering to “cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God.” He is the High Priest who is the mediator who “died as a ransom to set us free from sins committed.” His blood shed enabled us to receive forgiveness. “Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people.” In Paul’s letters: “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. He died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.” John writes, “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”

This was God in action, truly human, truly divine, taking upon himself the whole burden of human sin, the guilt, shame and grief, and the dreadful weight of his own judgment. God bore it all for us, and in our place, in order to pardon us righteously and lovingly, without in any way condoning our sin. It cost God to forgive us.

My seminary tutor, Charles Cranfield, put it this way.

“It is of vital importance that we recognize that it was God himself, and none other, that bore the cost. To think of Jesus as a third party besides God and sinful humanity, an innocent third party punished for the sins of humankind, would be to attribute to God an act of fearful horror. God did not lay the burden of our iniquities on a third party, but on himself – on his very self – in that human nature that his own dear Son, who is eternally God, inseparably one with the Father and the Holy Spirit, had for our sakes assumed. We must never forget that it is only within the framework of a proper Trinitarian doctrine of God that the Cross can be rightly understood.”

So you can see that the identity of the person who died on the Cross, and was buried, is of supreme importance. It only has significance for us if the person who was crucified, died and was buried is, as the Creed states, “Jesus Christ, his only Son our Lord”. It was God the Son who acted as Mediator because he was also truly human. He can bring humanity and God together in reconciliation, breaking down the sinful barriers between us, by his sacrifice on the Cross.

From the beginning of the Christian era there were some teachers, called Gnostics, who suggested that divinity entered Jesus at his baptism and left him before his crucifixion. Cerinthus believed that it was Simon of Cyrene who was crucified instead of Jesus. In the apocryphal Gospel of Peter the cry of Jesus on the cross is: “My power, my power why have you forsaken me?” It is the cry of the man Jesus forsaken by the divine Christ. In the Gnostic Acts of John, Jesus holds a conversation with John on the Mount of Olives at the very time of the crucifixion, telling John that the crowds think he is being crucified, but in reality he is not suffering at all. The views of these teachers are called Docetic, from the Greek dokein, ‘seem’, or ‘appear’. Their view was condemned as a heresy because they taught that Jesus Christ’s body and sufferings were not real, but apparent. They were wrong. They had the wrong idea about God. They saw God as detached and isolated, rather than involved and caring love. They had the wrong idea about Jesus. They did not take his humanity seriously. The church fathers said that, what God did not assume, he could not save. If God did not experience what we experienced in the body, his sacrifice would not be complete.

This view about Jesus was adopted in the seventh century by Muhammad, and is taught in the Quran. This is what the Quran says about the cross of Jesus Christ.

“And because of them saying we killed Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, the messenger of Allah. But they killed him not, nor crucified him. But the resemblance of Jesus was put over another man. And they killed that man. And those who differ there, are full of doubts. They have no certain knowledge. They follow nothing but conjecture for surely they killed him not, Jesus, son of Mary.”

Islam maintains that it is inappropriate that a major prophet of God should come to such an ignominious end as crucifixion. They do not want to portray a God who is so weak that he cannot protect his own son. Why would God allow his son to be so treated? God’s majesty and transcendence are so emphasized in the Quran that any real engagement on his part with human sin and suffering are rendered impossible. Salvation for the Muslim is by way of obedience – submission, through the five pillars of Islam: recitation of the confession of faith, prayer five times a day, fasting during Ramadan, giving to the poor, and the hajj – pilgrimage to Mecca. There is no place for God to come down into our world, to suffer and die as one of us, for our salvation. Their view of God is very different from that revealed through Jesus Christ.

“The prevailing view [of Islam] is that at some point, undetermined, in the course of the final events of Christ’s arrest, trial and sentence, a substitute person replaced Him while Jesus Himself was, in a phrase, raised or raptured in Heaven from whence,  unscathed and uncrucified, He returned to His disciples in personal appearances in which He commissioned them to take His teachings out in to the world. The Gospel they were thus to preach was a moral law only and not the good tidings of a victorious, redemptive encounter with sin and death. Meanwhile the substitute sufferer bore the whole brunt of the historical crucifixion, having been sentenced and condemned as if he were the Christ.”

The Muslim argues that the death of Jesus is unthinkable because it is unnecessary from God’s point of view. He believes that God can forgive unilaterally without having to endure any suffering. But forgiveness, by its very nature, involves suffering. According to the Muslim way of thinking forgiveness depends entirely on our repentance and on God’s mercy, which in turn depends on what happens on the Day of Judgment, when our good deeds are weighed in the balance against our bad deeds. This means that we cannot be sure, here and now, of God’s forgiveness, or of our final acceptance by him. Allah’s forgiveness has to be earned and is never bestowed as a free gift on the undeserving. That is why there is no jubilant musical celebration in Muslim worship. There is no Amazing Grace!

If Jesus did not die, then he ceased to be identified with humanity at the point which we fear and dread most of all. And if Jesus did not die, he could not in any sense defeat and overcome death. If there was no death, there can have been no resurrection. Yet Hebrews speak in the clearest terms of Jesus destroying the power of death through his own death: “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death, he might destroy him who holds the power of death – that is, the devil – and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.”

John Stott tells the story of an Iranian student who was raised to read the Quran.

“When Christian friends brought him to church and encouraged him to read the Bible, he learnt that Jesus Christ had died so that he might be forgiven. He said, ‘for me the offer was irresistible and heaven-sent.’ He cried to God to have mercy on him through Jesus Christ. Almost immediately ‘the burden of my past life was lifted. I felt as if a huge weight… had gone. With the relief and sense of lightness came incredible joy. At last it had happened and I was free of my past. I knew that God had forgiven me, and I felt clean. I wanted to shout, and tell everybody.’ It was through the cross that the character of God came clearly into focus for him, and he found Islam’s missing dimension, ‘the intimate fatherhood of God and the deep assurance of sins forgiven.’”

What must it have been like to have been present when Jesus was taken down from the cross? Put yourself in the place of Joseph of Arimathea, or Nicodemus, or John, or one of the Mary’s. In their grief would they have questioned where God was in all his suffering? Despair and bewilderment would have been their experience Yet the story did not end there. “The apparently pointless suffering of Jesus was revealed as the means through which God was working out our salvation. God was not absent from that scene; he was working to transform it from a scene of hopelessness and helplessness to one of joy and hope. God’s love was demonstrated, not contradicted, by the death of his Son.”

In the cross, death and burial of Jesus, God is saying to us that he is with us, even when our hopes seem at an end. “I have been there, I know what it is like,” he says. “Don’t despair. Trust me. I love you, and will bring you through. All will be well.”