What If Jesus Had Lived?

I think it’s very important to bring sin out of the individual.  I feel that conceptualizing Jesus as a sacrifice, unblemished and pure, not only fails to deal with the reality of the horrific and unjust nature of his death, but also somehow puts a stamp of approval on that death.  Whether or not Jesus’ crucifixion was an act of selflessness, I feel the movement would have been better off had he not died.  Sometimes we need to make the best of a bad situation, but much of crucifixion talk seems to me like it justifies suffering and violence.

It is hard to know how history might have unfolded had the Jesus story gone differently, but as a Christian, my focus on Jesus is on his life.  I feel there is, in a focus on the cross, a tendency to justify violence and to glorify an event that I have trouble seeing as anything but terrible.  For me, the time after Jesus’ death is a mystery.  I know this makes me a heretic, but I’m not really sure whether Jesus resurrected in any sense of the word… and since I’m not sure of that, I’m not sure what good came of the cross.  Certainly there was something amazing that happened with his followers after his death.  The furthest I want to go with the cross is toward “risk”.  I can think about resurrection metaphorically; I certainly feel that I have had “resurrection” moments in my own life.  They have nothing to do with literal death, though.  I think I tend toward a Markan focus that leaves out resurrection and focuses on the ministry.  That’s just a bunch of my own personal beliefs surrounding this stuff, but that’s where my thinking is.  I would like to think that Jesus would have offered much more to the world had he the chance to live longer.  I’m not interested in celebrating the death of the greatest man who ever lived.