St. Athanasius and the Cross

A Good Friday Homily

In the fourth century, a great doctor of the Church named St. Athanasius wrote a work entitled “On the Incarnation.” You may wonder why I bring up a work on the incarnation today, on Good Friday, when we commemorate not Jesus’ conception or his birth, but his death. The two are more intimately connected than you may at first think.

St. Athanasius argued that the death of Jesus was the very reason for the incarnation. The one thing that Jesus did not possess as God, the source of all being and the source of all life, was the ability to die. And the one thing we need from God is eternal life. We could never, on our own, acquire God’s immortality, but God can, as our Creator, take to himself our mortality. The incarnation was thus a divine exchange, allowing Jesus, by his death, to gain for us everlasting life.

But why this kind of death? Roman crucifixion was the most excruciating form of execution ever conceived by the heart of sinful man. Indeed, it is the source of the word “excruciating,” from the Latin crux, or “cross.” Some have objected to the divinity of Christ for this very reason — if Jesus is truly the all-good and all-powerful God, it would seem terribly unfitting for God to die in such a public and shameful way, as a condemned criminal. This is why St. Paul calls the crucifixion “a stumbling block for Jews and foolishness for the Gentiles” (cf. 1 Cor 1:23). St. Athanasius addresses these objections.

First, if Jesus had to die to save us, why not die in a more dignified manner? Why not live a long, fruitful life and die peacefully in his bed of old age? St. Athanasius says no. Were our Savior to die a death like that, it would appear that he died from his own weakness, because his body simply wore out. But Jesus is strong, not weak. It would be unfitting for the great Healer to himself succumb to age or disease. Instead, death came to Jesus from others.

But why did it have to be so public? Would a private death not have been less shameful? But if his death had not been witnessed by the crowds, his resurrection would not have been believable. People would have assumed he was faking, reappearing after hiding for three days, only claiming to have died. No, there had to be witnesses, many witnesses. Christ’s death had to be a public spectacle for the resurrection to be believed.

But why so painful a death? Even given that God wanted to die as man for our sins, surely He had it within his power to choose a less painful means for his sacrifice. I love St. Athanasius’ rebuttal to this objection. He notes that a strong, confident wrestler doesn’t selectively choose his own opponents but rather takes all comers. If Jesus had chosen his own form of death, one less painful or less shameful, or easier to endure, it would have suggested that his power over death was limited. Instead, at the crucifixion, our Lord stands on the hill of Calvary staring Death in the face saying, “Give me your worst.”

By permitting his enemies, chief among them Satan, to choose the manner and means of his death, St. Athanasius writes that, “A marvelous and mighty paradox has thus occurred, for the death which they thought to inflict on Him as dishonor and disgrace has become the glorious monument to death’s defeat.” We are here today to honor that monument to death’s defeat, that instrument of torture which has become the means of our salvation and the gateway to eternal life, the Holy Cross on which hung the Savior of the world.

Come, let us worship Jesus who hangs for us today upon the wood of the cross, arms outstretched, one to the Jews, the others to the Gentiles, embracing all peoples and races, nations and tongue, just as he prophesied: “And when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself” (Jn 12:32).