From the UK journal Priests and People

This is a wonderfully rich way of bringing together incarnation and salvation, focusing on the theme of Christ’s solidarity with and commitment to human beings who have lost their way. But more should be said: there is a particular significance in the fact that the climax of his journey into the far country is a death at the hands of brutal human beings. This matters: think for a moment of how different our account of Christ and God would be if Christ had died of natural causes at a ripe old age, surrounded by grieving disciples. If his life had unfolded in this way, he would have been regarded as a teacher of wisdom rather than as the saviour who by his sacrificial death opens the Gates of Mercy. His impact on us and our relation to God would then be pedagogic, exemplary and moral, the one among us who ‘gets things right’ and shows us how to do the same.

It is surely significant that a strong current in our contemporary Life of Jesus Research is the interpretation of Jesus as a teacher of subversive wisdom who challenges the constraints of conventional living, a Palestinian gadfly more grounded in the Socratic method than in Torah fidelity. Our destabilised culture is currently so uncertain about how to be a good man or woman, how to be real and holy, moral and secure, stable and authentic, strong and honourable, that we are desperate to find a way of avoiding the manipulations of our culture by uncovering a pre-modern depth of wisdom. Jesus, at the hands of some American interpreters, fits the description of such a teacher. That by portraying him in this way they downplay his sense of bringing God’s relation to Israel to a climactic pitch is something they are prepared to accept; that they insistently marginalise the aspect of Christ’s self-offering in death makes their interpretation of the historical Jesus inadequate not only for historical purposes but also for Christian faith.2

That Christ dies violently is significant…