A Voluntary Sacrifice

There is a potential Jewish and atheistic objection to Christianity based around the death of Jesus that might strike many Christians as odd, but it is nonetheless worth responding to.  The objection in question treats the death of Christ as a sort of human sacrifice, an act blatantly condemned in the very divine laws Jesus endorsed.  Thus, in order to refute this objection, one must demonstrate that the Biblical depiction of Jesus' death is fundamentally different from a pagan sacrifice of human life to some other deity.

It is indeed the case that Jesus' death is hardly comparable to a human sacrifice, where a (likely unwilling) victim is murdered to appease an apathetic or brutal deity.  On the contrary, Jesus directly clarifies in John 10 that Yahweh did not coerce him into dying on behalf of humanity.  His sacrifice was not a fatalistic event that could not have been avoided: it was entirely voluntary.  Not only could he have chosen to not die via crucifixion, but he also could have chosen not to die at all.

God (Yahweh) is not said to have threatened Jesus until he agreed to die, nor is he portrayed as overriding Jesus' own freedom to choose his actions--in Luke 22, the opposite is confirmed.  In this chapter, Jesus submits his will to that of Yahweh despite preferring a future that would not involve the crucifixion, demonstrating his own willingness to enable human salvation at the cost of torture and death.  What makes this death even more significant for soteriology is that it was motivated, as far as the Biblical evidence indicates, by a redemptive longing for fallen humans to be restored to God.

It follows that the Biblical depiction of the death of Christ scarcely resembles the kind of human sacrifice that Yahweh himself so fiercely opposes in Mosaic Law, which goes so far as to demand the death of whoever would murder another human in this context or in others (Leviticus 20:1-5).  Human sacrifice, indeed, is a capital offense by Biblical standards!  To kill an unwilling person outside of self-defense or a just execution or military campaign is a moral abomination, but human sacrifice adds the depravity of misrepresenting the divine will for human behaviors by treating murder as theologically positive in some way.

It requires lunacy to equate the death of Jesus with a human sacrifice to a deity that has no concern for humanity until blood is shed.  Neither divine nor human forces made Jesus a hostage to their own whims, as Jesus could have changed his mind at any time, and the gospel accounts plainly describe him as approaching his death without external coercion.  It is for this reason that a willingness to commit to Yahweh's will was the motivation behind Jesus' allowance of his own death.