Was Jesus’s Death A Suicide?

An essay about life, death, and living

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

The biblical Jesus purposefully missed opportunities to avoid being killed by the very people who ended up killing him. Christians worship Jesus specifically because they believe that he freely and intentionally chose to die out of his belief in a higher purpose. But isn’t this what suicide bombers do? Did Jesus suicidally kill himself when he decided to go down the path of betrayal and crucifixion?

Popular depictions of suicide include the shotgun to the head, the fall off the bridge, and the hose in the exhaust pipe. These illustrate the popular notion of suicide as a self-administered, quick, and intentional act that results in one’s own death. This popular portrayal explains why my question about whether Jesus’s death was a suicide may be strange. You may be thinking it’s a dumb question to ask because obviously no one can crucify himself.

That’s true in an immediate sense, but it’s possible for you to commit to doing something now that will influence other people to kill yourself in the future. For instance, a suspect in a standoff with police strategizes her suicide-by-cop ahead of time and then commits to an action plan now that will eventually get herself killed by cops. Some suicide pilots commit to dying years before their deaths so that they will have time to train and prepare for their mission. The story of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane is theologically significant precisely because Jesus pre-committed to an action plan that he knew would result in his own death. Suicide requires a self-commitment to dying, not the direct self-administration of lethal force.

To explore the idea that suicide must be quick, let’s say you reach a juncture with multiple paths. Even though there are many viable paths, you intentionally choose the one you know for certain ends in being eaten alive by wolves. How long do you have to be intentionally going down this path before your decision to choose it ceases to qualify as an act of suicide?

It’s a strange question because the idea that only people who can think an hour ahead of time can kill themselves is strange. A guy could hire assassins to kill himself in 50 years. Since suicide by proxy can theoretically take place over any timespan within a person’s lifetime, the suicide process can be as long or short as the duration of a realistic plan. Suicide must be a plan otherwise it would be impossible to experience anxiety about suicide.

Maybe the popular notion of suicide as “a quick, self-administered, and intentional act that results in one’s own death” only gets the intentional and death parts right. But if suicide is intentionally choosing to act now in a way that guarantees your own future death, then your every waking decision is an act of suicide. If suicide is securing death ahead of time, then everything you do is suicide because your death is already secured and there is nothing you can do to stop it from happening eventually.

This conceptualization of suicide is unhelpful because it doesn’t discriminate a specific suicidal intention from other intentions. All intentions become intentions to die. The trick is that “I die” does not qualify as an intention because an intention is a means-ends statement. Intentions exist in the form “I do X to Y” and motivate human activity by applying attention. You always attend to what you intend, but the only intentions you can know are future-directed. This aspect of human existence must be appreciated before suicide can be understood.

You can’t know your intentions in the present moment for two reasons. The first is that you can’t know your intention while acting self-consciously because your self-consciousness must be affixed to the action you are performing rather than the intention motivating it. If you are self-conscious of an intention, then you can only attend it (pay attention to it). You must be attending that specific intention for some reason and that reason is necessarily a different intention.

Secondly, you can’t know what you are intending when you are acting un-self-consciously in the present moment because, by definition, the you that knows things is sleeping. The you that thinks and identifies things like intentions is asleep when you are acting out of habit, in the flow state, through reflex, etc. If you can’t know your intentions while acting self-consciously or un-self-consciously in the present moment, then you can’t ever know your present intentions at all.

The moment your attention shifts with a new intention, you lose the intention that applied your attention initially. You ask, “Why did I just do that?” You often learn things about yourself and the world that spur you to attribute different intentions to past actions you used to think you understood. Your past is malleable and therefore subject to bias, error, and interpretation. Your past can be many different things, but your future is always singular and specific.

Since you can’t truly know your present or past intentions, the only kind of intentions that you can know are future-directed. Through intention, you write what becomes your re-interpretable past. You can’t know for sure why you did what you did or why you are doing what you are doing, but you can know for sure why you are about to do what you intend to do because your intent is your why.    

The exclusive knowability of future intentions implies that the suicidal intention must specify a future-directed purpose so that it can logically qualify as a real intention. The “I do X to Y” would be “I die to (insert goal).” But what is suicide if not the rejection of goals?

The suicidal intention is “I die to do/be nothing,” but doing/being nothing can’t be a goal because nothing isn’t something pursuable. The pursuit of nothing is ___ (nothingness). “I die to ___” is a logically impossible intention, but suicide’s logical impossibility actually makes good logical sense.

Suicide is illogical because logic is a way of thinking and thinking is for living and living means encountering and creating possibility. Suicide is intending nothing else in life. It is wanting nothing more than what has already been and already is. Suicide is logically impossible because it is the denial of possibility itself.

Jesus’s death was like a suicide bomber’s, but not because he intended the intention “I die to ___.” The deaths are similar because “suicide bomber” is a misnomer that misrepresents the death of the implicated bomber. If a bomber’s intention is “I die to progress a holy mission,” then he is really no more suicidal than Jesus, who also committed to die to progress a holy mission.

Whether or not someone else’s death is a suicide turns on whether they logically intend their death to do/be something or illogically intend their death to do/be ___ (nothingness). In a multicultural world, people disagree about what things exist as objects of possible sacrifice. If I fulfill my intention to die to progress my holy mission of saving the ninja turtles, you will probably label my death “suicide” because you believe my ninja turtle mission is impossible and therefore not something I can intend about. My intention “I die to save ninja turtles” is “I die to ___” in your perspective because you don’t think “saving ninja turtles” is a realizable possibility. To you, it isn’t anything, so it is ___. 

This illustrates that the label “suicide” is a social construct. What socially counts as suicide is shaped by cultural beliefs about what is and is not possible. The only suicide you can know for sure to be suicide is your own because only you can choose and know your future intentions. I can collect clues, but I can never know for sure whether you intended something with your death or not.

Disturbingly, “I die to ___” is indistinguishable from “I live to ___.” When someone commits suicide, they commit their (remaining) life and their death to ___. It makes just as much sense to say that Jesus “sacrificed his life” as it does to say he “sacrificed his death” because sacrificing death always entails sacrificing life.

Do you die immediately after you choose an action plan that entails sacrificing your life to something eventually? Of course not, but your understanding of what your life is/means dramatically changes after making that leap of faith. Who you understand yourself to be, your goals and priorities, are re-created through the intentional act of sacrifice. 

If the intention “I die to ___” equals “I live to ___,” then every unintentional act is an act of suicide. Every time a person acts without intending anything, he necessarily intends “I live to ___” for his unintentional action continues his death-destined life without sacrificing it to anything. 

Life is not the opposite of suicide because life can be extinguished for ___. Every person who commits suicide chooses nothingness while they are alive. They do not live because their life is the nothingness of death.

Since suicide is choosing to deny possibility, its opposite is choosing to embrace and create possibility. The opposite of denying the future is creating it. The opposite of suicide is living, or intentionally sacrificing life to something greater than life.

If you do not know what your something greater is right now, you are in purgatory.

You are trying to live.