How did Jesus sacrifice anything if He knew He would be resurrected?

By CopticBot.ai (Coptic Space Inc.) · Last reviewed 2026-10-10

The sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ is not measured by the permanence of death, but by the reality of His suffering and the profound condescension of the Infinite God taking on the limitations and pains of human nature.

From the Coptic Orthodox perspective, the sacrifice is understood through several theological dimensions:

1. The Reality of Human Suffering

While the Lord is the Word of God incarnate, He took a real, human body capable of feeling pain, hunger, and death. St. Cyril of Alexandria emphasizes that the Word "made His very own a body capable of tasting death." The knowledge of the resurrection did not numb the nerves of His body or the anguish of His soul. In Gethsemane, He experienced true agony, sweat like drops of blood, and the weight of the sins of the entire world. A sacrifice is not defined by "losing" something forever, but by the voluntary endurance of a cost. The cost for Him was the cross, the shame, and the physical dissolution of the body and soul (though His Divinity never parted from either).

2. The Authority of the Sacrifice

The sacrifice is magnified precisely because He had the power to avoid it. As He stated in the Gospel of John, "No one takes my life from me; I lay it down of my own accord. I have the authority both to lay it down and to take it up" (John 10:18). If a man dies because he has no choice, it is a necessity. Because Christ is the Almighty and could have summoned legions of angels, His choice to submit to the "chains" and the "Redemptive Table" while mankind was plotting His death shows the depth of His unlimited love.

3. The Divine Condescension (Kenosis)

For the Immortal God to "taste death" is an incomprehensible sacrifice of status and nature. The One who is Life itself entered into the state of the dead. St. Paul describes this in Philippians 2, noting that He "emptied Himself". The sacrifice was the act of the Creator allowing His own creatures to spit upon Him, scourge Him, and nail Him to a tree.

4. The Purpose of the Resurrection

The Resurrection does not "undo" the sacrifice; it completes it. The purpose of His death was to "pull us out of the snares of death." As noted by early Church historians, the Word of God offered His human body as a "sacrifice of atonement" and a "trophy of victory" over the Devil. If He had remained dead, death would have conquered God, and we would remain in our sins. By rising, He proved that the sacrifice was accepted and that the power of death was shattered for all humanity.

5. The Eternal Wound

Even after the Resurrection, the Lord retained the marks of the nails and the spear. This signifies that His sacrifice is an eternal act. He remains the "Lamb as though it had been slain" (Revelation 5:6). The sacrifice is not a past event that was "fixed" by the Resurrection, but a permanent testament to His love for mankind.

In summary, the sacrifice was real because the pain, the humiliation, and the separation of soul and body were real. The Resurrection was not a "cheat code" that made the suffering fake; it was the victory that made the sacrifice effective for our salvation.