It’s Holy Week—a quiet, reverent, and somewhat somber week in the liturgical calendar. During this week, we hear the Passion of Our Lord read during Mass twice—on Palm Sunday and Good Friday. It can be very emotional to hear the story of Jesus’ last hours on earth and the details of his painful death. It can be hard to understand why all of this had to happen. Ken called The Patrick Madrid Show from Texas to ask a question that you may be wondering—did God will that Jesus should die?

Patrick Madrid points to scripture for the answer. “In the Garden of Gethsemane, the Lord praying, he says, ‘Father, may this cup pass from me’—the cup being the Passion and the crucifixion—‘but not my will, but thine be done.’ That’s the answer.”

But why would God want his Son to die? “God did will for Jesus to die; Jesus himself said so. He said, ‘for this I have come into the world.’ Elsewhere, he says, ‘I have come into the world to destroy the works of the devil.’ And the way Jesus accomplished that was not so much by his teaching and miracles and casting out demons, but by his death on the cross. Thus permanently and irrevocably defeating the devil once and for all by his death on the cross. So, basically by dying on the cross, Jesus killed death.”

“We talk about the triumph of the cross—that was the will of the Father. And so Jesus, in obedience, fulfilling the will of the Father and saying so at several points along the way, ‘This is the will of the Father’, ‘this is why I have come into the world’, ‘this is my hour’. Remember how Jesus would say, my hour has come? All of this is pointing toward the fact that this is the will of God. And being God—he’s both God and man—he’s participating as man in God’s will that he should save the human race by his death on the cross,” explained Madrid.