The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ

by Fleming Rutledge

Taking up the cross, as Jesus himself called us to do, means a total reorientation of the self toward the way of Christ. Long before he knew his own destiny, Dietrich Bonhoeffer memorably wrote, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”7

Most of us are conditioned to think of Jesus’ death as the scandal, when in fact it is not the death in itself but the mode of death that creates the offense.

Churches sometimes offer Christian education classes under the title “Why Did Jesus Have to Die?” This is not really the right question. A better one is, “Why was Jesus crucified?” The emphasis needs to be, not just on the death, but on the manner of the death.

The four Gospels have nothing whatever to say about the physical suffering of Jesus during his passion. This omission is extraordinary, being so different from what we would expect. The Evangelists want us to focus elsewhere.

When we say that Jesus Christ took upon himself the sin of the world, it means quite specifically that he suffered the shame and the degradation that human beings have inflicted on one another and that he above all others had done nothing to merit.

Most churchgoing people are “Jews” on Sunday morning and “Greeks” the rest of the time. Religious people want visionary experiences and spiritual uplift; secular people want proofs, arguments, demonstrations, philosophy, science. The striking fact is that neither one of these groups wants to hear about the cross. It is “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1:23). The cross is not a suitable object of devotion for religious people, and the claims made for it are too extreme to be acceptable to secular people. It is the paradox of present-day American culture to be both religious and irreligious. We are secular and materialistic most of the time, but also so pious that candidates for president must stage photo ops of themselves coming out of church. Paul opposes all of this, at both ends of the spectrum, with the stumbling block (skandalon) and the foolishness that is the cross.

Wherever there is emphasis on spiritual virtuosity with a corresponding de-emphasis on atonement for sin and self-sacrificing service, there we meet the Corinthians once again.

To put it in the bluntest possible terms, no one expected a crucified Messiah.

Therefore, the mocking and jeering that accompanied crucifixion were not only allowed, they were part of the spectacle and were programmed into it. In a sense, crucifixion was a form of entertainment. Everyone understood that the specific role of the passersby was to exacerbate the dehumanization and degradation of the person who had been thus designated to be a spectacle. Crucifixion was cleverly designed — we might say diabolically designed — to be an almost theatrical enactment of the sadistic and inhumane impulses that lie within human beings. According to the Christian gospel, the Son of God voluntarily and purposefully absorbed all of that, drawing it into himself.

No one understands exactly what is meant by “he made him to be sin.” How could the Son of God “be sin”? Since Paul understands Sin not as an accumulation of misdeeds, but as a Power with a death grip on the whole human race, it certainly sounds as though Jesus somehow was overtaken by the dread Power of Sin, or was assimilated to it, or was held by it in extremis — imprisoned by it in some way that was commensurate with its annihilating intentions.

Note that Paul does not say “Jesus never sinned” or “Jesus did not commit sin.” That is because Sin in Paul is not something that one commits; it is a Power by which one is held helplessly in thrall.

Sin is personalized here by the apostle, because it is not just “missing the mark,” as has been so often taught; it is an active Power hostile to human beings.73

For Paul, it is not God, but the curse of the Law that condemned Jesus.76 In his death, Paul declares, Jesus was giving himself over to the Enemy — to Sin, to its ally the Law, and to its wage, Death (Rom. 6:23; 7:8-11). This was his warfare. That is one of the most important reasons — perhaps the most important — that Jesus was crucified, for no other mode of execution would have been commensurate with the extremity of humanity’s condition under Sin.

This is what happened on the cross. The Son of God gave himself up to be enslaved by Sin, condemned by the Law, and subject to Death.

Forgiveness in and of itself is not the essence of Christianity, though many believe it to be so. Forgiveness must be understood in its relationship to justice if the Christian gospel is to be allowed its full scope.

Although people feel blessed in the presence of a holy man who wants the world to be right and people to be happy, the holy man cannot make that happen.40

The wrath of God is not an emotion that flares up from time to time, as though God had temper tantrums; it is a way of describing his absolute enmity against all wrong and his coming to set matters right.51

Where is the outrage? It is God’s own; it is the wrath of God against all that stands against his redemptive purpose. It is not an emotion; it is God’s righteous activity in setting right what is wrong. It is God’s intervention on behalf of those who cannot help themselves.

When we read in the Old Testament that God is just and righteous, this doesn’t refer to a threatening abstract quality that God has over against us. It is much more like a verb than a noun, because it refers to the power of God to make right what has been wrong.61

This is the real meaning of Paul’s use of dikaiosis, traditionally translated “justification,” but better translated “rectification” (“rectify,” from Latin rectus [right] + ficare [to make]).62 “Rectification” is the only English word that covers the bases. It is better than “justification” because the verb “rectify” — to make right — is closer to the English word “righteousness” than is the verb “justify.” Because it is relatively uncommon in daily usage, it is not ideal, but it is the best equivalent we have.

Summing up this brief overview, “apocalyptic” theology can be defined on the simplest level as the thought-world that emerged among the Hebrew people after the exile, in which the human situation is seen as so tragic and insoluble that the only hope for deliverance is from outside this sphere altogether.

To be outraged on behalf of oneself or one’s own group alone is to be human, but it is not to participate in Christ. To be outraged and to take action on behalf of the voiceless and oppressed, however, is to do the work of God.

When we read of the righteousness of God, it also means the justice of God, and, most important, it means the action of God in making conditions and relationships right. “Righteousness” has the force of a verb rather than a noun; it is not a static quality but a continual going-out in power to effect what it requires. Nor is it an abstraction; it can only be understood in the context of the community called into being by God, which is itself the image, however flawed, of the new humanity. This understanding of the righteousness of God affords a greatly enlarged perspective on the cross and resurrection.

Apocalyptic hope began to replace confidence in the progressive march of history.

In an important sense, the Bible is art rather than science or philosophy, and theology is a sort of art too, since it is largely based upon the narrative form of the Scriptures.

The true “punishment” for sin, Paul is suggesting here (and Paul conspicuously never uses the word “punish”), is Sin itself. The consequence of the Fall (Gen. 2–3) has been the enslavement of the human race to Sin (and its allies, Death and the Law), separation from God with no hope of restitution from the human side.

The righteousness of God, we have seen, is a righteousness of love that must resist and finally eliminate all that is destructive of his divine purpose for the redemption of the world.

Not only Anselm but also the Old Testament can be mistakenly read as though a “jealous” God were preoccupied with defending his own honor. In the sentence just quoted, Anselm is saying that God does not need to defend his own honor. It is for the creature that he is concerned — for the hapless human being who has neither the will nor the capacity to straighten out his relationship to God.

More important still, Anselm’s view of God’s action on our behalf is actually quite close to the patristic narrative that he is accused of leaving behind. Hart explains: Sin having disrupted the order of God’s good creation, and humanity having been handed over to death and the devil, God enters into a condition of estrangement and slavery to set humanity free. . . . Formidable linguistic shifts aside, Anselm’s is not a new narrative of salvation. In truth, this facile distinction between a patristic soteriology concerned exclusively with the rescue of humanity from death and a later theory of atonement concerned just as exclusively with remission from guilt . . . is perhaps supportable, but only in regard to emphasis and imagery; Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, and John of Damascus (to name a few) were no less conscious than Anselm that the guilt which places humanity in bondage to death is overcome on the cross, nor is he any less concerned than they with the Son’s campaign against death’s dominion over those [all human beings] who have turned from God in disobedience. Indeed, in Cur Deus Homo, the matter of guilt is somewhat recused; it is guilt that is set aside, made of no account by Christ’s grace, so that death should be overcome without violence to divine justice. (emphasis added)33

Hart is thus saying, from a quite different perspective, almost exactly the same thing as J. L. Martyn: the resurrection is God’s validation of his Son’s redemptive death, not the replacement of it. “The resurrection of the Son does not eclipse the Son’s cross.”35

The New Testament, however, never mentions God being reconciled to us. It speaks only of our being reconciled to him. This factor has become a key to most present-day discussions of reconciliation.

How can we talk about the wrath of God unless we conclude that somehow the sacrifice of Jesus caused the Father to change his mind? This indeed would cast the Father in a bad light. This is not, however, what Anselm says; it is a distortion that has unfortunately taken on a life of its own. Hart briskly corrects this distortion: “Christ’s death does not . . . effect a change in God’s attitude towards humanity; God’s attitude never alters; he desires the salvation of his creatures, and will not abandon them even to their own cruelties.”40

If we are to appreciate — if not entirely adopt — Anselm’s language of satisfaction, we need therefore to be clear that the change effected by Christ’s self-oblation does not occur within God. This is of primary importance. If we do not emphasize this, we end up with a dangerously capricious God who is indeed open to the critiques brought by those who think of the wrath of God as an emotion that must be appeased. In all our discussions of reconciliation, this underlying point is fundamental. It is not God that is changed. It is the relationship of human beings and the creation to God that is changed.

We have decisively rejected the popular understanding of Anselm as a proponent of penal suffering.

There is no way of taking the Bible seriously unless we are willing to entertain its presuppositions about sin, especially Sin in the singular. This is a catch-22 of sorts, because it is not possible to have a grasp of one’s own involvement in sin without a prior or simultaneous awareness of God’s prevenient love (Latin pre-venere, “going-before”). We need to recover that word “prevenient” because no other word or phrase captures so well the essential fact about grace: it prevenes (goes before), or precedes, recognition of sin, precedes confession of sin, precedes repentance for sin, and precedes forsaking of sin. Readers of this book are already held by God’s gracious intention toward them, whether they know themselves as sinners or not.

If we can understand that God’s righteousness (dikaiosyne, the same Greek word translated as “justice”) is liberating and restorative, not crippling and retributive, then we can discuss sin with a more open mind and heart.

The analogy to the cantatas of Bach, with their combination of grief-stricken laments and ecstatic dance forms, is this: participation in Christ means abandoning our pretenses, openly acknowledging our identities as sinners in bondage, and in the same moment realizing with a stab of piercing joy that the victory is already ours in Christ, won by him who died to save us. The action of God’s grace precedes our consciousness of sin, so that we perceive the depth of our own participation in sin’s bondage simultaneously with the recognition of the unconditional love of Christ, which is perfect freedom. We recognize that love, moreover, not from the depths of the hell we were bent on creating for ourselves, but from the perspective of the heaven that God is preparing for us. In the victorious presence of the crucified and risen One, the whole company of the redeemed will throw off every bond and join in a celebration of mutual love and joy where no one will be a wallflower and everyone will be able to dance like Fred Astaire and Michael Jackson combined. Thus “Lord of the Dance” is truly an apt title for the risen Christ and for the kingdom of God: “The Great Dance . . . has begun from before always. . . . The dance which we dance is at the center and for the dance all things were made. Blessed be He!”

The church has always been tempted to recast the Christian story in terms of individual fault and guilt that can be overcome by a decision to repent. This undermines the gospel at its heart. The liturgy for the Jewish high holiday, Yom Kippur, contains these words: “Repentance will turn aside the severe decree.” No disrespect is intended in pointing out that this is perhaps the major difference between Christianity and Judaism.11 The germ of the Christian proclamation is already present in the apocalyptic late sections of the Old Testament, when the biblical writers have begun to realize that human repentance is not powerful enough or thorough enough or dependable enough to deliver the human race from wrong. Only the incursion of God’s irresistible grace will suffice to prevent us from self-destructing. As Austin Farrer wrote, “Christ . . . took us, and associated us with his divine life, even while we struggled against him. He has wrought all our repenting in us.”

The familiar caricature of the evangelistic tent revival depicts the preacher attempting to whip up a sense of sinfulness in the audience so that it will “come to Jesus” for mercy and forgiveness. The discussion here makes precisely the opposite point. If a congregation is led to an understanding of salvation, the sense of sin will come as a consequence — and then the knowledge that the danger is already past will result in profound and sincere repentance. That is the proper time to start talking about sin.

Whenever we are speaking from the perspective of the apostle Paul, “Sin” and “Death” are capitalized as Powers — a subject to be fully discussed in later chapters. Sin is not so much a collection of individual misdeeds as it is an active, malevolent agency bent upon despoiling, imprisonment, and death — the utter undoing of God’s purposes. Misdeeds are signs of that agency at work; they are not the thing itself. It is “the thing itself” that is our cosmic Enemy.

Sin, against the Old Testament background, is taken for granted as the basic human condition, which only God the Creator can restore to its original perfection.

Death and Sin alike rule over the human condition, a consequence of what John Milton memorably calls the “first disobedience” of Adam.48 Only through the “first obedience” of the Son of God can this situation be set right. Adam is “a type of the one who was to come”; in the history of Jesus Christ, the entire history of “Adam” (the human race) is retold in the right way. In that recapitulation, the powers of sin and death are routed.

sin is not so much naughty actions or even egregious wrongdoing; it is an infectious disease.54 Even more to Paul’s point, it is an enslaving power that has us all in its grip.55

In light of these tendencies, we do well to remember how utterly untouched the Bible is by sentimental manipulation of any kind; this has been universally acknowledged by a wide spectrum of unbelieving critics who read it as literature. Beginning with the murder of Abel by his brother Cain, we are given a full picture of human noninnocence. We have seen so many Sunday school pictures of dutiful children in biblical garb that we forget how utterly unblinking the Scriptures are about human nature. Far from being a collection of inspirational stories, the Old Testament is replete with unedifying R-rated tales of every conceivable kind of crime and villainy, much of it committed by men and women of God’s own choosing.

The cross rears up over all human life because it is the scene of God’s climactic battle against the power of a malignant and implacable Enemy.

God’s grace comes unsuspected, invading our circumscribed sphere in which we contrive fruitlessly to exonerate ourselves. The knowledge that we are imprisoned by Sin is not a prior condition for restoration. Such knowledge arises out of, and is therefore overcome by, the joyful tidings of redemption and release. In this glad certainty of new life, the people of God go to their knees to acknowledge their need for a deliverance from Sin that they have already received.

The grace of God prepares the way for the confession of sin, is present in the confession, and even before the confession is made has already worked the restoration of which the confession is not the cause, but the sign.

Discerning what exactly is meant by “Jesus Christ and him crucified,” however, is a considerable challenge. If the universe of self-identified believers were asked the question, “What happened when Jesus was crucified?” there is a good chance that, even in this era of high suspicion about sin, many respondents would automatically fall back on the traditional biblical language, saying, “Jesus died for our sins.” Another answer, representing the influences discussed in the introduction, would likely be, “To show us how much God loves us.” Many evangelicals would typically say, “Jesus took my place on the cross.” If asked for more detail, however, even lifelong churchgoers might be hard pressed to say more. Everyone recognizes the cross as a symbol of Christianity, but there is widespread bafflement about its interpretation.

Leanne Van Dyke puts it well, from a Reformed perspective: Atonement theories do not claim to define or explicate the inner mechanics of salvation. They seek to express in limited, analogical language the reality of God’s decisive act on behalf of a broken world. There was some kind of victory that took place, some kind of power shift in the universe, some kind of ransom paid, some kind of healing initiated, some ultimate kind of love displayed, some kind of dramatic rescue effected. Of course, the terrible paradox of the Christian faith is that this rescue, this victory, this healing happened because of a death — a notorious public execution. This is the dark mystery of the Atonement. No theory of the atonement can effectively account for that central paradox. Rather, the range of atonement theories attempt to focus our attention, illuminate the truth and point beyond themselves to God.

We can never lose sight of the fact, however, that the cross itself is not a metaphor. The purpose of the metaphors and images used in the New Testament is to help us to understand, and above all to respond to, the historical event.