The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ

by Fleming Rutledge

The cross reveals its meaning as it takes shape in the experience of believers.

As people of faith, we do not interpret them so much as we inhabit them — and indeed,

The truest way to receive the gospel of Christ crucified is to cultivate a deep appreciation of the way the biblical motifs interact with each other and enlarge one another.

The New Testament is from beginning to end a living witness to the apostolic preaching.

The unique feature of the Christian proclamation is the shocking claim that God is fully acting, not only in Jesus’ resurrected life, but especially in Jesus’ death on the cross. To say the same thing in another way, the death of Jesus in and of itself would not be anything remarkable. What is remarkable is that the Creator of the universe is shown forth in this gruesome death.

When the power of the apostolic preaching first exploded upon the world scene, it was anchored in an event already past, but its meaning was not imprisoned there. When Paul writes, “The word of the cross is the power of God,” he means that God is present and powerful specifically in the message.

In other words, Christians do not simply look to the cross of Christ with prayerful reverence. We are set in motion by its power, energized by it, upheld by it, guaranteed by it, secured by it for the promised future because it is the power of the creating Word that “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Rom. 4:17). Our labor is not only “not in vain” but also has eternal significance because it is being built into God’s future in ways that we presently see “through a glass, darkly,” but in the fullness of time, “face to face” (I Cor. 13:12 KJV).

On the cross, was Jesus was simply “showing” us something, or was something actually happening? This question will be a major factor in our discussion.

Paul’s argument is that the preaching and teaching of the “word of the cross” cannot be done without offense.

The scandalous “word of the cross” is not a human word. It is the Spirit-empowered presence of God in the preaching of the crucified One.

The Holy Spirit, so central to New Testament writings as diverse as those of Paul, John, and the author of Acts, inhabits the message and empowers the speaker, so that the proclamation of God’s act in Christ is the new occasion of creation, issuing from the Trinitarian power of the originating Word itself.

A commitment to the engendering Word of God is based upon a “high” view of the threefold Word. First and foremost, Jesus Christ himself is the incarnate Word; second, God’s Word written as Holy Scripture is the trustworthy yet dynamic and explosive witness to God in Jesus Christ; and third, the preach...

Yet we cannot allow ourselves to be reduced to mumbling, “Well, you just have to take it on faith.” We have evidence from within Scripture itself that scholarship, reflection, and wrestling with the text are part of our calling as God’s people; the profound engagement of the Evangelists and apostles with their own received Hebrew Scriptures bears witness to this.

And the truth of God’s Word is not predicated on my lifestyle. It is predicated on God’s word itself. He sends sinful men to preach to sinful men. I’m just another beggar, tellin’ other beggars where to find bread.”

For instance, in the third portion of Jesus’ high-priestly prayer, the Lord prays specifically for “those who believe in me through their [the apostles’] word” (John 17:20). The believers of the future will be brought into the near presence of Jesus, not just in the sense that the stories of his life will be retold, but because the apostolic preaching, by the action of the Spirit, makes Jesus present.51 Paul, the apostle par excellence, does this directly in his letters.

It is Paul who speaks unambiguously of Sin as a Power, not an accumulation of misdeeds.

Christian faith is not directed toward a human construction about the past; that would be a form of idolatry. Authentic Christian faith is a response to the living God, whom Christians declare is powerfully at work among them through the resurrected Jesus.

each one of the four Gospels presents the passion narrative as the dénouement, the climactic revelation that shapes the character of everything that has gone before it.

As a general rule, the theologia gloriae (theology of glory) will drive out the theologia crucis (theology of the cross) every time in a comfortable society.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer memorably wrote, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

The crucifixion is the touchstone of Christian authenticity, the unique feature by which everything else, including the resurrection, is given its true significance.

He wants them to understand that the resurrection life in this world, though free and confident “in sure and certain hope of eternal life,” must always be marked by the signs of the cross.

Virtually all human religion is gnostic. The eclectic religiosity of America today emphasizes individual spiritual experiences with a corresponding lack of interest in the human struggle for justice and dignity.

Perhaps the clearest way to sum this up is to say that Christian faith, when anchored in the preaching of the cross, recognizes and accepts the place of suffering in the world for the sake of the kingdom of God.

“In Gnostic Christianity, the enlightenment of the mind enables the avoidance of suffering.”

In none of the canonical Gospels is the scandal of the Cross removed in favor of the divine glory. In each, the path to glory passes through real suffering.”

Yet various versions of Christianity stripped of suffering and devoid of crucifixion are more common than ever in affluent America.

A North American theologian who has made important contributions to the theology of the cross is the Canadian Douglas John Hall.36 He speaks of the crucifixion as a “conquest from within” the human condition, particularly emphasizing the human condition of pain, limitation, abandonment, and despair. He insists that the Christian community is identified by the theologia crucis as by nothing else. If we are to claim our true identity, we need to renounce our relentlessly upbeat orientation.

He declares that “the basic distinction between religion and [Christian] faith is the propensity of religions to avoid, precisely, suffering: to have light without darkness, vision without trust and risk, hope without an ongoing dialogue with despair — in short, Easter without Good Friday.”

“A theology which did not speak of God in the sight of the One who was abandoned and crucified would have had nothing to say to us then.”

“Christians who do not have the feeling that they must flee the crucified Christ have probably not yet understood him in a sufficiently radical way.”45

It is essential to remember that it was the preaching (kerygma) of the apostles and early Christians that created the church in the first place. Men and women did not forsake their former ways of life because they were offered spiritual direction or instructed in righteous living; they became converts because of the explosive news that they heard. The apostolic preaching makes up most of the New Testament.48 The Spirit-driven proclamation of the new faith pivoted on the cross/resurrection event.

Much of what is taught and celebrated in church life today — creation, incarnation, spirituality — is not always anchored in the preaching of Christ crucified (I Cor. 1:23). We have noted that this can result in a triumphalist form of congregational life that is disconnected from pain, deprivation, and the dehumanization that Jesus suffered.

A single-minded focus on the incarnation produces a tendency, often shared with the environmental movement, to regard the creation as unfallen.51

the link between the completeness of Jesus’ humanity and his suffering on the cross — between the incarnation and the crucifixion. Musing on Jesus’ cry of dereliction (Matt. 27:46; Mark 15:34), Ferris says, “It seems almost inevitable to me that Jesus should go through this kind of darkness. . . . If you think of Jesus as God disguised as a man, then this will have no meaning for you. But if you think of him as a real man who in the very depths of his manhood disclosed the very nature of the Godhead, then this [suffering] is inevitable . . . this is an intrinsic part of human existence.”

The uttermost depth of human misery has been plumbed by the incarnate Lord.

Personal engagement with the cross is difficult and painful, but leaders of congregations will have a hole in the center of their ministry without it. Leech writes, [I]t is the task of the preacher to hold up Christ [crucified] as a symbol of folly and scandal, a sign of contradiction, and so to bring about the krisis, that turbulence and upheaval in the soul which opens it to the word which is the power of salvation. . . . The proclamation of Christ’s death involves an engagement with the wounded Christ, the Christ who suffers, who “bears in his heart all wounds” [Edith Sitwell]. If this engagement does not take place, the preacher is in deep trouble, and there is real danger of a descent into glibness and into that false sense of conquest which insults the sufferer and trivializes suffering.57

The resurrection is not just the reappearance of a dead person. It is the mighty act of God to vindicate the One whose very right to exist was thought to have been negated by the powers that nailed him to a cross.

The Kingdom of God in America: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

If ever mortal men found a real hero on this earth, those men were the disciples. They, indeed, were hero-worshippers. Then think of the horrid shock and shame which overwhelmed them at the Cross. It was no splendid martyrdom for a great cause, no glorious conquest won at the cost of life; no epic to be sung and celebrated. No, the Cross was simply an utter overthrow, a speechless failure. It was all sordid, cruel, criminal, a gross injustice, an intolerable defeat of good by evil, of God by devils. . . . He their hero, their chosen leader, he was numbered with the transgressors. He was cast out with a curse upon him. Think how loyalty would burn to right this wrong, to clear his memory, to save his reputation, to prove that gross outrage had been done him, to magnify the life so that the death might be forgotten. . . . But nothing of the kind seems to have occurred to the Evangelists. They literally glory in the Cross. . . . They are clear, with an absolute conviction, that the best and most wonderful thing he ever did was . . . to die a felon’s death, between two robbers. It was their hero’s greatest heroism that he was executed as a common criminal.75

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.

The crucifixion marks out the essential distinction between Christianity and “religion.” Religion as defined in these pages is either an organized system of belief or, alternatively, a loose collection of ideas and practices, projected out of humanity’s needs and wishes. The cross is “irreligious” because no human being individually or human beings collectively would have projected their hopes, wishes, longings, and needs onto a crucified man.5 In a PBS television series, The Christians (1981), a studiously impartial narrator said this: “Christianity is the only major religion to have as its central focus the suffering and degradation of its God. The crucifixion is so familiar to us, and so moving, that it is hard to realize how unusual it is as an image of God” (emphasis added). The description of the cross as “moving” is noteworthy, but not the point.6 We focus on the narrator’s (or screenwriter’s) perception of the wrenching unsuitability of a crucifixion as an object of faith. He has come closer than many Christians to understanding not only the abhorrent and irreligious nature of crucifixion as a method of execution but also the unlikelihood of it arising out of religious imagination.

Here in a few words is a fundamental insight with which to view the crucifixion. If Jesus’ demise is construed merely as a death — even as a painful, tortured death — the crucial point will be lost. Crucifixion was specifically designed to be the ultimate insult to personal dignity, the last word in humiliating and dehumanizing treatment. Degradation was the whole point.14 As Joel Green describes it, “Executed publicly, situated at a major crossroads or on a well-trafficked artery, devoid of clothing, left to be eaten by birds and beasts, victims of crucifixion were subject to optimal, unmitigated, vicious ridicule.”15

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.

First Corinthians 1:18-25 draws us into the heart of the difficulty that third-millennium Christians share with those of the first century. It helps us remember that the Corinthian church was not unlike many burgeoning American congregations today. The church parking lot is always full, new services have been added, signs and wonders abound, testimonies are given about changed lives, and there seems to be no limit to the enthusiasm of the congregation. Paul, however, sees grave danger ahead, because the Corinthians’ life is oriented to the wrong center. He therefore writes: The word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart.” Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. . . . To those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. (1:18-25)

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.

relationship of the Spirit to the cross: “A Spirit who could derogate from the glory of Christ crucified in order to promote a more dazzling glory of his own, who passes by the sufferings of Christ in order to offer us a share in a painless and costless triumph, is certainly not the Holy Spirit of the New Testament [who] glorifies, not himself, but Christ, and therefore his mission is to reveal the full glory of Calvary, and to bring us into possession of all the blessings that by his death Christ has won for us.”37

Cicero, the great Roman statesman and writer, referred to crucifixion as the summum supplicium, the supreme penalty, exceeding crematio (burning) and decollatio (decapitation) in gruesomeness.

Passive

Jesus, in this moment on the cross, embodies in his own tormented struggle all the fruitlessness of human attempts to befriend the indifferent mocking silence of space62 — especially religious attempts.