The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ

by Fleming Rutledge

Reducing Paul’s argument to its simplest components, we learn that: Everyone is living under the power of God’s curse, because the Law (or Torah) pronounces a curse upon all who do not fulfill its demands (Deut. 27:26).68 Rectification (dikaiosis, traditionally translated “justification”)69 — meaning “to set right” — by the Law is impossible because the Law does not originate in faith. Faith, unlike the Law, is able to give life (Lev. 18:5; Hab. 2:4). God must therefore do the rectifying himself. He has done so through Jesus Christ, who actually took the full force of the curse of the Law into himself on the cross (Deut. 21:23). Our identity is now derived not from observance of the Law but from the gift of the Spirit through faith in Christ. The important thing for our discussion here is Paul’s announcement (kerygma) that God, in the person of his sinless Son, put himself voluntarily and deliberately into the condition of greatest accursedness — on our behalf and in our place. This mind-crunching paradox lies at the heart of the Christian message.

Paul understands Sin not as an accumulation of misdeeds, but as a Power with a death grip on the whole human race,

Jesus was giving himself over to the Enemy — to Sin, to its ally the Law, and to its wage, Death

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.

Does this mean that Jesus became his own Enemy? It would seem so.78 Just as his own human body turned against him on the cross, smothering and killing him, so his human nature absorbed the curse of the Law, the sentence that deals death to the human being (Rom. 7:11).79 By making himself “to be sin,” he allied himself with us in our farthest extremity, perfectly described in Ephesians: “Remember that you were at that time . . . alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12). Thus he entered into our desperate condition. No wonder he cried on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”80 The important thing here is Paul’s breathtaking announcement (kerygma) in Galatians 3:13 that God, in the person of his Son, put himself voluntarily and deliberately into the place of greatest accursedness and Godlessness — for us.81

understand someone else’s predicament lies at the very heart of what it means to be a Christian.

And so a major theme of the messianic passages in the Old Testament is the coming of God’s kingdom of perfect justice.7

The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.

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

he has steadfastly maintained the need for the church to be independent of any political party so as to be in a position to challenge any possible human rights abuses in the democratic future.

As archbishop, he positioned the church to be “able to address every group. We don’t belong to a church that is any party at prayer, and we can say to all and sundry, ‘Thus says the Lord.’ Today’s oppressed [might] become tomorrow’s oppressors.

Christians will readily see that there is more than theater here. In Tutu’s capacity to identify totally with those who underwent such torment, it is possible to see the image of the crucified One. The archbishop’s unyielding commitment to political justice, refined throughout many trials during the long anti-apartheid travail, was rooted in the greater justice and radical mercy of God.27

In January 1998, Tutu was in New York to receive treatment for prostate cancer. He gave just one interview during that time.28 He sought to explain the work of the TRC: “It is not enough to say let bygones be bygones. . . . Reconciliation does not come easy. Believing that it does will ensure that it will never be. We have to look the beast firmly in the eyes.” At the same time, he said, “We seek to do justice to the suffering without perpetuating the hatred aroused.” He continued, We recognize the past can’t be remade through punishment. Instead — since we know memories will persist for a long time — we aim to acknowledge those memories. This is critical if we are to build a democracy of self-respecting citizens. As a victim of injustice and oppression, you lose your sense of worth as a person, your dignity. Restorative justice is focused on restoring the personhood that is damaged or lost. But restoring that sense of self means restoring memory — a recognition that what happened to you happened. You are not crazy. Something seriously evil happened to you. And the nation believes you.29

Juan Luis Segundo, the Uruguayan Jesuit, has been frequently quoted reminding us that “the world that is satisfying to us [the affluent] is utterly devastating to them [the poor and powerless].”33 This is precisely the discovery that transformed the once-conservative Salvadoran archbishop Oscar Romero, costing him his life.

The relation of justice to mercy is not always clear. We have all heard of moving and dramatic cases of parents or spouses who forgave the murderer of their loved one, often motivated in part by a certainty that this is what the victim would have wanted also. Tutu spoke often of the Biehl family from California, whose daughter Amy, a young white anti-apartheid activist, was cruelly murdered in 1993 by militant blacks in Cape Town. Her parents have traveled repeatedly to South Africa to offer forgiveness and to work with their Amy Biehl Foundation for helping black youths. On the other hand, however, the bishop also holds up the example of Stephen Biko’s family, who say they cannot and will not forgive the murderers of the black leader. Their stance, Tutu says, demonstrates that forgiveness is a “long and demanding process” and must never be cheapened.42 These are two opposing examples that illustrate the dialectic between justice and mercy.

Novelists like Flannery O’Connor, Graham Greene, Cormac McCarthy, and others give us characters who cannot fit into this “present evil age” (Gal. 1:4). The Messiah came, not to a purified and enlightened world spiritually prepared for his arrival, but rather to a humanity no nearer to its original goodness than on the day Cain murdered his brother Abel. Indeed, the barbarity of crucifixion reveals precisely that diagnosis. From beginning to end, the Holy Scriptures testify that the predicament of fallen humanity is so serious, so grave, so irremediable from within, that nothing short of divine intervention can rectify it.47

It is common human expectation that there should be justice, and that justice should be in some way related to the magnitude of the loss.

Two ideas, then, are in play in this section. The one just mentioned is the notion of one person being accountable for many. The second is that a just or “expedient” resolution of a great offense should have some relationship to its enormity. This is the notion of proportionate justice: something of value is required to indicate the magnitude of the transgression. If the offering is the Son of God, does that not suggest a supreme order of magnitude?

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

Miroslav Volf writes, “A non-indignant God would be an accomplice in injustice, deception, and violence.”54 Perhaps the reason we have trouble with this is that we are ourselves accomplices. Yet most people will say at some point that their “blood boils”; the question then becomes, what is the boiling temperature?55 If our blood does not boil at injustice, how can we be serving the God who said the following through his prophet Isaiah? Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people. (Isa. 10:1-2 NIV)

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. No one could have imagined, however, that he would ultimately intervene by interposing himself.

The meaning of the word “righteousness” in Hebrew, however, is a world away from our idea of legalism or moralism. 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.

God’s righteousness leads him to all lengths to oppose what will destroy what he loves, and that means declaring enmity against everything that resists his redemptive purpose. This is the aggressive principle in God’s justice.

Note how, in the last sentence, “righteousness” clearly refers, not to human virtue or correct behavior, but to the action of God in restoring justice and righteousness to Israel. Again, “righteousness” has the character of a verb rather than a noun; it is not so much that God is righteous but that he does righteousness.67 It is true that God will turn his hand against Israel in judgment, but (remember that the word “judge” is part of the same word-group as “righteousness”) the judgment is not for destruction; it is for smelting away impurities and removal of alloy. It is clear that this will happen in spite of Israel’s resistance; it will be God’s action throughout. The goal is restoration and renewal. In the fullness of time, the covenant people will become a mirror of God’s own covenant faithfulness; however, this will not happen from the side of human competence. It must and will happen as a movement from God’s side to our side.

A policy of “forgive and forget” can produce lasting harm on the political level as well as the personal. Peace without justice is an illusory peace that sets the stage for vengeful behavior later on. The strength to persevere in the struggle is found in knowing that the wounds remaining in human society after great atrocities are the wounds of Christ himself, now risen and reigning but still the Lamb standing yet slain

lying behind everything in this chapter is a basic premise: in our world, something is terribly wrong and must be put right. If, when we see an injustice, our blood does not boil at some point, we have not yet understood the depths of God. It depends, though, on what outrages us. 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.

The Reformers, Hall continues, reclaimed a radical sense of sin: “They saw that sin meant disobedience, rebellion, refusal, turning away. In short, they saw it as a relational term . . . the foundational relationship of human life — our relation with God — is broken; and this brokenness shows up in all our other relations. . . . Whether we should even speak of ‘sins’ (plural) is questionable; but if we do, we should understand that they are consequences of what is wrong, not its causes.”3

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.

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.

The story of the rider well illustrates a central phenomenon in the Christian life: “Not the man who is lost, but the man who is saved can understand that he is a sinner.”

Gary Anderson writes, “The notion of human sin and fallenness is nothing other than a considered reflection on the unmerited and unfathomable moment of salvation.”15 Properly understood, the knowledge of one’s sinful condition comes as good, even joyful, knowledge.16

it means being catastrophically separated from the eternal love of God.

Were it not for the mercy of God surrounding us, we would have no perspective from which to view sin, for we would be entirely subject to it. That is the reason for affirming that wherever sin is unmasked and confessed, God’s redemptive power is already present and acting.

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.

He began to ponder “the mystery of the evil that good people do.” As an example he writes of a woman “who ran the hacienda near San Ramon, worried to tears about not being able to go to Communion but unworried about the children who were dying on her farm.”23 This shows how easily an individual can focus on her own moral purity while ignoring larger claims on her conscience. This is an aspect of the gravity of Sin that all Christians need to ponder.24

Human solidarity in bondage to the power of Sin is one of the most important concepts for Christians to grasp.

To be lorded over by Sin is to have been engaged to be its representative, “member, part, and tool.” . . . In our very existence “we are exponents of a power which transforms the cosmos into chaos,” our lives actually “making a case” for the power that possesses us and in whose service we are enrolled. This is why Paul characterized the guilt of Sin not in terms of ignorance, but rather in terms of “revolt against the known Lord.”29 Thus the human condition is not only one of captivity, but also one of “active complicity.”30

Sin is the universal human condition, but this is not fully obvious unless one is God-directed, God-saturated, God-intoxicated. The concept of sin is not anthropological, but theological.34 As God makes himself known to us, we recognize that we are “not merely insulated victims of the ‘world of sin’ but rather its settled inhabitants, actively habituated to its ways and means as subjects in the service of its false gods.”

Here, in the briefest possible compass, are two crucial affirmations: “All for sin could not atone.” As Anselm of Canterbury was at such pains to demonstrate, only God can supply the remedy for sin. No amount of religious effort on our part can effect a significant change. Deliverance and atonement must come from outside our sphere of influence, for we are powerless to save ourselves from Sin’s sphere of power. “Be of sin the double cure; save me from its guilt and power.” Sin has two components, of equal gravity. Sin is both a guilt and a power. Ricoeur denotes its two aspects as “subjective weight” and “objective maleficence.”37

The Dutch theologian G. C. Berkouwer writes, In all the multiformity of sin there is always a common trait: sin is always against God. Never can we get at the essence of sin as long as we ignore this relation of sin and God and regard our sin as a mere “phenomenon” in human living. This fact is apparent when sin is described as enmity and rebellion, disobedience and alienation from God. That kind of terminology is a far cry from the common view which leaves no room for the relational character of sin and implies that sin is a bothersome “deficiency.”