The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus's Crucifixion

by N.T. Wright

We constantly need to press beyond the one-line summaries and the popular slogans. The powerful love of God is so counterintuitive that we easily scale it down in our imagination and memory and develop ways of making ourselves immune to its ultimate and life-changing challenge.

The aim, as in all theological and biblical exploration, is not to replace love with knowledge. Rather, it is to keep love focused upon its true object.

It isn’t only faith that seeks understanding. Love ought to do the same; not of course in order to stop loving, but so that love may grow, mature, and bear fruit.

After the terrible events of September 11, 2001, Western leaders united in declaring that there was “evil” at large in the world and that they and their allies were going to deal with it—basically by dropping bombs on it. That proposal was not only politically naive and disastrous, not only philosophically shallow; it was also theologically naive or even, one might say, heretical. It was trying to “deal with evil” all by itself, with no reference to any belief that this might be God’s job.

In Christian theology it is God who deals with evil, and he does this on the cross. Any other “dealing with evil” must be seen in the light of that.

The line of thought goes like this, usually based on a particular arrangement of biblical texts: a. All humans sinned, causing God to be angry and to want to kill them, to burn them forever in “hell.” b. Jesus somehow got in the way and took the punishment instead (it helped, it seems, that he was innocent—oh, and that he was God’s own son too). c. We are in the clear after all, heading for “heaven” instead (provided, of course, we believe it). Many preachers and teachers put it much more subtly than this, but this is still the story people hear. This is the story they expect to hear. In some churches, if you don’t tell this story more or less in this way, people will say that you aren’t “preaching the gospel.”

The New Testament insists, in book after book, that when Jesus of Nazareth died on the cross, something happened as a result of which the world is a different place. And the early Christians insisted that when people are caught up in the meaning of the cross, they become part of this difference.

In particular, they seem to have interpreted Jesus’s crucifixion within a much bigger—and perhaps more dangerous—story than simply the question of whether people go to “heaven” or “hell.” That question, in fact—to the astonishment of many people—is not what the New Testament is about. The New Testament, with the story of Jesus’s crucifixion at its center, is about God’s kingdom coming on earth as in heaven.

The present generation has gazed with justified revulsion upon the whole late modern culture of violence and death; and it has noticed worrying signs of the same culture in some expressions of Christianity. Many have pointed out that traditional expressions of belief about Jesus’s crucifixion sometimes mirror all too closely language that has been used to justify violence.

Critics have found it easy to point out that some versions of the “punishment” view of Jesus’s death seem to be entrenched in the same communities, in parts of America, where a harsh penal regime, including the death penalty, is not only the norm, but is held up as a fine example of how to deal with crime and social unrest. In some of the same communities one might find the belief that when things go wrong in the wider world, the best thing to do is to use more violence there as well, dropping bombs on faraway towns and villages or sending drones to take out designated targets.

Since sin, the consequence of idolatry, is what keeps humans in thrall to the nongods of the world, dealing with sin has a more profound effect than simply releasing humans to go to heaven. It releases humans from the grip of the idols, so they can worship the living God and be renewed according to his image.

The “goal” is not “heaven,” but a renewed human vocation within God’s renewed creation. This is what every biblical book from Genesis on is pointing toward.

What the Bible offers is not a “works contract,” but a covenant of vocation. The vocation in question is that of being a genuine human being, with genuinely human tasks to perform as part of the Creator’s purpose for his world. The main task of this vocation is “image-bearing,” reflecting the Creator’s wise stewardship into the world and reflecting the praises of all creation back to its maker. Those who do so are the “royal priesthood,” the “kingdom of priests,” the people who are called to stand at the dangerous but exhilarating point where heaven and earth meet.

I am suggesting that in the Bible humans are created in order to live as worshipping stewards within God’s heaven-and-earth reality, rather than as beings who, by moral perfection, qualify to leave “earth” and go to “heaven” instead.

Once we get the goal right (the new creation, not just “heaven”) and the human problem properly diagnosed (idolatry and the corruption of vocation, not just “sin”), the larger biblical vision of Jesus’s death begins to come into view.

Prophetic passages such as Isaiah 11 and psalms such as Psalm 72 demonstrate that when God is faced with the corruption of monarchy, he promises not to abolish monarchy, but to send a true king to rule with utter justice, making the poor and needy his constant priority. The human vocation to share that role, that task, is framed within the true justice and mercy of God himself.

Most people suppose that when Paul explains what is wrong with the human race, he focuses on “sin.” This is wrong. What he says about “sin” in Romans 1–2 is secondary to what he says about idolatry. The primary human failure is a failure of worship. In Romans 1:18–25, “ungodliness” precedes “injustice”: those who worship that which is not God will inevitably produce distortions in the world. The point of “injustice” is not just that it means “wrong behavior” (for which the perpetrator would be culpable), but that it means introducing powerful rogue elements into God’s world. Like a foolish businessman who appoints to the board friends without the company’s best interests at heart, we have handed over control to forces that will destroy us and thwart our original purpose.

But his point is much wider than the fate of the human beings in question, important though that is (as 2:1–16 makes clear). Paul’s concern is that the Creator’s whole plan is put in jeopardy by the failure of humans to worship him alone. Only through that worship will they be sustained and fruitful in their vocation to look after his world.

“Sin,” for Paul, is therefore not simply the breaking of moral codes, though it can be recognized in that way. It is, far more deeply, the missing of the mark of genuine humanness through the failure of worship or rather through worshipping idols rather than the true God. That action, to say it again, hands over to lifeless “forces” or “powers” the authority that should have belonged to the humans in the first place. The problem is not just that humans have misbehaved and need punishing. The problem is that their idolatry, coming to expression in sin, has resulted in slavery for themselves and for the whole creation.

“Sin” is not just bad in itself. It is the telltale symptom of a deeper problem, and the biblical story addresses that deeper problem; it includes the “sin” problem but goes much farther. The problem is that humans were made for a particular vocation, which they have rejected; that this rejection involves a turning away from the living God to worship idols; that this results in giving to the idols—“forces” within the creation—a power over humans and the world that was rightfully that of genuine humans; and that this leads to a slavery, which is ultimately the rule of death itself, the corruption and destruction of the good world made by the Creator.

It ought to be clear from all this that the reason “sin” leads to “death” is not at all (as is often supposed) that “death” is an arbitrary and somewhat draconian punishment for miscellaneous moral shortcomings. The link is deeper than that. The distinction I am making is like the distinction between the ticket you will get if you are caught driving too fast and the crash that will happen if you drive too fast around a sharp bend on a wet road. The ticket is arbitrary, an imposition with no organic link to the offense. The crash is intrinsic, the direct consequence of the behavior. In the same way, death is the intrinsic result of sin, not simply an arbitrary punishment. When humans fail in their image-bearing vocation, the problem is not just that they face punishment. The problem is that the “powers” seize control, and the Creator’s plan for his creation cannot go ahead as intended.

In the story the Bible is telling, humans were created for a purpose, and Israel was called for a purpose, and the purpose was not simply “to keep the rules,” “to be with God,” or “to go to heaven,” as you might suppose from innumerable books, sermons, hymns, and prayers. Humans were made to be “image-bearers,” to reflect the praises of creation back to the Creator and to reflect the Creator’s wise and loving stewardship into the world. Israel was called to be the royal priesthood, to worship God and reflect his rescuing wisdom into the world.

Worshipping things other than the one true God and distorting our human behavior in consequence is the very essence of “sin”: the Greek word for “sin” in the New Testament means, as we saw, not just “doing wrong things,” but “missing the target.” The target is a wise, full human life of worship and stewardship. Idolatry and sin are, in the last analysis, a failure of responsibility. They are a way of declining the divine summons to reflect God’s image. They constitute an insult, an affront, to the loving, wise Creator himself.

When humans sin, they hand to nondivine forces a power and authority that those forces were never supposed to have. And that is why, if God’s plan is to rescue and restore his whole creation, with humans as the active agents in the middle of it, “sins” have to be dealt with. That is the only way by which the nondivine forces that usurp the human role in the world will lose their power. They will be starved of the oxygen that keeps them alive, that turns them from ordinary parts of God’s creation into distorted and dangerous monsters.

We have all too often imagined “sin” as the breaking of arbitrary commandments and “death” as the severe penalty inflicted by an unblinking divine Justice on all who fail to toe the line. We have then tried to insert Jesus and his death into this picture, so that an unblinking divine Justice kills him instead. This doesn’t look good. More important still, it doesn’t look biblical. It is not “in accordance with the Bible.” It may invoke a few odd proof-texts, but it snatches them out of the much larger context of Israel’s scriptures as a whole. They mean something different as a result.

But deep down underneath there is nothing arbitrary about sin or death. Choose the one, and you choose the other. Worship idols, and you’ll go into exile. Obey the serpent’s voice, and you will forfeit the right to the Tree of Life. You can’t have it both ways.

The whole book of Acts assumes, first, that God’s kingdom has already been well and truly launched through the death and resurrection of Jesus (1:6; 8:12; 19:8; 20:25; 28:23, 31); second, that this kingdom will be fully and finally established when Jesus returns (1:11; 3:21); and, third, that in this final new world all God’s people will be raised to new bodily life (4:2; 24:15, 21; 26:23). The book has not one word to say about people “going to heaven”—except, of course, for Jesus himself in 1:9–11, and his “ascension” has nothing to do with the popular image of people “dying and going to heaven” and everything to do with his enthronement and the commencement of his worldwide reign (as in 1 Cor. 15:25).

The purpose of forgiving sin, there as elsewhere, is to enable people to become fully functioning, fully image-bearing human beings within God’s world, already now, completely in the age to come.

The larger reality is that something has happened within the actual world of space, time, and matter, as a result of which everything is different. By six o’clock on the Friday evening Jesus died, something had changed, and changed radically. Heaven and earth were brought together, creating the cosmic “new temple”: “God was reconciling the world to himself in the Messiah” (2 Cor. 5:19).

The four gospels have very little to say about this topic. Almost nobody talks about “going to heaven.” When Jesus talks about the “kingdom of heaven,” he doesn’t mean a place called “heaven,” but the rule of “heaven,” that is, God’s reign, coming to birth on earth. Almost nobody in the gospels warns about “going to hell.” The dire warnings in the four gospels are mostly directed toward an imminent this-worldly disaster, namely, the fall of Jerusalem and other events connected with that.

In particular, all four gospels tell the story of Jesus as one of Israel’s God returning at last.

When Luke’s gospel nears its climax, the coming of Jesus to Jerusalem is clearly to be seen as the moment when, at last, Israel’s God is “visiting his people,” that is, coming back in person to judge and to rescue (19:44).

Jesus represents his people, as Israel’s Messiah, and so he and he alone can appropriately be their substitute. And it is through that substitution, both national (as in the gospel as a whole) and personal (as in the exchanges in chap. 23), that the larger reality comes about. Jesus, by taking upon himself the weight of Israel’s sins and thereby of the world’s sins, dies under the accumulated force of evil, so that now at last the kingdom can come in its fullness. He had anticipated this in his public career. Now, through his royal, representative, and substitutionary death he “comes into his glory” (24:26), that is, his newly inaugurated rule over the whole world.

This famous passage (the Beatitudes, or “Blessings”) is usually read as though it is simply a promise of blessing to the people thus described. But a moment’s thought will reveal that though this is obviously true, it is actually the second-order truth. What matters is that these are the kind of people through whom the kingdom will be launched.

Jesus’s death is seen, right across the New Testament, not as rescuing people from the world so that they can avoid “hell” and go to “heaven,” but as a powerful revolution—that is, a revolution full of a new sort of power—within the world itself.

Here we see the full integration of what have seemed to subsequent generations to be two key elements of the meaning of Jesus’s crucifixion. A new sort of power will be let loose upon the world, and it will be the power of self-giving love. This is the heart of the revolution that was launched on Good Friday.

You cannot defeat the usual sort of power by the usual sort of means. If one force overcomes another, it is still “force” that wins. Rather, at the heart of the victory of God over all the powers of the world there lies self-giving love, which, in obedience to the ancient prophetic vocation, will give its life “as a ransom for many.”

For Paul, exactly in line with Revelation and other early writings, the result of Jesus’s achievement is a new creation, a new heaven-and-earth world in which humans can resume their genuinely human vocation as the “kingdom of priests,” the “royal priesthood.”

The primary human problem that Paul notes in Romans 1:18 is not “sin,” but “ungodliness.” It is a failure not primarily of behavior (though that follows), but of worship. Worship the wrong divinity, and instead of reflecting God’s wise order into the world you will reflect and then produce a distortion: something out of joint, something “unjust.”

“Sin” is not just “doing things God has forbidden.” It is, as we saw, the failure to be fully functioning, God-reflecting human beings. That is what Paul sums up in 3:23: all sinned and fell short of God’s glory. He is referring to the glory that, as true humans, they should have possessed. This is the “glory” spoken of in Psalm 8: the status and responsibility of looking after God’s world on his behalf. This status and this activity are sustained by true worship of the true God. This is the royal vocation, undergirded by the priestly vocation.

Here is a point that must be noted most carefully. Paul does not say that God punished Jesus. He declares that God punished Sin in the flesh of Jesus. Now, to be sure, the crucifixion was no less terrible an event because, with theological hindsight, the apostle could see that what was being punished was Sin itself rather than Jesus himself.

The death of Jesus, seen in this light, is certainly penal. It has to do with the punishment on Sin—not, to say it again, on Jesus—but it is punishment nonetheless. Equally, it is certainly substitutionary: God condemned Sin (in the flesh of the Messiah), and therefore sinners who are “in the Messiah” are not condemned. The one dies, and the many do not.

But many today, eager to talk about “sin,” have forgotten that it is the second-order problem. The root cause of the trouble is the worship of idols.

Paul is not simply offering a roundabout way of saying, “We sinned; God punished Jesus; we are forgiven.” He is saying, “We all committed idolatry, and sinned; God promised Abraham to save the world through Israel; Israel was faithless to that commission; but God has put forth the faithful Messiah, his own self-revelation, whose death has been our Exodus from slavery.” That larger context is vital and nonnegotiable. If it seems suddenly complex for readers today, that is our problem; at least its complexities are biblical complexities rather than the endless ramifications of theory that seem to be required with every step that different traditions take away from that biblical home base. If we take what Paul says out of its Jewish context—and ultimately out of its Jewish eschatological context, replacing that with a Platonized vision of the “goal”—then we will end up with a moralized vision of the human vocation and a paganized view of the means of redemption. That has happened again and again. It is time to put things back as they should be.

Christian mission means implementing the victory that Jesus won on the cross. Everything else follows from this.

The modern world, no less than that of several centuries ago, has seen major mistakes made in the name of the gospel. Very often, when Christian people have set out to “make the world a better place,” they have sadly left the world a worse place instead. Their tangled motives and flawed schemes have become simply another variation on the world’s normal power games. This should not put us off. A world full of people who read and pray the Sermon on the Mount, or even a world with only a few such people in it, will always be a better place than a world without such people.

But the point is that once the revolution was launched on Good Friday, the vital work was already done. We do not have to win that essential victory all over again. What we have to do is to respond to the love poured out on the cross with love of our own: love for the one who died, yes, but also love for those around us, especially those in particular need. And part of the challenge of putting that into practice is that the powers, in whatever form, will be angry. They want to keep the world in their own grip. They will fight back.

Like the Israelites leaving Egypt, just because you have escaped the life of total slavery, that doesn’t mean you won’t have to work hard to translate your newfound freedom into actual life.

For the early Christians, the revolution had happened on the first Good Friday. The “rulers and authorities” really had been dealt their death blow. This didn’t mean, “So we can escape this world and go to heaven,” but “Jesus is now Lord of this world, and we must live under his lordship and announce his kingdom.” The revolution had begun. It had to continue. Jesus’s followers were not simply its beneficiaries. They were to be its agents.