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

by N.T. Wright

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.

The problem is that their idolatry, coming to expression in sin, has resulted in slavery for themselves and for the whole creation.

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.

The story of Israel and its land is set in deliberate parallel to the story of Adam and Eve in the garden.

The life given and then lost at the beginning is to be restored in the end. “Life” in the land will be the answer to the “death” of expulsion from the garden.

Once again, the scriptural vision is not of human souls “going to heaven,” but of a promised new creation for which the promised land is a sign and symbol.

So what happens when we read the story of Adam and Eve and then the story of Israel in parallel, on the one hand, and in sequence, on the other? In both cases the promise of life is exchanged for the reality of death, and for the same reason.

As always, words mean what they mean within the larger story that is being told. In this case, the word “sin” means what it means within the story the Bible is telling. Taking it out of that context generates the difficulties just outlined. Actually, the Bible has several different words for sin: “wickedness,” “transgression,” and other terms for inappropriate or illegal behavior. These words all converge on the idea we sketched in the previous chapter: that humans were made for a purpose, that Israel was made for a purpose, and that humans and Israel alike have turned aside from that purpose, distorted the vision, and abused their vocation.

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.

In the Bible, “sin”—for which there are various words in Hebrew—is the outworking of a prior disease, a prior disobedience: a failure of worship.

Human beings, worshipping their Creator, were thus the intended key to the proper flourishing of the world.

“Worship” was and is a matter of gazing with delight, gratitude, and love at the creator God and expressing his praise in wise, articulate speech. Those who do this are formed by this activity to become the generous, humble stewards through whom God’s creative and sustaining love is let loose into the world. That was how things were meant to be. The purpose of the cross is to take us back, from where we presently are, to that intended goal.

When humans turn from worshipping the one God to worshipping anything else instead, anything within the created order, the problem is not just that they “do wrong things,” distorting their human minds, bodies, hearts, and everything else, though of course that is true as well. In addition—and this is vital for grasping the meaning of Jesus’s crucifixion—they give to whatever idol they are worshipping the power and authority that they, the humans, were supposed to be exercising in the first place. 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.

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.

The reason we commit “sins” is because, to some extent at least, we are failing to worship the one true God and are worshipping instead some feature or force within the created order. When we do that, we are abdicating our responsibilities, handing to the “powers” in question the genuine human authority that ought to be ours.

The early Christian writings leave us in no doubt: if we reduce the problem to “our wrong behavior” and try to explain the cross simply as the divine answer to that, we will never get to the heart of the matter. Nor, in fact, will we fully understand how the cross dealt with sin itself.

To recap, then, humans were made to be “vicegerents.” That is, they were to act on God’s behalf within his world. But that is only possible and can only escape serious and dangerous distortion when worship precedes action. Only those who are worshipping the Creator will be humble enough to be entrusted with his stewardship. That is the “covenant of vocation.” (The word “covenant” is not used explicitly at that point, but it sums up neatly the sense of divine purpose in which human creatures are summoned to play their part.) That is what is lost when humans decide to rebel and take orders instead from within the world itself. That is why, in the developed view within Israel’s traditions, the basic “sin” is actually idolatry, worshipping and serving anything in the place of the one true God. And, since humans are made for the life that comes from God and God alone, to worship that which is not God is to fall in love with death.

So what happens if we understand the human vocation as bearing God’s image, of reflecting God’s wise authority into the world and the glad praises of creation back to God? What happens if we see “sin” in that context? Within that story, “sin” becomes the refusal of humans to play their part in God’s purposes for creation as a whole. It is a vocational failure as much as what we call a moral failure. This vocational failure, choosing to worship the creature rather than the Creator, is the choice of death over life. This is why “sin” and “death” are so inextricably intertwined in biblical thinking. The former is not the breaking of arbitrary rules; the latter is not the inflicting of arbitrary punishment. To be sure, they can often be spoken of, not least in the prophets, as a legal code to which appropriate penalties are attached. That is a natural way, on the surface, to refer to the whole sorry state of affairs. 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.

We should note what all this means. Modern Christians need to be reminded regularly that Jews in this period did not perceive themselves to be living within a story of an angry moralistic God who threatened people that he would send them to hell if they displeased him. Nor were they hoping that, if somehow they could make things all right, they would go to a place called “heaven” and be with God forever. Some ancient pagans thought like that; most ancient Jews did not.

They were hoping, longing, and praying for what the prophets had sketched, what the Psalms had sung, what the ancient promises to the patriarchs had held out in prospect: not rescue from the present world, but rescue and renewal within the present world.

It is startling to reflect on just how diminished the average modern Western Christian vision of “hope,” of “inheritance,” or indeed of “forgiveness” itself has become. We have exchanged the glory of God for a mess of spiritualized, individualistic, and moralistic pottage.

As many generations discovered, invoking the royal power of the one true God was itself an act of resistance, perhaps in some settings the most important act of resistance available.

We should note at the outset, however, that we do not find in pre-Christian Jewish literature any suggestion of a coming Messiah who would die for the sins of the nation or the world. Some Jews (not all) expected a coming king, but such a figure would follow his ancestor David in winning military victories that would set Israel free.

They nevertheless functioned as priest-kings, in fact, as a “royal priesthood.”

The victory and the cleansing came because the suffering of the martyrs somehow brought to an end the sufferings of the people as a whole, which had been caused by their sins. Now the victory over the pagans could begin.

The hundred-year reign of the Maccabean priest-kings may be seen as a distant cousin of the thousand-year reign of the Messiah’s people, the “reigning priesthood,” in Revelation 20:6.

These, then, who have been consecrated for the sake of God, are honored, not only with this honor, but also by the fact that because of them our enemies did not rule over our nation, the tyrant was punished, and the homeland purified—they having become, as it were, a ransom for the sin of our nation. And through the blood of those devout ones and their death as an atoning sacrifice [hilastērion], divine Providence preserved Israel that previously had been mistreated. (17:20–22)

The biblical promises of redemption have to do with God himself acting because of his unchanging, unshakeable love for his people.

When Jesus was crucified, the “powers” lost their power, because sin itself had been defeated and sinners forgiven. Once Jesus had chosen to do what he did at Passover time, joining the idea of a new or ultimate “Exodus” together with the idea that this was the time for the real “return from exile,” the forgiveness of sins, and linking them together via passages like Isaiah 52 and 53, the stage was set. The new Exodus was accomplished through the forgiveness of sins, and forgiveness of sins was accomplished by the Messiah as the living and dying embodiment of the one true God, standing in the place of sinners and taking the full weight of their plight upon himself.

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 physical, mental, and spiritual agony that Jesus went through on that terrible day was not alleviated in any way. But theologically speaking—and with regard to the implications that run through many aspects of church life, teaching, and practice—it makes all the difference.

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 ...

this substitution finds its true meaning not within the normal “works contract,” but within the God-and-Israel narrative, the vocational narrative, the story in accordance with the Bible.

Once we rescue this substitution from its pagan captivity, it can resume its rightful place at the heart of the Jewish and then the messianic narrative, the story through which—in 8:4 as elsewhere—humans are rescued not so they can “go to heaven,” but so that “the right and proper verdict of the law could be fulfilled in us, as we live not according to the flesh but according to the spirit.” Humans are rescued in order to be “glorified,” that is, so that they may resume the genuine human existence, bearing the divine image, reflecting God’s wisdom and love into the world.

To put it another way, Paul has told the long, sad story of Israel and arrived at last at the “slavery” of “exile” as in Deuteronomy 28. Israel needed a fresh start, such as is described in Deuteronomy 30, which Paul quotes in exactly this sense in Romans 10. But for that, as the prophets insisted, Israel’s sins needed to be dealt with so that “exile” could be undone. Paul has now shown, through the complex but carefully consistent narrative he has told, how this joins up with the larger expectation of the “new Exodus.”

The work of the cross is not designed to rescue humans from creation, but to rescue them for creation.

What we can say beyond any doubt is that within the first generation of the church there was an explosion of revolutionary beliefs about what had been accomplished on the day Jesus died, but that the revolution had a definite shape that remained constant across different traditions and widely different styles of expression. The early “official” summary remained the gold standard: the Messiah “died for our sins in accordance with the Bible.” Those who expounded this belief did so with a robust understanding of each element. The great narratives of scripture, it was assumed, had finally arrived at their divinely intended goal. This was naturally controversial then, and it has been controversial ever since, just as every messianic claim was controversial in early Judaism, meaning as it did that other claims about where Israel’s history might be going were to be set aside. The early Christians stuck to the basic belief. Jesus had been raised from the dead; therefore, he really was Israel’s Messiah; therefore his death really was the new Passover; his death really had dealt with the sins that had caused “exile” in the first place; and this had been accomplished by Jesus’s sharing and bearing the full weight of evil, and doing so alone. In his suffering and death, “Sin” was condemned. The darkest of dark powers was defeated, and its captives were set free.

Millions of Christians in many parts of the world still think the cross means “Jesus died for my sins so that I can go to heaven.” The “mission” of the church, then, becomes a matter of explaining to more and more people that he died for them too and urging them to believe this, so that they too can go to heaven. I have taken part in many events that have had that as their aim, some of which were explicitly called “missions.” True, in recent years several thinkers have made a distinction between “mission” (the broadest view of the church’s task in the world) and “evangelism” (the more specific task of telling people about Jesus’s death and resurrection and what it means for them); but the word “mission” is still used in the narrower sense as well, often referring to specific events such as a weeklong “evangelistic rally.”

Part of my aim in this book has been to widen the scope of the “mission” based on what Jesus did on the cross without losing its central and personal focus. I hope it is clear, in fact, that this task of telling people about Jesus remains vital. But I have also been arguing that the early Christian message is not well summarized by saying that Jesus died so that we can go to heaven. That way of looking at the gospel and mission both shrinks and distorts what the Bible actually teaches. It ignores Jesus’s claim to be launching God’s kingdom “on earth as in heaven” and to be bringing that work to its climax precisely on the cross. It ignores the New Testament’s emphasis on the true human vocation, to be “image-bearers,” reflecting God’s glory into the world and the praises of creation back to God. Fortunately, a great many Christians live up to all this in practice even though they may only believe the shrunken theory.

Many other Christians, convinced of the “going to heaven” theory, have come to regard any talk of working for God’s kingdom in the present world as a dangerous distraction. We ought (so they think) to see ourselves as “citizens of heaven” and therefore have nothing much to do with “earth.” Sometimes this view is backed up by the belief that God will actually destroy the present world. Why, then, would we bother with it? Why plant a tree if the garden is going to be dug up tomorrow?

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

When Georg Frideric Handel set scripture passages to music in his oratorio Messiah, this text from Revelation was used in his “Hallelujah Chorus,” a powerful celebration of the kingdom of God on earth as in heaven. But my point is not just this chorus itself. What matters even more is where the chorus comes in the work as a whole. The selection and arrangement of texts were not random. The oratorio divides into three parts: first, the hope for the Messiah, and his birth and public career; second, his death and resurrection and the worldwide preaching of the gospel; third, the resurrection of the dead and the joy of the new creation. The “Hallelujah Chorus” celebrates the fact that the true God now reigns over the whole world, so that their kingdoms have become his; and it is placed not at the end of the third and final part, but at the end of the second part. This reflects closely the view of mission held by many in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the first performance of Messiah was in 1742). First would come the worldwide kingdom, achieved through the preaching of the gospel; then, and only then, the final resurrection. The aim of “mission” was therefore then to bring the nations into submission to God the Creator and to his Son, Jesus the Messiah. That is, after all, what Psalm 2 had indicated as the divine purpose. And Psalm 2, speaking of the dramatic divine victory over all enemies, was the text set immediately before the “Hallelujah Chorus.” It was quite c...

The “victory” is achieved because Jesus “gave himself for our sins,” rescuing and forgiving humans and so breaking the deadly grip of the powers they had been worshipping. A mission based on a supposed “victory” that does not have “forgiveness of sins” at its heart will go seriously wrong in one direction. That was the danger of the first view I outlined: triumphalism without forgiveness at its core. A mission based on “forgiveness of sins” where we see things only in terms of “saving souls for heaven” will go wrong in the other direction. That was the danger of the second view: a message of forgiveness that left the powers to rule the world unchallenged. The New Testament insists on both and in their proper relation.

According to that original revolution, rescued humans are set free to be what they were made to be. “Forgiveness,” achieved through God’s Son’s “giving himself for our sins,” is the key to the liberating victory. Sin matters, and forgiveness of sins matters, but they matter because sin, flowing from idolatry, corrupts, distorts, and disables the image-bearing vocation, which is much more than simply “getting ready for heaven.”

An overconcentration on “sin” and how God deals with it means that we see things only with regard to “works,” even if we confess that we have no “works” of our own and that we have to rely on Jesus to supply them for us. (Equally, an underemphasis on “sin” and how God deals with it is an attempt to claim some kind of victory without seeing the heart of the problem.) The biblical vision of what it means to be human, the “royal priesthood” vocation, is more multidimensional than either of the regular alternatives.

To reflect the divine image means standing between heaven and earth, even in the present time, adoring the Creator and bringing his purposes into reality on earth, ahead of the time when God completes the task and makes all things new. The “royal priesthood” is the company of rescued humans who, being part of “earth,” worship the God of heaven and are thereby equipped, with the breath of heaven in their renewed lungs, to work for his kingdom on ear...

A central part of our vocation is, prayerfully and thoughtfully, to remind people with power, both official (government ministers) and unofficial (backstreet bullies), that there is a different way to be human. A true way. The Jesus way. This doesn’t mean “electing into office someone who shares our particular agenda”; that might or might not be appropriate. It means being prepared, whoever the current officials are, to do what Jesus did with Pontius Pilate: confront them with a different vision of kingdom, truth, and power. The Jesus way, launched in his public career, won through his sin-forgiving death on the cross and bursting upon the wider world in his resurrection, resonates with the ancient prophecies of scripture, including the glorious vision of how power was meant to be exercised. This is one expression among many of the standard we must never tire of repeating: Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to a king’s son. May he judge your people with righteousness, and your poor with justice. . . . May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor. . . . May all kings fall down before him, all nations give him service. For he delivers the needy when they call, the poor and those who have no helper. He has pity on the weak and the needy, ...

The gospel will not allow us to retreat into the private “Christian” space imagined by those for whom the death of Jesus does little except forgive our sins so we can go to heaven. The forgiveness of sins, as we have seen, breaks the grip of the “powers,” and the followers of Jesus must make that point again and again and work to bring it to reality.

And happen it will, because the victory of the cross is real, and the power of the Spirit to implement that victory is real as well. But those who are called to this particular royal and priestly ministry, to worship the Jesus who reasserted the power of love and to bring that powerful love to bear upon the enslaved world, will suffer in some way or other as they do so. That, as we have seen, is the norm. And those who stand behind them, praying for their work in the spirit of Romans 8:26–27, will groan in the Spirit as they find themselves faced with apparently insuperable challenges. But victory is already won. Nothing in all creation can stop this all-powerful love.