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

by N.T. Wright

If there is to be a place where the living God will dwell forever among his people, it will not be in a building of bricks and mortar; it will be in and as a human being, the ultimate son of David.

race. 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. And in the middle of it we have radically distorted the meaning of the central gospel message: that, in accordance with the Bible, sins are forgiven through the Messiah’s death. We have domesticated the revolution.

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.

those who read the text in this new way are in imminent danger of exchanging the ancient Israelite covenantal context of the notion of redemptive suffering for a very different context, namely, a pagan one.

The point for our present purposes is that the idea of redemptive suffering, though certainly not associated with messianic expectation, was clearly available in the Jewish world of Jesus’s day.

When God looks at sin, what he sees is what a violin maker would see if the player were to use his lovely creation as a tennis racquet. But here is the difference. In many expressions of pagan religion, the humans have to try to pacify the angry deity. But that’s not how it happens in Israel’s scriptures. The biblical promises of redemption have to do with God himself acting because of his unchanging, unshakeable love for his people.

How often we get God's response to Sin wrong.

First, these ancient writings constantly insist that what God’s people in the Second Temple period needed was, from one point of view, the “end of exile,” and from another point of view, the “forgiveness of sins.” Israel’s sins were responsible for exile, so forgiveness and “return” would be the inside and the outside of the same thing.

Second, this great and long-awaited event would be the ultimate new Exodus, the final great Passover.

Third, the Passover context contributes, through its dramatic theme of the rescuing and guiding Presence of YHWH himself, the sense that the redemption, when it comes, will come through the personal, powerful work of Israel’s God himself.

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.

If we are to be faithful to the biblical overtones of “forgiveness of sins,” we must insist that all such meanings are included within something much larger, something far more revolutionary. It is this larger reality that really matters.

Being priests includes “moral behavior” as a central component. But, as with “forgiveness,” it points to a much larger reality: a human vocation to an active, involved role within God’s future world, anticipated by an equivalent active, involved role within God’s present creation.

One way or another, it makes historical sense to say that, “Jesus announced God’s kingdom and died as a would-be Messiah.” Everything we know about Jesus inclines me to say that he was as aware of this link as we are and that he understood it vocationally within his own web of prayerful, scriptural reflection.