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

by N.T. Wright

let’s make one thing clear. You do not have to be able to answer the question “Why?” before the cross can have this effect. Think about it. You don’t have to understand music theory or acoustics to be moved by a wonderful violin solo. You don’t have to understand cooking before you can enjoy a good meal. In the same way, you don’t have to have a theory about why the cross is so powerful before you can be moved and changed, before you can know yourself loved and forgiven, because of Jesus’s death.

Why, in short, did Jesus die? Why would anyone suppose that his death possessed revolutionary power? And why do so many people, without holding any particular theoretical answer to those questions, find nevertheless that the cross, in story, image and song, has a power to move us at such a deep level?

Once we fully grasp the biblical story and its focus on Jesus’s crucifixion, we will find as a by-product that many of the puzzles that have kept theologians awake at nights and have made nonspecialists sigh with frustration can be put together in a new way. Theology, after all, was made for the sake of the church, not the church for theology.

But Jesus died for our sins not so that we could sort out abstract ideas, but so that we, having been put right, could become part of God’s plan to put his whole world right. That is how the revolution works.

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. Or, worse, we distort it and twist it until we find ourselves saying more or less the opposite of what we ought to mean. Somebody needs to be asking “Why?” This must of course be done humbly and carefully, not arrogantly or scornfully. But the question must be addressed.

The task is difficult. There are different ways of probing this mystery. On the theological level, which of the “theories” or “models” do we prefer, and how does it all “work”? On the sacramental level, baptism and the Eucharist have both proved controversial; is this because they are so closely linked to Jesus’s death? On the level of preaching and teaching, how can we best articulate the central gospel message, so that its impact comes from its original meaning rather than from dodgy illustrations that can easily distort the truth? And on the pastoral level, how can the truth of the cross be applied to the difficulties of real-life discipleship? The more we engage in any of these, let alone all four, the more we seem to be entering dangerous, contested territory. Things happen to distract us, to dismay us, to put us off track. I have observed this in my own work over many years and again in the writing of this book. I take this to imply that something really important is at stake. It is vital that we keep our nerve, say our prayers, and press forward.

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.

Catholic apologists for the doctrine of purgatory had insisted that at the point of death the still sinful soul needed two things: further purification and further punishment. (Allowance was made for a small number of saints who would go straight to heaven, but they were assumed to be very much the exception.)

The Reformers replied that the purification in question was effected not after death, but by bodily death itself (as in Rom. 6:7, where death pays all debts) and by the Spirit’s present sanctifying work, putting to death the deeds of the body (as in Rom. 8:13). And

Thus the doctrine known as “penal substitution” (Jesus bearing punishment in the place of his people), though in itself a much older, indeed biblical and patristic, conception, received a new boost and a new spin from the Reformers’ rejection of purgatory. One of the reasons it became such a hallmark of Reformation theology was that it was thus a key part of the polemic against a doctrine that lacked biblical support and had the visible propensity to generate corruption and abuse.

So PSA is a result on a pendulum swing from indulgences and purgatory. Where then is the middle ground?

The question of whether medieval Catholics actually taught all this is beside the point, since the Reformers certainly thought they did.

am not a specialist in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it does seem to me that in general terms the Reformers and their successors were thus trying to give biblical answers to medieval questions.

We do the same now.

They were wrestling with the question of how the angry God of the late medieval period might be pacified, both here (through the Mass?) and hereafter (in purgatory?).

If, of course, you are faced with the medieval questions, it is better to give them biblical answers than nonbiblical ones. But the biblical texts themselves might suggest that there were better questions to be asking,

Completelyh agree

Atonement (how humans are rescued from their plight and restored to their intended place within the loving and creative purposes of God) must dovetail with eschatology (what God ultimately intends for the world and for humans). And if we rethink our eschatology, as I have been trying to do over the last decade or two, we must rethink our view of atonement as well.

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.

How can there be evil if there is no good

If a quick tour of two thousand years of church history leaves us somewhat confused about the meaning of the cross, we will not be surprised that there is plenty of confusion in our own day as well.

Good reminder

So they react in one of a number of predictable ways. Some people reject the whole thing as a horrible nonsense. Others, puzzled, go back to their Bibles and to the great teachers of the early church, and there they find all sorts of other things being said about the cross, for instance, that it was the means by which God’s rescuing love won the ultimate victory over all the forces of darkness. Or they find early writers urging Christians to imitate the self-giving love of Jesus, and they seize upon that as the “answer”: the cross, they say, wasn’t about God punishing sin; it was about Jesus giving us the ultimate example of love. Thus many different interpretations have arisen, affecting the ways in which people have been taught the Bible and the Christian faith. This has been a recipe for confusion. This confusion, as I shall be suggesting, gets in the way of what is arguably the most important thing. 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.

Im in the camp of divinh deeper into history

Confusions about the cross have come in many shapes and forms, but the one most Western Christians are familiar with today has to do with violence. Today’s global population is more aware of violence, its scale, and its nature than any previous generation. But now, among the unintended consequences of the technological revolution, the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have offered two remarkable things. First, humans have devised ways of killing one another on an industrial scale. Second, the nastiest details about such horrors are now transmitted instantaneously around the world through social media. Apart from those directly involved either in war or torture, most people in earlier generations never really faced the disgusting actualities of raw violence. We all now know not only that it has happened and is happening, but what it looks like and sounds like. And even if we don’t watch the relevant news bulletins, the movie industry has made an entire art form, new and dark, out of the graphic depiction of every kind of violence.

My heart breaks for how far weve fallen from the peace jesus intended

In fact, of course, the Bible was not written as a collection of “moral examples” in the first place. The stories are regularly told in quite a sophisticated way, nudging alert readers into seeing serious and complex underlying patterns and narratives that warn against simplistic readings and that, indeed, encourage them to draw conclusions beyond anything stated on the surface of the text. But this both does and doesn’t help. People naturally ask: Does the Bible justify violence? And, in particular: Is the death of Jesus a supreme example of the God of the Bible using violence—violence, it seems, against his own son!—as a way of achieving his purposes? (I once heard that argument made explicitly in the 1970s by some who wanted to use violence to oppose South African apartheid; they were saying, in effect, if God could do it, so can we.) Even supposing those purposes are ultimately loving and aimed at rescuing people, is this an appropriate way for the one true God to behave?

Did anything actually happen on the cross that made a real difference in the world, and if so what account can we give of it? Has the revolution really begun, or is it all wishful thinking?

I struggle so much with this line of thinking

Unless there was a reason for Jesus to die, and perhaps even a reason for him to die that particular and horrible kind of death, it is hard to see how this death could actually be an example of love. If Bill’s dearest friend falls into a fast-flowing river and Bill leaps in to try to save him, risking his own life in the process, that would indeed provide an example of love (as well as heroic courage) for anyone who witnesses the event or hears about it. But if Fred, wishing to show his dearest friend how much he loves him, leaps into a fast-flowing river when the friend is standing safely beside him on the bank, that would demonstrate neither love nor courage, but meaningless folly. My point is this: unless Jesus’s death achieved something—something that urgently needed to be done and that couldn’t be done in any other way—then it cannot serve as a moral example. The “exemplary” meaning must always depend on something prior. As John puts it: “Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the sacrifice that would atone for our sins. Beloved, if that’s how God loved us, we ought to love one another in the same way” (1 John 4:10–11). John does not expect his readers to offer themselves as the sacrifice to atone for one another’s sins. That has already been done. They are expected to copy the self-sacrificial love through which Jesus did something unique, something that urgently needed doing. So our question presses: What was that “...

Im leaning in. What was it? Can we know?

What might happen if, instead of an ultimate vision of saved souls going to heaven, we were to start with the eschatology of Ephesians 1:10, with God’s plan to sum up all things in heaven and earth in the Messiah? What if, instead of a disembodied “heaven,” we were to focus on the biblical vision of “new heavens and new earth,” with that renewal and that fusion of the two created spheres taking place in and through Jesus himself? What if, instead of the bare “going to heaven,” we were to embrace (along with theologians like John Calvin) the biblical vocation of being the “royal priesthood”? What would happen if we thought through the ongoing cross-shaped implications, writ large as they are in the New Testament, of the once-for-all event of Jesus’s death? What difference might that make to our view of salvation—including once more its philosophical and political dimensions? How, in other words, does the cross fit into the larger biblical narrative of new creation? What would happen if, instead of seeing the resurrection (both of Jesus and of ourselves) as a kind of happy addition to an otherwise complete view of salvation, we saw it as part of its very heart?

What a cliff hanger!

We will fail too to understand the questions the historian and theologian must ask: How and why did the cross so quickly acquire a radically different symbolic meaning? And what precisely did that revolutionary meaning say about God, the world, Israel, and the human race?

This is very true! If Jesus's message were not true why would the symbol of the cross have such a sudden and radical change

The early Christians’ shorthand summaries point beyond themselves into areas with which the thought of our own day, including contemporary Christian thought, is not nearly as familiar as it should be. Just as the resurrection of Jesus cannot be fitted into any other worldview, but must be either rejected altogether or allowed to reshape existing worldviews around itself, so the cross itself demands the rethinking of categories. We cannot capture it; to be Christian means, among other things, that it has captured us. If we make it our own too easily, fitting it into the theories and preachers’ illustrations that explain it all neatly, we will have shrunk it, reduced it to a size that we can manage and perhaps manipulate. The aim of the present book is to do the opposite: to point to new visions more robustly biblical and more deeply revolutionary of what the cross meant to the first Christians and even to Jesus himself.

We cannot capture it christiantii captures uss

The idea of someone dying for someone else, so familiar from Christian statements of the gospel, is far more clearly visible in ancient pagan literature than in ancient Jewish literature.

Aim your swords at me alone, at me who fight a losing battle for despised law and justice. My blood, mine only, will bring peace to the people of Italy and end their suffering; the would-be tyrant need wage no war, once I am gone.

This Is unreal. Wouod work for a game of who said it

The people who died on behalf of others in the pagan writings were dying what would be seen as a “noble death.” Nobody in the ancient world would have said that about crucifixion.

So true. It seems nobel to us on this side of history

The old sense, that the animals were suffering a kind of transferred death penalty so that the worshippers who had brought the animals might be spared, simply will not do, for reasons that will become apparent. Only when we have gotten our minds into the world of first-century Jewish Temple theology will we even begin to make sense of it all.

Ive been struggling with this concept forr quite a while

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.

In the English language the work of dealing with sin is commonly spoken of as “atonement.” Because this word occurs in many passages in English translations of the Bible, it is easy to imagine that it carries a single and obvious meaning. It does not.

Noted

The Covenant of Vocation

The “goal” is not “heaven,” but a renewed human vocation within God’s renewed creation.

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.

Within this narrative, creation itself is understood as a kind of Temple, a heaven-and-earth duality, where humans function as the “image-bearers” in the cosmic Temple, part of earth yet reflecting the life and love of heaven. This is how creation was designed to function and flourish: under the stewardship of the image-bearers. Humans are called not just to keep certain moral standards in the present and to enjoy God’s presence here and hereafter, but to celebrate, worship, procreate, and take responsibility within the rich, vivid developing life of creation. According to Genesis, that is what humans were made for.

The diagnosis of the human plight is then not simply that humans have broken God’s moral law, offending and insulting the Creator, whose image they bear—though that is true as well. This lawbreaking is a symptom of a much more serious disease. Morality is important, but it isn’t the whole story. Called to responsibility and authority within and over the creation, humans have turned their vocation upside down, giving worship and allegiance to forces and powers within creation itself. The name for this is idolatry. The result is slavery and finally death.

This makes so much sense

it is, rather, about direct consequences. When we worship and serve forces within the creation (the creation for which we were supposed to be responsible!), we hand over our power to other forces only too happy to usurp our position. We humans have thus, by abrogating our own vocation, handed our power and authority to nondivine and nonhuman forces, which have then run rampant, spoiling human lives, ravaging the beautiful creation, and doing their best to turn God’s world into a hell (and hence into a place from which people might want to escape).

it changes Gods motivation from perfection to purpose

Called to the Royal Priesthood

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.

For many people, not least those who got rid of monarchs in the eighteenth century, the very idea of kings or queens seems outdated, antiquated, unnecessary, and quite possibly abusive. People often ask me why I continue to talk about the “kingdom of God” when kingdoms in general have been such a disaster, making a few people rich and proud and a great many people poor and downtrodden. My normal answer is that things were like that in the first century too, if anything worse (think of Herod; think of Caesar!), but that Jesus went on talking about God becoming king anyway. Why did he do that? Answer:

Communities of Reconciled Worshippers

Once we grasp this, it plays back into our understanding of the earlier part of the verse and, with it, the analysis of the “problem” throughout Romans 5. Here is the point. When humans sinned, they abdicated their vocation to “rule” in the way that they, as image-bearers, were supposed to. They gave away their authority to the powers of the world, which meant ultimately to death itself. Thus, in the climactic conclusion in v. 21, Paul declares that “sin reigned in death.” Sin is the human failure of vocation, with all that this entails. When we sin, we abuse our calling, our privileges, and our possibilities. Our thoughts, words, and actions have consequences. They were meant to. That is what being image-bearers is all about. Sin risks replacing good consequences with damaging ones. Turning away from the source of life, we invite death to fill the vacuum. Both these elements, sin and death, need to be dealt with on the cross. The whole New Testament and Paul in particular declare that this is what was achieved. That is why the cross launches the revolution.

“Idolatry,” of course, covers a lot more than simply the manufacture and adoration of actual physical images. It happens whenever we place anything in the created order above the Creator himself. When humans worship parts of creation or forces within creation, they give away their power to those aspects of the created order, which will then come to rule over them. “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.

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.

When the early Christians wrote about Jesus’s death, they used what are often seen as different models or metaphors. These include “redemption,” a metaphor from the slave market; “justification,” a metaphor from the law court; and “sacrifice,” a metaphor well known from the Temple. People often suggest that these don’t really fit together; they are simply different pictorial ways of getting at the central truth. I think this represents a failure to see what it means that Jesus’s death was in accordance with the Bible.

Every single element in this (to us) increasingly complex picture is important if we are to get inside the minds of the first followers of Jesus and understand what they meant when they spoke of Jesus’s death being “in accordance with the Bible” and “for our sins.” If we fail to grasp how all this fits together, how the whole framework functions as a whole, it isn’t just that we will reduce our view of Jesus’s death to inadequate shorthands and slogans. We will put it into a different framework. And that alternate framework, invented to fill the gap left by the original one, will impart to central phrases like “for our sins” a meaning subtly but importantly different from the original one. We will, in fact, de-biblicize the story. We will de-Judaize it. We will paganize it.

How could this happen?

The normal Greek word for “sin,” namely hamartia, means “missing the mark”: shooting at a target and failing to hit it. This is subtly but importantly different from being given a long and fussy list of things you must and mustn’t do and failing to observe them all. 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.

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.

The prophet Nathan, responding to David’s proposal to build God a “house,” declared that God would instead build David a “house.”

In a sense then God is affirming davids request by setting the stage to build the temple God wnts (a human not a building) tgrough David

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.