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

by N.T. Wright

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