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

by N.T. Wright

So what, in the light of all this, would Paul say had actually happened by six o’clock on the first Good Friday evening? If Romans 3:21–26 was all we had to go on, what might we conclude? First, he would say that the age-old covenant plan of the Creator, to rescue humanity and the world from sin and death, had been accomplished. The new Passover had taken place, in fulfillment of God’s promises to Abraham. Second, he would say that this had been accomplished by God himself, in his act of covenant faithfulness (for which the shorthand is “love,” though Paul does not use that word until chapters 5 and 8), drawing together Israel’s vocation and his own deepest purposes in the faithful death of the Messiah. Third, as befits a “Passover” moment, he would say that people of all sorts—Jews and Gentiles alike—were now free, free from past sins, free to come into the single covenant family. They were “freely declared to be in the right,” to be within God’s justified people, able to look ahead to the final day without fear of condemnation (5:9; 8:1; 8:31–39). Fourth, as we have seen in all the other early Christian strands of thought we have studied, Paul saw the new Passover also as the “dealing with sins” through which exile was undone. This is where Passover and the “Day of Atonement” meet and merge. Fifth, and at the heart of it all, Paul saw Israel’s representative Messiah “handed over because of our trespasses,” in the sense intended in Isaiah 53. Dealing with sins robs the “p...