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

by N.T. Wright

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.

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. Some Jews (not all) believed that deliverance would come through suffering, but such suffering would not be undergone by the Messiah himself. It would be hard for a Second Temple Jew to read key passages like Psalm 2 or Psalm 110 without envisaging the Messiah as a military conqueror. This is all the more striking in that the early Christians continued to invoke just those passages, shorn of their explicit violence, in their interpretation of Jesus and what he had accomplished.

The problem comes, I think, when the central thrust of Isaiah 53—that this suffering was the means, not merely the occasion, of the forgiveness of sins and all that went with it—is taken out of the context, both literary and historical, in which it is found and made to serve a different narrative. At that moment, I suggest—and this is one of the main arguments of the present book—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.

So whht is the point

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.

In other words, non-Jewish peoples too are to have their own Exodus! This is revolutionary indeed, and it transforms the exclusive note of the earlier passages about the divine love. It now appears that this love is not only the divine love for Israel, but the divine love through Israel, resulting in the worldwide appeal of

Nothing in the Second Temple world encourages us to suppose that Jews before the time of Jesus were composing the kind of fresh construct we discover among the early Christians.

The philosophical shift in jesuu followers is also e vidence of his presence

in much popular modern Christian thought we have made a three-layered mistake. We have Platonized our eschatology (substituting “souls going to heaven” for the promised new creation) and have therefore moralized our anthropology (substituting a qualifying examination of moral performance for the biblical notion of the human vocation), with the result that we have paganized our soteriology, our understanding of “salvation” (substituting the idea of “God killing Jesus to satisfy his wrath” for the genuinely biblical notions we are about to explore).

once the new way of looking at things is grasped, all that was best in the old way will be retained, but in a new framework through which it loses its frankly unbiblical elements.

I like the restorative messaging

the means of salvation, as we shall see throughout this part of the book, does indeed involve the death of Jesus as the representative and then the substitute for his people, though not in the sense that many have understood those rather abstract categories.

Get to it

This is what “for our sins in accordance with the Bible” actually meant: that the scriptural narrative of the restoration of Israel and then the welcome of the non-Jews into this restored people (though this is not yet in view in Acts 2–3) had been launched through the death and resurrection of Jesus, and that the single-phrase summary of all this, operating at both the large, national scale and the small, personal level, was the “forgiveness of sins.”

Where does all this take us? To a fresh understanding of what I have called the “goal” of the gospel through a fresh understanding of the early Christian use of the phrase “forgiveness of sins” (which obviously relates directly to the early gospel formula “The Messiah died for our sins”). The goal is not for people “to go to heaven when they die.” That is never mentioned in Acts. The whole book of Acts assumes, first, that God’s kingdom has already been well and truly launched through the death and resurrection of Jesus (1:6; 8:12; 19:8; 20:25; 28:23, 31); second, that this kingdom will be fully and finally established when Jesus returns (1:11; 3:21); and, third, that in this final new world all God’s people will be raised to new bodily life (4:2; 24:15, 21; 26:23). The book has not one word to say about people “going to heaven”—except, of course, for Jesus himself in 1:9–11, and his “ascension” has nothing to do with the popular image of people “dying and going to heaven” and everything to do with his enthronement and the commencement of his worldwide reign (as in 1 Cor. 15:25).

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.

I do not think any early Christians would have denied that this was true, but it is interesting that they didn’t put it like that.

No. 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. The smaller reality—that I, as a sinner, need to know the forgiving love of God in my own life—is vital for each person, one by one. But, as history shows, that reality can all too easily be understood within the Platonized version of the gospel in which the whole emphasis falls on a detached spirituality in the present and a detached future salvation in which the created order is abandoned altogether.

That our spiritual reality mkes us much more interconnected thn individulized

This was not about inventing a new kind of religion. It had nothing to do with getting rid of the earthbound hopes of the ancient Jews and embracing a “spiritual” reality instead. It was far more revolutionary. It was about the kingdom of God coming “on earth as in heaven.”

As we saw briefly above, one of the key problems about the idea of a platonic “disembodied heaven” is that it generates the wrong view of what human life ought to be in the present time as an anticipation, or even a qualification, for that destiny. The idea of “heaven” carries with it in the popular mind and even in many well-taught Christian minds the notion that this is where “good people” go, while “bad people” go somewhere else. This, of course, quickly gets modified by standard teachings of the gospel: we are all “bad people,” so that if anyone “goes to heaven,” it must be because our badness has somehow been dealt with and, in some traditions, because someone else’s “goodness” has somehow been “reckoned to our account.” But the problem with this entire way of looking at things is that the idea of moral behavior as the qualification for “heaven” is itself a distortion. As we saw above, we have Platonized our eschatology—our vision of the ultimate end—and, to match, have “moralized” our anthropology, our sense of what humans are and what they are meant to be. This has worked its way into traditions of Christian ethics, and I have argued elsewhere (in my book Virtue Reborn, whose American title is After You Believe) that we need to replace this with the biblical vocation of human beings, which is to be image-bearers, God’s “royal priesthood.” Being priests includes “moral behavior”

Our view of “salvation,” after all, is tied in closely to our view of the human possibility and plight, and that in turn is tied in closely to our view of our final destiny. Adjust one, and we must adjust them all.

True that

What might it look like for the “kingdom” to be “restored to Israel”? The Cross-Shaped Kingdom Many Jews of the period, faced with that question, would have said three things at least. First, Israel must be set free from the domination of pagan overlords. Second, Israel’s God, perhaps through the agency of his Messiah, would become the ruler of the whole world, bringing to birth a new reign of justice and peace. Third, God’s own Presence would come to dwell with his people, enabling them to worship him fully and truly. There might be much more, of course: plenty of prophecies to be explored, plenty of promises to be prayed into fulfillment. But these three things would be a start. And the book of Acts is the story of how these three things in particular came into being.

Once we realize that “heaven” means “God’s space,” that “earth” means “our space,” and that these two, made from the start to overlap and interlock, did so fully and finally in Jesus, the problems disappear.

As always in Christian theology, we have to start with Jesus and reconfigure our ideas around him, rather than trying to fit him into our existing worldviews.)

Out of worship and prayer there grows witness; and the “witness” is not simply about people saying, “I’ve had this experience; perhaps you might like it too,” but about people announcing that a new state of affairs has come into being.

The problem, I think, is once again that if we assume the regular Platonized “goal” of the divine rescue operation—the idea that what matters is how sinful souls get saved and go to “heaven”—then it does indeed appear that the evangelists and even Jesus himself had comparatively little to say on the subject.

Oh snap

The first thing to realize is that the crucifixion, by itself, carried no “meaning” whatever other than the depressingly normal one. Roman “justice” was once again doing what it did best, stamping out any sign of dissent. The Romans (we remind ourselves) crucified tens of thousands of young Jews over the course of the first century. It was a horribly familiar event. Nobody—neither Jesus’s followers, nor his mother, nor Pontius Pilate, nor the mocking crowds—were saying to themselves, as evening drew on and Jesus’s body was taken down from the cross for burial, “So he died for our sins!” Nobody was saying “All this has happened in accordance with the Bible!” Nobody, as far as our evidence goes, had been expecting Israel’s Messiah to die for the sins of the world. Nobody, on the evening of Jesus’s crucifixion, had any idea that a revolutionary event had just taken place.

Excelent point

Luke himself did believe in quite a sophisticated understanding of the cross, which he has woven into the narrative rather than letting it appear as a formula.

Something to be learned

I have made the point elsewhere, but it bears repeating: when Jesus wanted to explain to his followers what his forthcoming death was all about, he did not give them a theory, a model, a metaphor, or any other such thing; he gave them a meal, a Passover meal—or at least what they seem to have thought was a Passover-meal, though it turned out to be significantly different.

Theories of atonement do not need to be superimposed on an abstract narrative about Jesus, as has so often been attempted. They grow out of the real-life Jesus stories we already have.

may suspect that the early Christians did not have particularly good language to say what they wanted to say at this point, and we certainly don’t have good language for it either.

We shall return to those. But the overwhelming historical impression from the gospels as a whole is of a human being doing what Israel’s God had said he would do, of a human being embodying, incarnating what Israel’s God had said he would be across page after page in Israel’s scriptures. The new Passover happened because the pillar of cloud and fire—though now in a strange and haunting form, the likeness of a battered and crushed human being—had come back to deliver the people. The covenant was renewed because of the blood that symbolized the utter commitment of God to his people, the lifeblood that spoke of divine protection, of God’s self-giving love. Paul, in Acts 20:28, speaks of “the church of God, which he purchased with his very own blood.” Forgiveness happened because the “arm of YHWH” was “wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities” (Isa. 53:5). The cross became the encoded symbol as well as the actual outworking of the dying, and hence the undying, love of Israel’s God.

We too are easily fooled into allowing distinctions of ethnic origin to determine the boundaries of our fellowship in the Messiah. We are easily fooled into supposing that because we believe in faith, not works, in grace, not law, the absolute moral challenge of the gospel can be quietly set aside. Paul’s message of the cross leaves us no choice. Unity and holiness and the suffering that will accompany both are rooted in the Messiah’s death. To regard them as inessential is to pretend that the Messiah did not need to die. It is to imply that the “present evil age” is still in untroubled control of the world, that the Gentiles are still under the unbroken rule of the “powers.” It is to suppose that the ultimate revelation of divine identity—more, of divine love (as in 2:20)—has not happened. It is to deny the gospel.

everyone knew how worldly emperors behaved, and Jesus did the opposite. His self-emptying, his humility, his obedience to the divine plan even though it meant his own cruel and shameful death—all this is the complete opposite of normal human behavior, normal imperial behavior. The result is that the cross establishes the kingdom of God through the agency of Jesus. That is what the last three stanzas of the poem are celebrating. We are here exactly on the same page as the four gospels.

The Messiah was lord of all, yet became a slave. He was all-powerful, but became weak. He was equal with the Father, yet refused to take advantage of this status. Add to this the echoes throughout this passage from Isaiah 40–55, particularly the “servant” poems, and we can go one step farther: he was innocent, yet he died the death of the guilty. This is how the cross establishes God’s kingdom: by bearing and so removing the weight of sin and death. The kingdom of God is established by destroying the power of idolatry, and idols get their power because humans, in sinning, give it to them. Deal with sin, and the idols are reduced to a tawdry heap of rubble. Deal with sin, and the world will glorify God.

Humans are designed to worship God and exercise responsibility in his world. But when humans worship idols instead, so that their image-bearing humanness corrupts itself into sin, missing the mark of the human vocation, they hand over their power to those same idols. The idols then use this power to tyrannize and ultimately to destroy their devotees and the wider world. But when sins are forgiven, the idols lose their power.

Summary Of the book

I suspect—from conversations with many readers over the years—that plenty of people who read the Bible have that sort of feeling about Paul’s Letter to the Romans. It’s about righteousness and faith and love and wrath and God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and Adam and Abraham and Moses and Israel. At times it sweeps you along on a tide of extraordinary writing and glorious hope, while at other times it plunges you not only into gloom, but into serious puzzles, knotty intellectual problems, and arguments that will make you wonder whether St. Paul is losing his balance or whether, perhaps, you are the one losing your balance—which

It is as though a child, having longed to visit the zoo in order to see the elephants, were to arrive on a day when the elephant house was closed for repair and, desperate to avoid disappointment, somehow convinced herself that the rhinoceroses was a strange kind of elephant after all.

Great analogy

The primary human problem that Paul notes in Romans 1:18 is not “sin,” but “ungodliness.” It is a failure not primarily of behavior (though that follows), but of worship. Worship the wrong divinity, and instead of reflecting God’s wise order into the world you will reflect and then produce a distortion: something out of joint, something “unjust.” That is the problem, says Paul: “ungodliness” produces “out-of-jointness,” “injustice.” Since this out-of-jointness clashes with the way things actually are, humans then suppress the truth as well, including ultimately the truth about God himself, and so the vicious circle continues; people continue to worship that which is not divine and swap the truth for a lie (1:18–26). One can of course sum up all the consequent distortions and fracturings of human life with the word “sin.” But to jump straight there without recognizing the careful analysis Paul has offered is itself to “miss the mark” in understanding what he is saying. “Sin” is not just “doing things God has forbidden.” It is, as we saw, the failure to be fully functioning, God-reflecting human beings. That is what Paul sums up in 3:23: all sinned and fell short of God’s glory. He is referring to the glory that, as true humans, they should have possessed. This is the “glory” spoken of in Psalm 8: the status and responsibility of looking after God’s world on his behalf. This status and this activity are sustained by true worship of the true God. This is the royal vocation, u...

What A much more rich definition

That is the position I have myself taken in commentaries and books. But there is a problem with this reading.

This is a brave d vulnerable statemeegt

The early church from then on, as we have seen, used Passover as the basic route toward understanding why he died. Paul picks this up and celebrates it. Passover, as we have seen, had to do with the overthrow of the powers of evil, the rescue of God’s people as they passed through the waters of the Red Sea, the giving of the law, and above all the strange and dangerous Presence of God himself, fulfilling his promises, coming to dwell in the tabernacle, and leading the people on the long, difficult journey through the wilderness to their promised inheritance. All of these themes find their home in Romans 6–8 within the narrative of Messiah and Spirit. At their heart, again and again, is the Messiah’s death.

Mic drop.

every step away from the Jewish narrative, in this case the Jewish narrative as reaching its focal point in Israel’s Messiah, is a step toward paganism.

Hence why we continully need to study the ot

The Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Bible, not in accordance with some other scheme into which a few fragments of the Bible can be made to fit.

Who is the “me” here? The “I” and “me” of Romans 7 is a literary device through which Paul is telling the life story of Israel under the Torah. He doesn’t want to speak of Israel as “they,” as though he were dealing with “others,” people distant from himself. This is his own story not in the sense of straight autobiography, but in the sense that he, Paul, a loyal Jew, is part of that same Israel “according to the flesh.” (That,

Paul describes Jesus’s death as “a sin offering.” This may seem strange. Why mention this particular sacrifice, one of many different sacrifices in Leviticus and Numbers, at this moment? It would be a mistake, as I hinted earlier, to think that the animal presented as a sin offering was being punished for the sins of the worshipper. That is not the point. The point is that in the Bible the “sin offering” is, again and again, the particular sacrifice that has to do with sins that the Israelite performed either unwillingly (not intending to do them) or unwittingly (intending to do them but not realizing that they were sinful). And Paul has analyzed the actions of the “I” in 7:13–20 in such a way as to place Israel under the Torah in exactly that position. “I don’t understand what I do” (v. 15) is literally, “I do not know what I am doing”; this is unwitting sin, the sin of ignorance. “I end up doing the evil thing I don’t want to do” (v. 20); this is the unwilling sin. The remedy is suited exactly to the problem.

Fascinating Perspective.

The work of the cross is not designed to rescue humans from creation, but to rescue them for creation. If we told the story that way, all kinds of problems would either be solved or at least appear in a new light.

How is God to be faithful to the covenant—to rescue and bless the world through the Jews—if Israel is faithless?

Paul is not, then, talking about God’s moral uprightness in general. He is referring more particularly to his faithfulness to his covenant purposes, enacted through the faithful Messiah, Jesus, through which he brings his putting-right purposes (his “justice”) to the world.

The usual “Romans road” reading of the letter assumes that the only point Paul is making between 1:18 and 3:20 is that “all humans are sinful.” This then leads us into the “works contract”: we are moral failures; we need to get “right with God” if we’re going to get to heaven; Jesus dies in our place; the job is done. And at one level this is better than nothing. The glass may be one-third full. But something vital has been left out, like a cocktail without the all-important shot of bourbon. You can still drink it. Some important flavors are really there. But the intended meaning, the real “kick” to Paul’s argument, is missing.

As we have seen, that explanation simply goes like this: we sinned, God sent Jesus to die for us, we are saved. No mention of Israel. But when you leave out Israel, your shortened story will easily tip over into a non-Jewish way of thinking, into, as we have seen, a platonic view of the ultimate goal (“heaven”), a moralistic view of the human vocation (“good behavior”), and a downright pagan view of salvation (an innocent death placating an angry deity).

The Hebrew word kappōreth was rendered in the Greek translations of scripture as hilastērion. This posed quite a problem when English translations of scripture were being produced. One could hardly say that God put forth Jesus as a “lid” or even as a “covering.” That is why some translations made the innovation of rendering the word as “mercy seat,” though the lid of the ark was not a “seat” in the modern sense except perhaps in the sense we use when we describe the heart as the “seat of the emotions” (hence, perhaps, Tyndale’s rendering as “seat of mercy,” the place from which mercy flows, where it is to be found). Strictly speaking, the “lid” was not the place of “mercy” as such, but the place of both “meeting” and “cleansing.” This was where God met with his people; and, in order for this to take place, it was where the priest cleansed the sanctuary from the defiling effects of the past sins of Israel with the sprinkled blood of the sacrifice.

the killing of the sacrificial animals was not, in ancient Israel, the important part of the ritual. The killing did not take place on the altar (an important difference from much pagan ritual). Cutting the animal’s throat was simply the prelude to the release of blood, symbolizing the animal’s life, which was then used as the all-important agent for purging or cleansing the worshippers and also the sacred place and its furniture, thus enabling the all-holy God to meet with his people without disastrous results. And that meeting took place precisely on the kappōreth, the place of cleansing or purgation.

The only time in Leviticus when an animal has sins confessed over its head, the animal in question—the “scapegoat”—is precisely not sacrificed. It is, after all, impure, and would not be suitable as an offering. It is driven out into the wilderness.

the goat that was killed on that day and the other animals used as sin offerings made regularly throughout the year were likewise not being “punished” in the place of the people. Sin offerings were a sign of penitence for accidental sins: acts you knew were sinful but had not intended to commit or acts you committed without realizing they were sinful. (According to the legislation, if you did know and did intend to do them, no sacrifice could be offered. Such high-handed offending was to be punished, not forgiven.) So when Paul writes in Romans 3:25 that God put Jesus forth as a hilastērion, he does not mean that God was punishing Jesus for the sins of Israel or the world. Had he wanted to say that, he would not have echoed the language of the Day of Atonement. That was not what it was about.

Why would we not realize this? Why are we so easy to cling to our ideas instead lookingfoor truth?