Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

by Brian Zahnd

When we say Jesus died for our sins, we mean something like this: We violently sinned our sins into Jesus, and Jesus revealed the heart of God by forgiving our sins. By saying “we” violently sinned our sins into Jesus, I mean that all of us are more or less implicated by our explicit or tacit support of the systems of violent power that frame our world. These are the political and religious systems that orchestrated Jesus’s death. At the cross we see how Adam and Eve’s penchant for shifting blame and Cain’s capacity for killing led to the ultimate crime: the murder of God! The transgression of our first parents along with the sinful violence of the founders of human civilization led inevitably to the killing of Jesus on Good Friday. At Golgotha human sin is seen as utterly sinful. God did not require the death of Jesus, but our sinful systems certainly did! We are so addicted to the idea of redemptive violence—problem solving by killing—that it even infects our theology of the cross. With our superstitious reverence for redemptive violence we wrongly assume that God was the source of violence on Good Friday. But once we see the absurdity of this erroneous notion, we can then take an honest and hard look at the killing of Jesus and consider its deep implications.