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by
Brian Zahnd
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January 8 - July 31, 2019
It’s time for the Story to bust out of the cage and take the stage And demand a hearing once again It’s a STORY, I tell you! And if you allow the Story to seep into your life So that THE STORY begins to weave into your...
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The confession of the Second Council of Nicaea was more than a ruling in support of the sacred art of Christian iconography; it was an acknowledgment that in the life of Jesus Christ we find a definitive answer to the question of what God is like. God is like Jesus! Jesus is not an idol; Jesus is not just one of many avatars of God; Jesus is the perfect icon of the invisible God!
The cross is many things, but it is not a quid pro quo to mollify an angry God.
At the cross Jesus does not save us from God; at the cross Jesus reveals God as savior! When we look at the cross we don’t see what God does; we see who God is!
God’s foreknowledge of this killing doesn’t mean that it was God’s will for Jesus to be murdered.
The cross is where God receives the most vicious blow of human sin, turns the other cheek, and forgives.
This should not be misunderstood as God reconciling himself to the world. It wasn’t God who was alienated toward the world; it was the world that was alienated toward God. Jesus didn’t die on the cross to change God’s mind about us; Jesus died on the cross to change our minds about God! It wasn’t God who required the death of Jesus; it was humanity that cried, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” When the world says, “Crucify him,” God says, “Forgive them.
In Christianity the supreme value is not freedom but love. We can kill in the name of freedom, but in the name of love we suffer and forgive. Our savior is Jesus Christ crying “Forgive!”—not William Wallace crying “Freedom!”
The cross is not where God finds a whipping boy to vent his rage upon; the cross is where God saves the world through self-sacrificing love.
it was not necessary to convince God to forgive. To forgive sinners is the nature of God.
The crucifixion is not what God inflicts upon Jesus in order to forgive; the crucifixion is what God endures in Christ as he forgives. The monstrous aspects of Good Friday are of entirely human origin. What is divine about Good Friday is the completely unprecedented picture of a crucified God responding to his torturers with love and mercy. Golgotha offers humanity a genuinely new and previously unimagined way of conceiving the nature of God.
God does not have a monstrous side.
instead of perceiving the cross as what God endures as he forgives.
As Jesus heals the sick, forgives the sinner, receives the outcast, restores the fallen, and supremely as he dies on a cross forgiving his killers, he reveals what God is like.
The hands of God are not hurling thunderbolts. The hands of God have scars; they were nailed to a tree as he forgave monstrous evil.
If we move against the grain of love, we will suffer the shards of self-inflicted suffering—and we can call this the wrath of God if we like—but the deeper truth remains: God is love.
John Calvin’s theory
What Jesus did on the cross is far more mysterious and beautiful than simply offering himself as a primitive ritual sacrifice.
we confess that Christ died for our sins, but this does not mean we should interpret the cross according to an economic model where God had to gain the necessary capital to forgive sins through the vicious murder of his Son.
Forgiveness is not receiving payment for a debt; forgiveness is the gracious cancellation of debt. There is no payment in forgiveness. Forgiveness is grace.
In the parable of the prodigal son, the father doesn’t rush to the servants’ quarters to beat a whipping boy and vent his anger before he can forgive his son.
No, in the story of the prodigal son, the father bears the loss and forgives his son from his treasury of inexhaustible love. He just forgives. There is no payment.
Jesus did not shed his blood to pay off God in the form of a ritual sacrifice. That’s not what God wanted. Jesus shed his blood in faithful obedience to his Father’s will, demonstrating divine forgiveness even as he was crucified!
Jesus did not shed his blood to buy God’s forgiveness; Jesus shed his blood to embody God’s forgiveness!
Paul says the cross heaps shame on the rulers and authorities that preside over structural sin: “In this way, he disarmed the spiritual rulers and authorities. He shamed them publicly by his victory over them on the cross.
God didn’t crucify Jesus; Rome and the Sanhedrin did. Now the cross forever shames the rich and powerful who seek to preserve their privilege and position through the use of violence. Their pretentious claim that they are wise and just enough to use violent means to achieve good ends is put to everlasting shame. If we claim that it was God who required the crucifixion of Jesus, we seek to clothe with false dignity the very structures of sin that Jesus deliberately stripped bare and put to open shame in his death!
We are worthy of God’s love and healing not on the basis of personal merit but because of the image we bear: the very image of God. Original blessing is more original than original sin!
Jesus sacrificed his life to remain true to everything he taught in the Sermon on the Mount about love for our enemies.
Jesus sacrificed his life to confirm a new covenant of love and mercy.
Jesus sacrificed his life to Death in order to be swallowed by Death and destro...
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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
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The spirit of God is not heard in the blood-lusting cries of “Crucify him” but in the merciful plea “Father, forgive them.” We must not imagine the machinations of the devil as the handiwork of God!
C. S. Lewis says, “Hades is neither Heaven nor Hell; it is almost nothing.
in all the evangelistic sermons found in the book of Acts, none of them makes an appeal to afterlife issues.
“I ask myself: ‘What is hell?’ And I answer thus: ‘The suffering of being no longer able to love.’
hell is the love of God wrongly received. Hell is not God’s hatred of sinners; God has a single disposition toward sinners, and that is love.
Those who are suffering in hell, are suffering in being scourged by love….It is totally false to think that sinners in hell are deprived of God’s love. Love is a child of the knowledge of truth, and is unquestionably given commonly to all. But love’s power acts in two ways: it torments sinners, while at the same time it delights those who have lived in accord with it.
“It is not God who is hostile, but we; for God is never hostile.
He is good, and He only bestows blessings and never does harm….Thus to say that God turns away from the wicked is like saying that the sun hides itself from the blind.
From the heart of God there flows an eternal river of fire, the fire of unquenchable love. The question is not whether God loves us but how we respond to God’s love.
I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside. I do not mean that the ghosts may not wish to come out of hell, in the vague fashion wherein an envious man “wishes” to be happy: but they certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages of that self-abandonment through which alone the soul can reach any good. They enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded, and are therefore self-enslaved just as the blessed, forever submitting to obedience, become
through all eternity more and more free.
The truth is that the gospel is the joyful proclamation that the kingdom of God has arrived with the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The gospel is the audacious announcement that Jesus is Lord and that the world is to now be reconfigured around his gracious rule. The gospel is the beautiful story of how God is bringing the world out of bondage to sin and death through the triumph of Jesus Christ. If you don’t know how to preach the gospel without making appeals to afterlife issues, you don’t know how to preach the gospel!
When talking about hell, a good dose of humility is in order.
No one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end. —Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life
Luther had no use for the book of Revelation,
Eugene Peterson says, “The gospel of Jesus Christ is more political than anyone imagines, but in a way that no one guesses.”
hideous monsters are finally conquered by a little Lamb, a slaughtered Lamb who lives again. This is how John describes the triumph of Jesus over the Roman Empire and all beastly empires.
If some people admit that the lamb with seven horns and seven eyes is obviously symbolic but insist that Jesus riding a flying white horse is literal, they’re going to have to explain their system of interpretation.
The only way to consistently interpret the book of Revelation is to acknowledge that everything is communicated by symbol.
