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by
Brian Zahnd
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July 8 - July 17, 2021
Sometimes the Bible is like a Rorschach test: our interpretation of the text reveals more about ourselves than about God.
The wrath of God is a biblical metaphor we use to describe the very real consequences we suffer from trying to go through life against the grain of love.
The Bible is not the perfect revelation of God; Jesus is. Jesus is the only perfect theology. Perfect theology is not a system of theology; perfect theology is a person. Perfect theology is not found in abstract thought; perfect theology is found in the Incarnation. Perfect theology is not a book; perfect theology is the life that Jesus lived. What the Bible does infallibly and inerrantly is point us to Jesus, just like John the Baptist did.
hero. On the Sabbath Jesus went to the synagogue and was invited to read from the Scriptures. And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.*9 Did you catch what happened? Do you see what Jesus did? While reading from the familiar passage of Isaiah 61, Jesus stopped midsentence and rolled up the scroll! It would be like someone singing the national anthem and ending with “O’er the land of the free.” Everybody would be waiting for “and the home of the brave.” Jesus didn’t finish the line. Jesus omitted the bit about “the day of vengeance of our God.” Jesus edited Isaiah like this: to proclaim the year of the
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If we want to rummage around in the Old Testament and drag out Moses or Joshua or Elijah or David to mitigate what Jesus teaches about peacemaking and loving our enemies, we are trying to build an Old Testament tabernacle on the holy mountain of Christ’s glory, to which God says, “No!”
I don’t read the Law and the Prophets by the light of Moses and Elijah; I read the Law and the Prophets in the light of Christ. So if Moses instructs capital punishment and Elijah models violent retribution, I remember Mount Tabor and the voice from heaven that said, “This is my beloved Son; listen to him.”*19 The final testimony of Moses and Elijah is to recede into the background so that Jesus stands alone as the full and true Word of God. Jesus is what God has to say!
The sacrifice of Jesus was necessary to convince us to quit producing sacrificial victims, but it was not necessary to convince God to forgive. To forgive sinners is the nature of God. When Jesus prayed on the cross for the forgiveness of his executioners, he was not acting contrary to the nature of God; he was revealing the nature of God as forgiving love. The cross is not what God does; the cross is who God is!
The crucifixion is not what God inflicts upon Jesus in order to forgive; the crucifixion is what God endures in Christ as he forgives.
How and why would God need a “blood sacrifice” before God could love what God had created? Is God that needy, unfree, unloving, rule-bound, and unable to forgive? Once you say it, you see it creates a nonsensical theological notion that is very hard to defend. Many rightly or wrongly wondered, “What will God
ask of me if God demands violent blood sacrifice from his only Son?”*12
Punishing the innocent in order to forgive the guilty is monstrous logic, atrocious theology, and a gross distortion of the idea of justice.
Jesus did not shed his blood to buy God’s forgiveness; Jesus shed his blood to embody God’s forgiveness!
God did not kill Jesus. God’s action on Good Friday was to surrender his beloved Son to our system. And our system killed him. But on Easter Sunday God overthrew our satanic verdict by raising Jesus from the dead! God did not kill Jesus; we did. What God did was to raise Jesus from the dead and in Christ give us a new way of organizing the world. Instead of being organized around blame and ritual killing, the world is to now be organized around forgiveness and cosuffering love. The cross is not the place where God vents his wrath on Jesus. The cross is the place where human fear and anger are
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world, at last, might be saved by the love of God. The cross is not about the wrath of God finding a suitable sacrifice. The cross is about the love of God offering humanity a way out of the vicious cycle of producing endless victims. The cross of Christ is the end of sacrifice. It’s not the appeasement of a vengeful deity but the supreme demonstration of God’s everlasting love.
