We come now to the climax of our series on the meaning of Jesus, and the climax of the whole biblical story of Jesus that we’ve been looking at over the past six weeks. I say it’s the “climax” and not the end of the series, because our Lenten series is going to take us to the next part of the story—the story of Jesus’ resurrection, the story of the church, and the story of God’s future and our future in God’s good creation. It seems a good time to do that, what with all the speculative talk about 2012 being the end of the world as we know it—but, to quote the band REM, we’re going to learn that that’s something to feel fine about. Indeed, it’s not the end of the world that we should be looking for, but rather the beginning of God’s new creation. Stay tuned during Lent for that story.
To get there, however, we have to first understand the massive importance of the cross in the biblical story. The cross is our central symbol, the one that dominates our view of worship and the life of discipleship. And yet, as important and central as the cross is to our faith, many Christians don’t really understand why.
For example, I had a conversation once with a college student when I was doing campus ministry in my first appointment. During a late night Bible study, the student, who was a very deep thinker, said to the group, “I often hear that whole ‘Jesus died for my sins’ thing, but how does that work? What does the death of a man in an obscure part of the world 2,000 years ago have to do with me and my situation right now?
That was a great question, and one that theologians have wrestled with themselves for a long time. Indeed, over the course of Christian history, many theories of the atonement, or the meaning of Jesus’ death, have emerged. The ransom theory, for example, says that Jesus died as a ransom to Satan (based on Matthew 20:28 and Mark 10:45, where Jesus says he came to give his life as a ransom for many). This theory says that God gave up Jesus to Satan in order to set us free from captivity to sin and death, but then God tricked Satan by raising Jesus from the dead and depriving the devil of his prize captive.
The Satisfaction Theory, on the other hand, says that Jesus appeased God’s angry wrath by being a ritual human sacrifice.
Closely allied with that theory is the Penal Substitution Theory, which says that God’s mercy replaced his wrath after the infinite self-sacrifice of Jesus. Because Jesus was righteous and sinless, God credits us with that righteousness because of Jesus’ sacrifice for our sins.
Then there’s the Moral Influence Theory, which says that Jesus’ death is simply an example for the rest of humanity to emulate. As Jesus gave himself for us, we should give ourselves for others.
Some of these sound familiar to you if you’ve been part of a church for at least part of your life. There are others, too. Different traditions use these theories as the standard answer to the question of why Jesus had to die.
But while these theories each have some truth to offer us, the problem with them is that they are incomplete in and of themselves. Like the edited versions of the gospel that we talked about at the beginning of this series, atonement theories tend to focus on pieces and parts of Scripture, and are truncated versions of the story the Gospel writers are telling us—a story that sees the cross as the climax of a much larger story—the story of the Bible, the story of Israel, the story of how God redeems his good creation. The meaning of the cross isn’t derived from a theory, it’s derived from the whole story.
Remember how that story goes? It begins with God creating the world for the purpose of dwelling there. God creates humans in his image as the stewards of that creation, and walks with these humans in a face-to-face, loving relationship. The humans, however, seem to want more than that, so they listen to snake who, like the accuser Satan, reminds them that they can choose to be more than God created them to be.
So they reject the image of God for their own image, and the result of their sin is the curse of death—the ultimate dehumanizing force. The whole creation suffers because the human stewards no longer see their vocation as caring for it. Instead, they begin to exploit the creation, and each other.
But God does not give up on the project. Indeed, God chooses another human, a man named Abram, and makes him a promise—through your family will come a great nation that will bless the whole world. This nation will be a light to other nations, showing them the way to be truly human, living out the purpose of stewardship and reflecting my image. Through Abraham’s family, God is going to carry out his project of redeeming and renewing his good creation, and will dwell with his people there.
Abraham’s family grows into a nation, which soon finds itself enslaved to one of the powerful empires of the world, Egypt. The tyrant, Pharaoh, rules over Israel, but God sends a leader named Moses to deliver his people from slavery. The moment of liberation takes place at Passover, when the people are to place the blood of an unblemished lamb on the doorpost as a protection against the death that will pass over Egypt and it’s tyrant ruler. The Passover sacrifice signals the beginning of an exodus out of slavery and into a new future.
God preserves the nation of Israel, despite her grumbling in the desert and, through the law, gives them their vocation as a light to the nations. If they were faithful to this mission and to their covenant with God, God would give them the inheritance of a promised land, a holy land, from which they would be a city on a hill, a lamp on a stand, the salt of the earth, the ones through whom God’s redemptive plan for the whole world would be realized. Indeed, God dwells with Israel in the tabernacle, and then the temple—the place where heaven and earth came together. God had intended to dwell with his people from the beginning of creation, and the temple represented that reality.
But Israel could not carry out this mission. The creeping influence of sin and idolatry was always pulling them away from it and from God. Israel’s kings struggled to stay faithful, and as they went, so did their people. Instead of being a light to other nations, Israel chose to be like them. Instead of obedience to God, Israel chose to be the kind of power from which they had been liberated all those years before—the kind of power that oppresses the poor and gives into self-serving idolatry.
So God deals with Israel’s sin by withdrawing from the temple and removing Israel from the land. Israel goes into exile in Babylon because of sin, her failure to be the people God called her to be. After some years, some of the people return and rebuild, but things are not the same. The temple is rebuilt a couple of times, but God’s glory is no longer present in the way it was. They are overtaken by foreign powers—the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Syrians, the Romans. They are still, in a very real sense, enslaved and in need of liberation.
But again, God does not forget them. God promises Israel a savior—a messiah who will come and set things right. The messiah will restore the temple, cleansing it as the place for God to return and dwell once again. And the messiah will fight Israel’s battle against her enemies, forcing them out. The messiah will be Israel’s representative, indeed, he will be Israel, and do for Israel what she, in her sin, could not do for herself.
In the midst of all that hope and expectation, however, Israel seemed to miss an important vision of the Messiah. The prophet Isaiah had said that the messiah would, indeed, cleanse the temple and fight Israel’s battle, but he would do it not through triumph, but through suffering. The suffering servant, as Israel in person, would bear the pain of Israel’s sin. As Isaiah 53:5-6 puts it, “He was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”
As we have been saying throughout this series, Jesus believed that it was his mission to embody the messiah’s mission, but in a way that nobody expected. Jesus would take on Israel’s commission to be a light to the nations and succeed where she failed, but at a high price. The blessing that was to come through Israel to the whole world would not come through the show of power and strength they had long hoped for but, ironically, through the suffering and death of her only true king.
This is the template that Jesus lays over his ministry. The story of the exodus, Israel’s foundational story, is the story that Jesus embodies in his own ministry. Look at it again:
Jesus understands that his people—who are all the people of the world—are enslaved by the tyrant, Satan, and his greatest weapons of sin and death. As we said last week, Jesus understands that part of his messianic vocation is to go out and do battle with this enemy, who is behind all the powers of this world.
Jesus believes he is the leader, the deliverer, the savior of his people. He is the new and even greater Moses, who has come to rescue people from slavery to sin and death and lead them toward a new future.
But that new future requires sacrifice. Jesus would be that sacrifice, the one who, like the Passover lamb, takes on the sin of his people, and causes death to pass over them. It’s not coincidence that Jesus’ death takes place just before the Passover feast, nor is it coincidence that the night before his crucifixion Jesus takes his disciples to an upper room and shares a meal with them that is a different kind of Passover meal—a meal that features his own broken body and shed blood. It is a meal that shows that he is the lamb, the blood, and the firstborn son all wrapped up in one—the one whose death will save his people from death. Jesus doesn’t leave his disciples with a theory about what his death will mean. Instead, he gives them a meal—not something to be debated, but a meal to be embodied.
Jesus thus lays out a new vocation for his followers. He chooses twelve disciples as a archetype of the 12 tribes of Israel—a new Israel. And he gives them a renewed vocation. It’s the vocation he lays out in his teaching, in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere—a vocation of going the second mile, turning the other cheek, loving one’s enemies, forgiving even those who would nail him to a cross. Jesus reveals the mission of the new Israel as one of peace, mercy, and love, not power and prestige.
Lastly, Jesus reveals the new Israel’s inheritance—the kingdom of God, the reality of heaven and earth coming together. The promise was not for a holy land, but the whole world filled with God’s glory. Not for a temple made of brick and stone, but a temple embodied in Jesus himself, the one in whom heaven and earth, humanity and divinity, come together, and the one in whom all sacrifices for the forgiveness of sins were done once and for all. Jesus embodies the temple in his life and in his death. He also embodies God’s return and the end of exile.
This is what Jesus, Israel’s true king, sees as his mission—a mission that will take him all the way to the cross. Jesus was speaking and acting in such a way as to imply that he was to go ahead of his people, to meet the powers of destruction in person, to take their full weight on himself, so as to make a way through, a way in which God’s people could be renewed, could rediscover their vocation to be a light to the nations, could be rescued from their continuing slavery and exile.
Indeed, this is what we see happening in the crucifixion narratives. In John’s Gospel, we see Jesus battling against the wind of those two great storms we talked about early in this series: the wind of Rome and the gale of Jewish expectation. Jesus stands against them both and reveals his true mission. Turn with me to John 18 and let’s walk through this briefly.
In verse 28, Jesus is brought from Caiphas’ (the high priest) house to Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor. They represent the two storms. Caiaphas wants Jesus dead, but Pilate can’t find anything wrong with him. Jesus befuddles them both.
In verse 33, Pilate asks the question: “Are you the king of the Jews?” This is the central question of the Gospels – who is Jesus? In verse 36, Jesus answers in a powerful way. Indeed, he is the king of the Jews, but not in the way that anyone, either Caiaphas and the Jews or Pontius Pilate and the Romans would have every conceived. “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But, as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” Notice that Jesus doesn’t say, “My kingdom is not of this world.” That would imply that his kingdom is somewhere else, a heavenly kingdom perhaps, which is what many people expect it to be. No, it’s not from this world—it’s not, in other words, the kind of kingdom that the world typically holds up—kingdoms of power and prestige—the kind of kingdom that Rome was and that Israel aspired to be. It’s not the kind of kingdom that fights for its existence. It’s the kind of kingdom whose king comes not to fight, but to die.
John reminds us a few times that this was the day of preparation for the Passover—the festival celebrating the liberation of Israel. The irony was that Israel’s liberator, Israel’s true king had, indeed, come. But he had come not only as the leader, but as the lamb, quite literally bearing the weight of their sin in his own body and he carried the cross. Pilate, in the ultimate touch of irony to the story, has the title “King of the Jews” nailed on to the cross above Jesus’ head. He meant it as a mockery, a way of sticking it to the Jewish leaders who were incensed at his joke. But John tells us, as do the other Gospel writers, that this is, indeed, Israel’s true king—the king who has come to die, with the weight of his people’s sins and the weight of the worst human evil on his sagging shoulders. He died the death that they deserved for their power hungry and bloodthirsty reach for power. He died in place of the guilty one, Barabbas, but also in place of all those who held Barabbas’ own revolutionary ambitions—those who included his own disciples. He died at the hands of his enemies—he died at the hand of the ultimate enemy, evil, and succumbed to evil’s greatest weapon, death.
But the Gospel writers and Paul as well make it clear that this death was not a defeat, but a victory. In Colossians 2, for example, Paul says that on the cross Jesus “disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it.” The two great storms converge over Jesus, and yet their force is exhausted. He dies, but he is not defeated. Indeed, his death takes on all the evil the world can muster and somehow starts to reverse evil’s curse.
Albert Schweitzer, the great 20th century physician and philosopher, once said that Jesus understood that his vocation was to go out and reverse the course of history. The great wheel of history was turning, powered by sin and death. Jesus hoped it would turn the other direction, but when it didn’t, Jesus threw himself upon that wheel and it crushed him. But then it started to turn in the other direction. The way of death is reversed, and the way of life begun—all because Jesus chose to die.
This is the larger story that we need to understand in order to grasp the meaning of Jesus’ death. We need more than theories, we need the story that puts the theories in perspective. Jesus’ death fulfilled the whole biblical story, the story of how God will redeem his whole creation from sin and death—a story of ultimate, sacrificial, life-giving love. It’s the story that finds its climax in Jesus’ last words from the cross: “It is finished.” You know, that’s the same thing that is said in Genesis about creation (Genesis 2:1-2). On the sixth day, God finished the work. On the sixth day of the week, Jesus says, “it is finished.” In Jesus, on the cross, the story, the work, the mission, is complete.
Too often we’ve taken the reality of the cross and made it a personal story of how Jesus died so that we can go to heaven. The Gospel writers tell the story quite differently, however. In fact, they’re telling us the story in exactly the opposite direction. The story of the cross is the story of how the creator God, in the person of his Son, died so that death could be defeated, and the life of God’s good creation restored. Jesus came that we might have life, and have it abundantly right now, because the anti-creation and anti-life force of death has been beaten and sin right along with it. We are forgiven, not just so that we can avoid the penalty for sin, but so that, free from sin’s slavery, we can begin to live into the full life of the kingdom, right here, right now. That’s the work that Jesus finishes—and a work that we as his disciples—ransomed, healed, restored, and forgiven ourselves—are to implement and share with the whole world.
Indeed, Jesus tells his disciples that their vocation is to bear a cross of their own—to offer his sacrificial love to the whole world, to die to ourselves and our own sin and shame, and to live into the new life of the kingdom. Jesus’ death changes us so that we, in turn, join the risen Jesus in challenging the powers of death with the good news of life.
None of this, of course, makes much sense if Jesus had simply died and that was the end of it. He would have been just another in a long line of would-be Messiahs that died a violent death at the hands of Rome. But what happened three days after Jesus died put all of this into perspective. We can’t fully understand the cross without the empty tomb. We shall turn to that next week.
But for now, what does the death of a man 2,000 years ago have to do with us? Everything. And not just for us, for the world. His cross-bearing vocation has become ours as well. We are a people of the cross.
