The Day the Revolution Began

The Day the Revolution Began

N.T. Wright

From then on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he would have to go to Jerusalem, and suffer many things from the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and be raised on the third day.

Peter took him and began to tell him off. ‘That’s the last thing God would want, Master!’ he said. ‘That’s never, ever going to happen to you!’

Jesus turned on Peter. ‘Get behind me, satan!’ he said. ‘You’re trying to trip me up! You’re not looking at things like God does! You’re looking at things like a mere mortal!’
Matthew 16:21-23 KNT

The question we are faced with when we look at the New Testament or when we think about Christian preaching and teaching in general is: Why did Jesus die? I've been haunted by that question and actually sometimes amused by it for many years. Amused because once I was teaching a Sunday school with a class of bright 12-year-olds. We had been working through the Gospels, as you do in Sunday school, and we got to the point of the cross. I asked them at the beginning of the class why did Jesus die? And I said, ‘We are going to go around without conferring. I want you each to write two sentences on a piece of paper about what you think the answer is to that question: Why did Jesus die?’. 

And so they all did and we went around and they read them. Roughly half the class did one sort of thing and the other half the other sort of thing. It wasn't a male-female division or anything like that, it was just random. Half of them gave me what you might call ‘historical reasons’. Jesus died because the Romans were frightened that he might be leading some sort of revolution. Or the chief priests didn't like the way he was teaching and attacking the temple. Or the Pharisees didn't like the sort of things that he was saying and leading people to believe and they didn’t like the fact that he was mixing with all the wrong sort of people. Historical reasons of one sort or another.

The other half gave me theological reasons. He died to save us for our sins. He died so we could go to heaven. There are hymns, of course, which make it easier to remember all that.

He died that we might be forgiven;

and he died to make us good, 

so we could go at last to heaven

saved by his precious blood. 

That's one of the best-known Good Friday hymns. There is a Green Hill Far Away. Maybe some of the children were dimly remembering that. These historical and theological reasons look at one another as it were from opposite sides of the room, and we say, ‘How did they work together? Do they work together at all?’ 

And here is one of the odd things. Generations of Christians have said, 'He died to save us from our sins; He died so that we could go to heaven'. And people have told the story about the chief priests saying crucify him and about Pontius Pilate trying to figure out what to do and all the rest of it. Although they have never put these two together as though all that the Gospels are doing from that point of view is just providing the back story. And later, then, we come with a theory from somewhere else about what it all means. But supposing some of what it all means is actually contained within that history. What would that do to our understanding of the cross? How will that, as it were, work? Is it just incidental background detail? Or do what do we think, for instance, about John telling that extraordinary story of Jesus and Pilate arguing with one another about kingdom and truth and power? Do we think that John is really telling us all that without it having any impact on the meaning of Jesus death? 

I think that the history and the theology really do go very closely together. But for Jesus himself, what did Jesus think was going on? And again, isn't it interesting that many Christians when they are thinking about the meaning of Jesus death, don't actually pause and ponder very much about what Jesus himself seems to have had in mind? 

All our records suggest in the Gospels that he did know he was going to face death and that he knew that this death would have, what we might call, a ‘theological meaning’. When we read the Gospels clearly, it looks as though at least from the time of his baptism, when the voice from heaven quoted from Psalm 2 and Isaiah 42, Jesus was aware of a vocation not just to inaugurate God's kingdom but to do so by going to his death. How on earth would that make sense? What would it mean to have a vocation like that? How could Jesus himself think that through, pray it through? Why didn't people get it at the time and why have they found it so difficult to get hold of ever since? And how does that relate to any sense of what God was up to? Are we just going to say that because Jesus was the incarnate Son of God, therefore He knew exactly all the atonement theories that might subsequently come, and he just engineered his own death in order to make those atonement theories work? Doesn't that make Jesus just weird? How do we understand a first century Jew fully human as well as fully divine according to the church’s teaching? How do we understand such a person coming to terms with a vocation to go to the place of death itself in order to achieve some kind of extraordinary new revolution?

It is because of these questions and others like them that church teachers down the years have come up with various theories as to what it all means, growing out of and developing some of the things that are said in the New Testament. There is perhaps the most famous theory of all the theories that on the cross Jesus won the victory over all the powers of darkness. This is sometimes the Christus Victor theory. It's a Latin phrase meaning Christ the Victor; Christ is the one who has won the great triumph. You’ll find this in many of the early Church Fathers often couched in terms of a victory over the devil, over the powers of darkness. 

And so other theories have developed as well, again growing out of much of the teaching of the New Testament. These are theories about sin needing to be punished and so Jesus takes the punishment on behalf of his people and perhaps on behalf of the whole world. That he stood in for us. That he died for us. How does that then fit with Christus Victor? The early fathers seem to teach them both side by side and they don't really wrestle with the question of should they fit together, and if so how. 

So these different preachers who pointed to different illustrations, different ideas, were present from very early on. But it was only really with the 16th century and the 17th century when and after the Protestant Reformation people thought we need to sort this one out. And as they did so, they pulled in a couple of other ideas as well. 

One is the notion of sacrifice. There is much of the language of the New Testament about Jesus death has to do with sacrifice, taking the sacrificial cult of the Old Testament and speaking of Jesus death in those terms. Now on the face of it, that's very odd thing to do because the ancient Jews knew that human sacrifice was absolutely ruled out. So what does it mean to think of Jesus death as a sacrifice?

Some people have put that together with the idea of Jesus being punished for our sins on the assumption that when an animal was sacrificed, the person who brought the sacrifice deserved to be punished and perhaps killed when the animal was being killed in their place. Now that idea may have had some currency in the pagan world but that doesn't seem to be what's going on in the Jewish sacrificial cult. For a start, the animals are not killed on the altar. The animals are killed elsewhere, and that isn't so important. What is important is that the blood which is collected is used as a purifying agent to purify not only the worshipers but also the temple furniture, and so on. The result is that the stain of death, which comes from human corruption and the corruption of the present material world, is covered by the life which is the blood. That seems to be what's going on in Leviticus. 

And after all, it isn't only animals who are offered in sacrifice. There are grain offerings and wine offerings as well. And, of course, you can't say that they are being killed as a punishment. In fact the only animal in Leviticus that has sins confessed over its head is the scapegoat on the Day of Atonement. And that is precisely the one animal that isn't killed. That is the animal that is driven off into the wilderness.

I'm particularly concerned with this question: What had changed by 6 P.M. on Good Friday? So we have Christus Victor. We have a theory of punishment or something like it. We have sacrificial notions. We also have the idea of Jesus death as an example. When Jesus died according to the New Testament, this was the great outpouring of the love of God and we are to love one another in the same way.

And those controversies meant that the reformers were basically trying to give biblical answers to what actually were mediaeval questions. I think they did a pretty good job of that, but actually as many theologians have seen subsequently, we need to go beyond that and say, ‘What were the first century questions and what is the Bible saying in relation to those first century questions?’ If we just come with the mediaeval picture, we remain with that idea that what matters is going to heaven, whereas the New Testament is about New Creation. It is about new heavens and a new earth. And if we asked the question what is it about Jesus death that somehow enables that New Creation to take place and somehow enables us to be part of that New Creation in the resurrection, then we get a rather different picture of what was achieved on the cross.

By Prof. N.T. Wright from a lecture in the course The Day the Revolution Began. 

© 2017 by N.T. Wright. All rights reserved.

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The Day the Revolution Began II

The Day the Revolution Began

Prof. N.T. Wright

‘Look’, said Pilate, ‘here is your king!’

‘Take him away!’ they shouted. ‘Take him away! Crucify him!’

‘Do you want me to cru

cify your king?’ asked Pilate.

‘We have no king’, the chief priests replied, ‘except Caesar!’

Then he handed him over to them to be crucified.  John 19:14-16 KNT

By 6:00 P.M. on the first Good Friday, the world was a different place. That may sound very odd, but that is what the first Christians said again and again. They said things like ‘on the cross Jesus disarmed the principalities and powers and led them in a captor’s triumph making a public example of it’. It didn't look like that on the evening of the first Good Friday but as they looked back, that's what they said had happened. They said that that day a revolution had begun.

There is a famous story (I wish I knew which archbishop it was that it concerned) that concerns a Roman Catholic archbishop who told the story of three naughty young lads who one day for a laugh went into a Catholic Church and went into the confessional one by one and confessed to all sorts of outrageous sins that they claimed they had committed. The priest being an experienced guide saw through them quite quickly. And the first two lads ran out of the church laughing but the priest hung on to the third one and said, ‘Okay, you have confessed these sins. I want you to do a penance. I want you to walk up to the far end of the church and I want you to look at the picture of Jesus hanging on the cross, and I want you to look at his face and say, “You did all that for me and I don't care that much.” And I want you to do that three times'. 

And so the boy went up to the front, looked at the picture of Jesus and said, ‘You did all that for me and I don't care that much’. And then he said it again, but then he couldn't say it the third time because he broke down in tears. And the archbishop telling the story said, the reason I know that story is that I was that young man. There is something about the cross. Something about Jesus dying there for us which leaps over all the theoretical discussions, all the possibilities of how we explain it this way or that way and it grasps us. And when we are grasped by it, somehow we have a sense that what is grasping us is the love of God. 

I've often thought when I go into a restaurant and have a meal, I don't know much about cooking. I certainly don't know much about the theory that lies behind it, but if I have a good meal, I don't need to know the theory. Somebody else has done that bit. Or if I hear a wonderful piece of music, I didn't have to understand how the violin strings actually work or how the brass or the woodwind actually function. I simply take in drinking this fantastic music but unless somebody understood that, there wouldn't be any instruments made unless somebody understood it, those instruments would never get played.

So in the church and for the sake of the church's mission, we not only have to celebrate the fact that the cross does still carry an extraordinary evocative power. But we have sometimes reflected on, if you like, the theory behind it, not for its own sake, not so that the theory can replace that power and passion which we sense with the cross and with great pieces of art like J.S. Bach’s, St. Matthew Passion or St. John Passion, but so that in our thinking, our praying, our preaching and teaching, and not least our mission, we can understand so that we can be like the chefs who are cooking the meal or the instrument makers and players who are producing the music for the next generation.

One of the reasons it's a puzzle is that the New Testament doesn't give us a single theory. Every time the New Testament talks about Jesus’ death it seems to say it slightly differently. We’re in danger sometimes of collapsing those differences and simply imagining that there is basically one theory and then everything else conforms to that. That certainly isn't likely to work. Okay, there are other simple summaries in 1 Corinthians 15. Paul says, ‘Here is the summary of the Gospel which I preached and which you believed and it goes like this: The Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures and he was buried and he was raised from the dead in accordance with the Scriptures on the third day and he was seen by many….’ And then he gives a list, ending with himself.

And so the Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures. Even that can be a bit of a puzzle. Which Scriptures are we talking about? How do we know? Is it just three or four proof-texts which we can go to and say that Isaiah 53, Psalm 22, or something else gave us an advanced theory of what this would mean? Or is it somehow deeper than that? And when we try to probe, we find that already by the middle of the first century, that is within 25 or 30 years of Jesus death, there is an apparently bewildering range of ideas.

The New Testament draws on sacrificial imagery, draws on the imagery of the slave market trying to explain, or if not to explain, at least to evoke something of that power and meaning of Jesus death, though again and again coming back to the central fact that Jesus’ death was the expression of the love of God. That’s there all the way through one of the best known verses in the Bible, John 3:16, ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only son’, and that's in the context of talking about Jesus’ forthcoming death. And particularly we have a puzzle here because, though we in the West have often thought that Jesus died so that we could go to heaven, neither the Old Testament nor the Gospels nor the Epistles nor the Book of Revelation actually say that. Isn't that bizarre? We have assumed that that's what it's about. We are sinful; that's stopping us getting to heaven; so Jesus died so that we will be all right after all.

The Bible never actually puts it like that. We need to get back into the mindset of those Christians in the first century experiencing Jesus, his death and his resurrection, and then his new life and the power of his spirit and reflecting right in those early days on what this actually meant. Coming back to this question by 6 P.M. on Good Friday, what was different? What had changed? The Gospels all say something had changed. Paul says something radical had happened. John says it was finished. What was finished? What was accomplished that day? How can we express that, and more particularly, live by it ourselves?

By Prof. N.T. Wright from a lecture in the course The Day the Revolution Began.

© 2017 by N.T. Wright. All rights reserved.

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