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.