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Topical Studies
Lectures
Evil and the Justice of
God
a series of lectures for 2003 by the
Canon Theologian, Dr N. T. Wright
Lecture 3: Evil and the Crucified
God
March 17 2003
(written up in retrospect from notes,
December 2004)
Introduction
My purpose in this lecture course was really to explore
the meaning of the cross. Having offered a series on the resurrection in 2001, I
intended this time around to work back and look at the reasons, particularly the
theological reasons, why Jesus was crucified. But it quickly became apparent
that in order to do that I would have to look at the question of evil: all
theories about why Jesus died (that is, why in the purposes of God Jesus
died), that is, all theories of atonement, are necessarily correlated with
theories about what evil is and how it works. This is, in the nature of the
case, a two-way street: it isn�t just that you come with a view of evil and then
design a doctrine of the atonement to show how God has answered this problem,
though no doubt some have done that. There are clear signs from the New
Testament onwards that Christian theologians have often, perhaps even usually,
gazed in awe, horror and gratitude on the crucifixion of the Lord of the World
and have deduced from that something profound about the nature of evil. �If
righteousness could come by the law�, wrote Paul, �the Messiah�s death would not
have been necessary� (Galatians 2.21).
To show how this lecture in intended to work, let me
recapitulate what I said in the first two. In the opening lecture, I argued that
evil is real and powerful, that it is more than the sum total of individual sin,
and that it cannot be properly understood through dualism, whether the
ontological dualism that sees the created world as evil and the solution as
being to escape it, or the sociological dualism that divides the world into �us�
(good) and �them� (bad). Then, in the second lecture, I presented a reading of
the Old Testament in which I argued that the entire canon, not just key passages
like the book of Job, tell a story which, from a bewildering variety of angles,
is all about what God (the creator God, please note) is doing about evil. God
has undertaken a plan � a daring and risky plan, involving God in so much
ambiguity, one might almost say subterfuge, that he begins to look like a double
agent, becoming compromised at many points in order to bring off the solution.
This plan involves drawing evil to a point, in order to deal with it there. The
Old Testament symbols which speak of God�s strategy for dealing with evil
include the Temple, where the regular sacrifices were a constant reminder of
both sin and grace, and the human symbols of kings, priests and prophets,
particularly as we saw the figures of the Servant and the Son of Man, both of
whom emerge at the point where Israel, the people who bear God�s promise to deal
with the world�s evil, is itself overwhelmed by the weight and force of
evil.
All this leads to an initial reflection. Theologies of
the cross, of atonement, have not in my view grappled sufficiently with the
larger problem of evil, as I set it out in the first lecture; conversely, those
who have written about �the problem of evil� within philosophical theology have
not normally grappled sufficiently with the cross as part of both the analysis
and the solution of that problem. The two have been held apart, in a mis-match,
with �the problem of evil� on the one hand being conceived simply in terms of
�how could a good and powerful God allow evil into the world in the first
place?�, and the atonement on the other hand being seen in terms simply of
personal forgiveness, of the various categories set out movingly if ultimately
inadequately in the hymn �There is a green hill far away�. (Successive verses
run through the various ways of saying what a personalized �atonement� wants to
say: �He died that we might be forgiven; he died to make us good; that we might
go at last to heaven, saved by his precious blood.�) Much nineteenth and
twentieth century Christian thought has accepted the framework offered by the
Enlightenment, in which the Christian faith has the role of rescuing people from
the evil world, ensuring them forgiveness in the present and heaven hereafter.
The Enlightenment-based wider world has then accepted that evaluation of the
Christian faith � not surprisingly, since it was driving it in the first place �
and so has not through it necessary to factor in Christian theology to its own
discussions of �the problem of evil�. How, after all, does a hymn like �There is
a green hill far away� have anything at all to say to a world dumbstruck in
horror at the first world war, at Auschwitz, at Hiroshima? And even if
theologians like J�rgen Moltmann have made a start on putting back together what
ought not to have been split apart, we are still left with what seems a huge
uphill task.
1. Re-Reading the Gospels
At this point, what we need is to re-read the gospels as
what they are, not as what they are not. It often appears � as I know only too
well from my years of teaching and examining students in the New Testament
within a university world where the dominant paradigm was still at work � that
there is not actually that much �atonement-theology� in the gospels. Mark�s
�theology of the cross� often seemed to be reduced to one key verse, 10.45,
which evoked Isaiah 53 in speaking of the Son of Man coming �to give his life a
ransom for many�, lutron anti pollōn. Luke, who seemed to have
deliberately avoided following Mark at that point, was often held therefore to
have stood aloof from any real atonement-theology. The Lord�s Supper gave hints
towards an atonement-theology, and the crucifixion narratives, especially in
their evocation of biblical allusions, provided some further elements. But for
the most part the gospels, as read within the mainstream tradition both of
scholarship and of church life � and I mean the life of the churches that might
be expected to be on the lookout for atonement theology and to exploit it where
it was to be found � had little to contribute, except as a general narrative
backcloth to an atonement theology which was grounded in Paul, Hebrews and 1
Peter.
When, however, we read the gospels in the holistic
fashion in which, arguably, they ask to be read, we find that they tell a double
story, in which the themes of our first two lectures are drawn together into a
single point. They tell the story of how the evil in the world � political,
social, personal, moral, emotional � reached its height; and they tell how God�s
long-term plan for Israel � and for himself! � finally came to its climax. And
they tell both of these stories in and as the story of how Jesus of Nazareth
announced God�s kingdom and went to his violent death. In the main body of this
lecture, to which I now turn, I shall unpack this dense statement, and then show
how the gospels, read in this way, offer us both a richer theology of atonement
than we are used to and also a deeper understanding of the problem of evil
itself and what can and must be done about it in our own
day.
(i) The gospels tell the story of the political
powers of the world reaching to their full, arrogant height. All early readers
of the gospels knew perfectly well that the word �gospel� itself, never mind any
teaching about �God�s kingdom�, was a direct confrontation with the regime of
Caesar; Rome is in the background of all the gospel stories, and when Jesus
meets Pilate at last the shrewd reader of the gospel has a sense of denouement,
of the unveiling of the real confrontation that has been taking place all along.
Similarly (a point we see particularly in Matthew) the presence of the house of
Herod (Herod the Great, at the beginning, Herod Antipas during Jesus� public
career), and the story of John the Baptist, offer constant reminders that the
local Jewish (or would-be Jewish) pseudo-aristocracy did not take kindly to the
presence, or the proclamation, of rival Kings of the Jews. Finally, the corrupt
Jerusalem regime of Caiaphas and his high-priestly house, who again we confront
only at the climax of the story, are a deep part of the problem, as from very
angle human systems overreach themselves and end up putting Jesus on the
cross.
(ii) The gospels thus also tell the story of
corruption within Israel itself, as the people who bear the solution have
themselves become, with terrible irony that causes Paul to weep every time he
thinks of it, a central part of the problem. The Pharisees are offering an
interpretation of Torah which pursues a kind of holiness but only makes matters
worse. The priests in the Temple are offering the sacrifices which should speak
of God�s grace but which instead speak of their own exclusive and corrupt
system. The revolutionaries try to get in on the act of God�s inbreaking kingdom
(Matthew 11.12), but their attempt to fight violence with violence can only ever
result in a victory for violence, not a victory over it. This means that
the death of Jesus, when it comes, is bound to be seen as the work not only of
the pagan nations but of the Israel that has longed, as (with further irony) on
the day when it chose a king in the first place, to become �like all the
nations� (1 Samuel 8.5, 20) and now is reduced to saying that it has no king but
Caesar (John 19.15).
(iii) The gospels then tell the story of the deeper,
darker forces which operate at a supra-personal level, forces for which the
language of the demonic is still the least inadequate, for all its problems.
These forces of evil use all of the above human elements, but cannot be reduced
to terms of them. The gospels introduce us to �the satan�, the quasi-personal
�accuser� which is doing its best to drag Jesus down into the trap into which
Israel, like the rest of the world, has already fallen. The shrieking demons
that yell at him as he performs healings, that rush at him out of the tombs, are
signs that a battle has been joined at a more than personal level. The dark,
stormy sea evokes ancient Israelite imagery of an evil which is more than the
sum total of present wrongdoing and woe. �The power of darkness� to which Jesus
alludes immediately before his betrayal (Luke 22.53) indicates an awareness that
on that night in particular evil was being given a scope, a free reign, to do
its worst in ways for which the soldiers, the betrayer, the muddle disciples and
the corrupt court were merely long-range outworkings. The mocking of the
bystanders as Jesus hangs on the cross (�If you are the son of God . . .�) echo
the taunting, tempting voice that had whispered in the desert. The power of
death itself, the ultimate denial of the goodness of creation, speaks of a force
of destruction, of anti-world, anti-god power being allowed to do its worst. The
gospels tell this whole story in order to say that the tortured young Jewish
prophet hanging on the cross was the point where evil had become truly and fully
and totally itself.
(iv) The gospels tell the story of Jesus as a story in
which the line between good and evil runs, not between Jesus and his friends on
the one hand and everyone else on the other, certainly not between Jews and
Gentiles, but down the middle of Jesus� followers themselves. Peter, called to
be the rock, is immediately denounced as �Satan�. Thomas grumbles and doubts.
James and John want the best seats in the kingdom. All of them argue about who
will get the top jobs. Judas is Judas is Judas, the deepest enigma of all. In
any case, once swords begin to flash in the garden torchlight, loyalty and
courage desert them and they desert Jesus. We could perhaps make out a case for
some of the women in the gospels being loyal and devoted while the men fall
apart, but it would be largely an argument from silence. Granted the situation
in which the gospels were being written up, the candour with which the failings
of the church�s early leadership are described is remarkable.
(v) The story the gospels tell is a story about the
downward spiral of evil. One thing leads to another; the remedy offered
against evil has itself the germ of evil within it, so that its attempt to put
things right merely produces second-order evil. And so on. Judas�s betrayal and
Peter�s denial are simply among the last twists of this story, with the casual
injustice of Caiaphas and Pilate and the mocking of the crowds at the cross
tying all the ends together.
All of this leads us to say that the story the gospels
are telling us is the story of how the death of Jesus is the
result both of the major political evil of the world, the
power-games which the world was playing as it still does, and of the
dark, accusing forces which stand behind those human and societal structures,
forces which accuse creation itself of being evil, and so try to destroy it
while its creator is longing to redeem it. The gospels tell the story of Jesus�
death as the story of how the downward spiral of evil finally hit the bottom,
with the violent and bloody execution of this man, this prophet who had
announced God�s kingdom. And if this is the way the gospels are telling the
story of Jesus, what conclusion do the writers want us to
draw?
2. Jesus Dealing with Evil
We might stop at this point and say: Very well, the
gospels tell us that evil, evil as we have analysed it already, was indeed the
cause of Jesus� death; but, by itself, this would not constitute a
solution to the problem of evil, but simply a restatement of it.
We cannot simply say �Yes, evil put Jesus on the cross, but the resurrection
reversed all that�; the gospels tell a deeper, more complex story by far. This
is where the second strand comes in: that the gospels are also the story
of how God�s long-term plan, from Abraham through to the second-Temple period,
finally came to fruition, the apparently ambiguous and risky plan which we
explored in the second lecture.
We can see this close up in the way the gospels tell the
stories of Jesus during his public career. I have written about this at length
in various places (notably JVG chs. 5�10 and Challenge), and here
simply summarize.
(i) We see it in Jesus� healings. He reaches out and
touches the leper, and somehow, instead of the infection being passed to him,
his wholeness, his �cleanness�, is transmitted to the leper instead. He allows
himself to be touched by the woman with the issue of blood, whose every touch
would render a man unclean; but power flows from him to her, and she is healed.
He touches the corpse of the widow�s son at Nain, and instead of him contracting
uncleanness the corpse comes back to life. The gospel writers intend us, I
believe, to see the same phenomenon at work all the way to the cross, as Jesus
at last identifies himself with the Jewish revolutionaries in their failing
cause, in order to bring the kingdom for which they had longed but in the way
they had refused.
(ii) We see it in Jesus� table-fellowship with sinners.
He celebrates the kingdom with all the wrong people, incurring anger and
hostility from those who knew in their bones that God�s kingdom was about
holiness and detachment from evil, never suspecting that evil people could be,
and were being, redeemed and rescued. His mother and brothers come to take him
away, thinking him to be out of his mind, and he responds by declaring that the
crowd around him, hanging on his every word, were his mother and brothers. He
tells stories � a lost sheep, a lost coin, two lost sons � to indicate, for
those with ears to hear, that this policy was not an accident but a heaven-sent
priority. He invites himself to lunch with Zacchaeus the Jericho tax-collector,
while the crowds wait, shocked to the core, outside the door: �He�s gone in to
eat with a sinner!� Finally, he goes out to die with the rebels, sharing their
shame though himself innocent, as Luke in particular makes clear. The taint of
evil lay heavy on him throughout, and somehow he bore it, took it all the way,
exhausted its power.
(iii) We see it as Jesus articulates and models the call
to Israel to be Israel, now that he is there to express God�s call in a
new way and with the summons of the kingdom. Israel is to be at last the light
of the world, the city set on a hill. Israel is to show the world what it means
to be God�s people, God�s servant-folk for the world: turn the other cheek, go
the second mile, don�t resist the pagans who want to take you for all you�ve
got.
Then, with those deeply challenging sayings from the
Sermon on the Mount ringing in our ears, we read on in Matthew�s gospel and we
observe the Son of Man bringing God�s judgement to the world, putting the world
to rights, winning victories over evil, declaring forgiveness of sins on his own
authority, announcing that he had the right to suspend sabbath-regulations. Then
we observe the Messiah coming into his kingdom, winning the real battle,
cleansing the Temple, bringing God�s rule to the world as Psalm 2 had said he
would, but doing so in a way previously unimagined. Then, finally, we watch the
Son of Man, the Messiah, as he takes on himself the role of the Servant, the
ultimate representative of Israel, bearing the sin and shame of Israel and so of
the world. And as the story winds to its violent conclusion we realise with a
start that he has been obedient to the Israel-vocation which he had himself
announced in the bracing, and so often misunderstood, Sermon on the Mount. He
had turned the other cheek. He had picked up the Roman cross and gone the second
mile. He was set up on the hill, unable to be hidden. He was acting as Israel,
the light of the world, on behalf of the Israel that had embraced the pagan
darkness. Mark 10.45 is not, after all, an isolated or detached statement of
theological interpretation superimposed upon an otherwise bare and theologically
neutral narrative. It is the tip of the iceberg which tells us what is going on
all through; and what is going on could be summarized like
this:
(i) Jesus had warned his people of God�s impending
judgment for their failure to follow his call, to be the light of the world, for
their failure to embody within their own life that justice and mercy to which
God had called them.
(ii) Jesus had identified totally with Israel, as the
Messiah, the Servant, was bound to do, taking its vocation upon himself, coming
to the point of pain, of uncleanness, of sickness, folly, rebellion and
sin.
(iii) Jesus was thus taking upon himself the direct
consequences, in the political and in the theological realm alike, of the
failure and sin of Israel. He was dying, quite literally, for their sins � just
as, in a bumper-sticker I once saw beside an Indian reserve on the shores of the
Ottawa river to the west of Montreal, it could be said that �Custer died for
your sins�. This is not a piece of strange or arbitrary theology read into the
narrative at a later stage. This, the gospels are telling us, is what it was all
about all along.
In particular, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are
declaring, each in their very different ways, that all this was simultaneously
Jesus� own intention, in a vocation whose roots went deep into the Old Testament
and into his personality, formed in prayer and study from boyhood and confirmed
dramatically at his baptism, and the intention of God himself, the God who had
long promised that he would return to Jerusalem to rule, to judge, to heal and
to save, and who now came to the city with all of that in mind, telling stories
about the king who had promised to come back and warning of the consequences of
not being ready. He was the hen who longed to gather the chickens under his
protective wings. He was the green tree, the only one with life within him,
while all around were branches dead and dry, ready for burning. He had realized,
in that kind of vocation at which one can only stand amazed and awed, that the
peirasmos, the great �time of testing� of which prophets and oracles had
spoken, was about to burst upon the world like a great tidal wave, and that he
had to take its full force upon himself so that everyone else could be spared.
�Watch and pray,� he said to his followers in the garden, �so that you may not
enter the peirasmos�; if all he meant was the general advice that after a
good meal with rich wines one should say one�s prayers lest one be tempted to
commit some everyday sin, the scene is reduced to bathos, almost to farce. No:
the great, dark, horrible force of evil was bearing down upon him, and Jesus had
realized, had long realized, that as Israel�s representative it was his task and
his alone to do what, according to the same scriptures, Israel�s God had said
that he and he alone could do. He knelt there, a mile or so from the Gehenna he
had predicted as the city�s smouldering fate, believing that he had to go ahead,
to stand in the breach, to take that fate upon himself. There is no way around
this extraordinary, breathtaking combination of theological, personal, cosmic
themes. The only way of doing justice to what the gospels are trying to tell us
is to grasp the picture in its entirety and swallow it whole.
3. Early Christian View of Evil�s Defeat
Two themes emerge from all this which constitute, at one
and the same time, the foundation of early Christian atonement-theology and the
start of the New Testament�s answer to the problem of
evil.
(i) Paul saw, in his dramatic statement in Romans
7.1�8.11, that in the death of Jesus God had condemned sin, passed and executed
judicial sentence upon it (8.3). God�s great No to evil had been acted out in
the person of Jesus, the person who could and did represent Israel, as its
Messiah, and hence the whole world.
(ii) The New Testament writers report, in various ways,
the remarkable sign of evil doing its worst and being exhausted: when Jesus
suffered, he did not curse, and when he was reviled, he did not revile in
return. �Father, forgive them�; that is a radical innovation in the long and
noble tradition of Jewish martyr-stories, where (as e.g. in 2 Maccabees 7) the
heroes, while being tortured to death, call down God�s vengeance on their
persecutors and warn them of coming judgment.
The immediate result is of course the resurrection of
Jesus. It would be possible to understand this statement in an utterly trivial
and superficial way, simply as a reward for a supremely difficult job finally
completed, or perhaps as the sign that, since Jesus was divine, the whole thing
had been an elaborate charade. Unfortunately, I suspect that there are some
Christians who think in some such ways. But the resurrection is far, far more
than anything like that. Evil is the force of anti-creation, anti-life, the
force which opposes and seeks to deface and destroy God�s good world of space,
time and matter, and above all God�s image-bearing human creatures. That is why
death, as Paul saw so graphically in 1 Corinthians 15, is the final great enemy.
But if in any sense this evil has been defeated; if it is true, as the gospel
writers have been trying to tell us, that evil at all levels and of all sorts
had done its worst, and that Jesus throughout his public career and supremely on
the cross had dealt with it, taken its full force, exhausted it � why then, of
course, death itself had no more power. �One short sleep past, we wake
eternally; and Death shall be no more! Death, thou shalt die!�. John Donne saw
clearly what so many modern readers of the gospels have missed entirely. Indeed,
we might even say that the gospel writers were telling their entire story so as
to explain why the resurrection happened, to make it clear that this was not
simply an odd, isolated bizarre miracle, but rather the proper and appropriate
result of Jesus� entire, and successful, confrontation with evil.
But at the same moment as we say �resurrection�, and for
the same reason (as, again, Paul saw in 1 Corinthians 15), we must say
�forgiveness of sins�. The two are, in fact, the same thing. To be released from
sin is to be released from death; and, since Jesus died in a representative
capacity for Israel and hence for the whole human race and hence for the whole
cosmos (that is how the chain of representation works), his death under the
weight of sin results immediately in release for all those held captive by its
guilt and power. This is where all the old hymns come into their own, but now
with renewed force and deeper meaning. Forgiveness of sins in turn � just as in
Isaiah 54 and 55 � means new creation, since the anti-creation force of sin had
been dealt with. And new creation begins with the word of forgiveness heard by
the individual sinner, as in the matchless scene between Jesus and Peter by the
lake in John 21.
The story the gospels are trying to tell is a story in
which evil and its deadly power are taken utterly seriously, over against the
tendency in many quarters today, in the ridiculous clinging to an older liberal
idea that there wasn�t really very much wrong with the world or with human
beings. With a fully-blown theology of the cross such as the evangelists offer,
there is no need to shrink back from the radical diagnosis, since the remedy is
to hand. To be sure, it is humiliating to accept both the diagnosis and the
cure, but as our world lurches more and more obviously into a demonstration that
when you pretend that evil isn�t there you merely give it more space to operate,
so perhaps it is high time to look again at both the diagnosis and the cure
which the evangelists offer.
The evangelists, in fact, draw all this together in the
sequence of three events which together both set the scene and give the deepest
explanation for what was going on. First, the Temple-action: Jesus was embodying
and expressing the judgment of Israel�s God on the Temple as the focal point of
the life of the whole people, the people who had refused God�s call through the
prophets and now was refusing it through the Son. Jesus� action, a clear symbol
(like Jeremiah�s) of judgment to come, pointed the way forward to the sense that
now Israel�s God would be known, not through the sacrificial system but through
the launching of a new covenant in which God�s people would learn to love him
with heart, mind, soul and strength (see Mark 12.28�34, in its context, where
most of the surrounding scenes are about the coming destruction of the
Temple).
Second, the Supper. This was Jesus� own chosen way of
expressing and explaining to his followers, then and ever since, what his death
was all about. It wasn�t a theory, we note, but an action � a warning to all
atonement-theorists ever since, and perhaps an indication of why the church has
never incorporated a specific defining clause about the atonement in its great
Creeds. Perhaps after all atonement is, at its deepest level, something that
happens, so that to reduce it to a proposition to which one can give
mental assent is a deep-level mistake, something of the same kind of mistake
that happens when people imagine that they can solve the problem of evil.
Perhaps, in fact, it is the same mistake in a different guise. . . In any
case, at the Supper the King shares his life with his friends, and in
particular, solemnly makes them the beneficiaries of his kingdom-bringing death.
The shepherd gathers the sheep together for the last time before going to do for
them what only he can do.
Third, the crucifixion itself. The evangelists tell,
through each of the small stories and minor characters which make this narrative
so rich, something of what the event means, much as the minor scenes in a
Shakespeare play enable the audience to draw out the full meaning of the central
plot. Mary of Bethany anoints Jesus for burial; Simon of Cyrene carries the
cross; Barrabas goes free; one brigand curses, the other repents; bystanders
mock, soldiers gamble, a centurion stops for a moment in his tracks. Jesus on
his cross towers over the whole scene as Israel in person, as YHWH in person, as
the point where the evil of the world does all that it can and where the creator
of the world does all that he can. Jesus suffers the full consequences of evil,
evil from the political, social, cultural, personal, moral and religious angles
all rolled into one, evil in the downward spiral hurtling towards the pit of
destruction and despair. And he does so precisely as the act of redemption, of
taking that downward fall and exhausting it, so that there may be new creation,
new covenant, forgiveness, freedom and hope.
The gospels thus tell the story of Jesus, in particular
the story of how he went to his death, as the story of how cosmic and
global evil, in its suprapersonal as well as personal forms, are met by the
sovereign, saving love of Israel�s God, YHWH, the creator of the world. This,
the evangelists are saying to us, is what �the kingdom of God� means: neither
�going to heaven when you die� nor �a new way of ordering earthly political
reality�, but something which includes and thoroughly transcends both. What the
gospels offer is not a philosophical explanation of evil, what it is or why it�s
there, but the story of an event in which the living God deals with
it. This raises for us all the echoes of the ancient stories of the Exodus
from Egypt, and the return from Babylon, and it is no surprise that the earliest
Christians, both the NT writers and others on into the liturgical traditions of
the second, third and fourth centuries reached for imagery from both those
events to explain what had happened on the cross. This, they are saying, is how
God rescues his people from the evil in which they are trapped; and he does so
through the suffering of Israel�s representative, just as with the
martyrs only much more so. This is what it looks like when YHWH says, as in
Exodus 4, �I have heard the cry of my people, and I have come down to set them
free�. This is what it looks like when YHWH says �Behold, my servant�. As Isaiah
says later (ch. 59), it was no messenger, no angel, but his own presence that
saved them; in all their affliction he was afflicted. And the result of it all
is of course that the covenant is renewed; that sins are forgiven; that the long
night of sorrow, exile and death is over and the new day has
dawned.
The gospels thus tell the story, centrally and
crucially, which stands unique in the world�s great literature, the world�s
religious theories and visions: the story of the creator God taking
responsibility for what�s happened to creation, bearing the weight of its
problems on his own shoulders. As Sydney Carter put it in one of his finest
songs, �It�s God they ought to crucify, instead of you and me.� Or, as one old
evangelistic tract put it, the nations of the world got together to pronounce
sentence on God for all the evils in the world, only to realise with a shock
that God had already served his sentence.
Results: Atonement and the Problem of
Evil
Where does all this take us when we come to consider the
questions of atonement, the problem of evil, and how we put them together?
The first thing to say is that theories of atonement are
all, in themselves, abstractions from the real events, and that the
events, the flesh-and-blood, time-and-space happenings, are the reality which
the theories are trying to understand but cannot replace. In fact, the stories
are closer to the events than the theories, since it is through the narratives
that we are brought close to the events. And it is through other events in the
present time that we are brought still closer: both the eucharist, which repeats
the meal Jesus gave as his own interpretation of his death, and the actions of
healing, love and forgiveness through which Jesus� death becomes a fresh reality
within the still-broken world.
But, that said, I find myself compelled towards one of
the well-known theories of atonement, not as a replacement for the events or the
stories, but one which carries me further than the others towards the heart of
it all, and that is the Christus Victor theme, the belief that on the
cross Jesus has won the victory over the powers of evil. Once that is in place,
the other theories come in to play their respective parts. For Paul, Jesus�
death clearly involves a judicial or penal element, being God�s
proper No to sin expressed upon Jesus as Messiah, Israel�s and therefore the
world�s representative. This is the point at which the recognition that the line
between good and evil runs right through the middle of me, and of every one of
us, is met by the gospel proclamation that the death of Jesus is pro me,
in my place and on my behalf. Because, as Messiah, he is Israel�s and the
world�s representative, he can stand in for all: for our sake, writes Paul, God
made him who knew no sin to be sin, to be an offering for sin, for us (2
Corinthians 5.21). Throughout the New Testament, this death is therefore seen as
an act of love, both the love of Jesus himself (Galatians 2.20) and the
love of the God who sent him and whose bodily self-expression he was (John 3.16;
13.1; Romans 5.6�11; 8.31�39; 1 John 4.9�10). Within these, not as the
foundation but as the outworking, we see that Jesus� suffering and death are an
example of how we are summoned to love one another in
turn.
In and through all of this, we must continually remind
ourselves that we are speaking and thinking within the realm of
eschatology. That is to say, what is achieved on the cross is not a
timeless, abstract accomplishment located, if anywhere, among Plato�s forms,
well away from the reality of space-time history. It is not enough to say that
God will eventually make a new world in which there will be no more pain and
crying; that does scant justice to all the evil that has gone before. We cannot
get to the full solution to the problem of evil by mere progress, as though
provided the final generation was happy the misery of all previous generations
could be overlooked or even justified (as in the appalling hymn-line, �Then
shall they know, they that love him, how all their pain is good�, a kind of
shoulder-shrugging acquiescence in evil which the New Testament certainly
doesn�t countenance). No: all theories of atonement that are to do the job
required must include both a backward look, seeing the guilt, sin and shame of
all previous generations heaped up on the cross, and a forward dimension, the
promise that what God accomplished on Calvary will be fully and finally
implemented. Otherwise the cross becomes merely an empty gesture, ineffective
unless anyone happens to notice it and be influenced by it this way or that.
This is where the personal meaning of the cross
becomes very clear. There will be a time when I � even I, sinner that I am! �
will be totally sinless, when God has completed the work of grace within me. But
I already enjoy, in anticipation of that future fact, forgiveness in the
present and the new life of the Spirit that is made available precisely
when Jesus has been �glorified� by being �lifted up� on the cross (John 7.39;
20.22). And, as we should expect granted the tight sacramental link between
eucharist and cross, the eucharist embodies and expresses the first
(forgiveness) and strengthens and enables the second (the life of the Spirit).
The personal message of Good Friday, expressed in so many hymns and prayers
which draw on the tradition of the suffering servant (Isaiah 53) and its New
Testament outworking, comes down to this: �see all your sins on Jesus laid�;
�the son of God loved me and gave himself for me�; or, in the words which Jesus
spoke at the Supper but which God spoke on Good Friday itself, �This is my body,
given for you�. When we apply this, as individuals, to today�s and tomorrow�s
sins, the result is not that we are given license to sin because it�s all been
dealt with anyway, but rather that we are summoned by the most powerful love in
the world to live by the pattern of death and resurrection, repentance and
forgiveness, in daily Christian living, in sure hope of eventual victory. The
�problem of evil� is not simply or purely a �cosmic� thing; it is a problem
about me. And God has dealt with that problem on the cross of his son,
the Messiah. That is why some Christian traditions venerate the cross itself,
just as we speak of worshipping the ground walked on by someone we adore. The
cross is the place where, and the means by which, God loved us to the
uttermost.
We shall explore the significance of forgiveness more
fully in the final two lectures in this series. But it is time now to return to
the larger dimensions of the problem of evil, as we expounded them in the first
lecture, and to see the ways in which the cross enables us to approach them in a
fresh way.
I spoke in the first lecture of the shallow analysis of
evil and of the immature reactions which it produces. It is fascinating that the
best-known of the gospel �atonement� passages occurs, in fact, in the context of
a sharp saying of Jesus about the nature of political power and the subversion
of it by the gospel events themselves. The request of James and John, that they
should sit on either side of Jesus when he comes into his kingly power, is a
political question which receives a political answer: earthly rulers lord it
over their subjects, but it must not be so among you. Rather, those who are
great must be the servants, and those who are chief must be slaves of all,
because the Son of Man came not to be served but so serve and to give his life a
ransom for many. This evocation of Isaiah 53 � exactly, in fact, as in Isaiah
40�55 as a whole! � sits in the middle of the political analysis of
empire and subverts it by showing how all the traditions of Israel, the
people through whom God would address and solve the problem of the world�s evil,
come to a point which overturns Babylon and its ways. We find the same point in
Luke 9.54, where once more James and John want to do things in the world�s way,
calling down fire from heaven on their enemies. Jesus� rebuke to them is
directly cognate with �Father, forgive them� in Luke
23.34.
What then is the result? The call of the gospel is for
the church to implement the victory of God in the world through
suffering love. The cross is not just an example to be followed, it is an
achievement to be worked out, put into practice. But it is an example none the
less, because it is the exemplar, the template, the model, for what God now
wants to do, by his Spirit, in the world, through his people. It is the start of
the process of redemption, in which suffering and martyrdom are the paradoxical
means by which victory is won. To this we shall return in the last two
lectures.
What if, someone will ask, the people who now bear the
solution become themselves part of the problem, as happened before? Yes, that is
a problem, and it must be addressed; the church is never more in danger than
when it sees itself simply as the solution-bearer, and forgets that every day it
must say �Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner�, and allow that confession to work
its way into genuine humility even as it stands boldly before the world and its
crazy empires. In particular, it is a problem as and when a �Christian� empire
seeks to impose its will, dualistically, on the world, by labelling other parts
of the world �evil� while seeing itself as the avenging army of God. That is
more or less exactly what Jesus found in the Israel of his day, and the cross
was and is a call to a different vocation, a new way of dealing with evil, and
ultimately a new vision of God.
What, after all, would it look like if the true God came
to deal with evil? Would he come in a blaze of glory, in a pillar of cloud and
fire, surrounded by legions of angels? Jesus of Nazareth took the total risk of
speaking and acting as if the answer to the question were this: when the true
God comes back to deal with evil, he will look like a young Jewish prophet
journeying to Jerusalem at passover-time, celebrating the kingdom, confronting
the corrupt authorities, feasting with his friends, succumbing in prayer and
agony to a cruel and unjust fate, taking upon himself the weight of Israel�s
sin, the world�s sin, Evil with a capital E. When we look at Jesus in this way
we discover that the cross has become for us the new Temple, the place where we
go to meet the true God and know him as saviour and redeemer. The cross becomes
the place of pilgrimage where we stand and gaze at what was done for each one of
us. The cross becomes the sign that pagan empire, symbolized in the might and
power of sheer brutal force, has been decisively challenged by a different
power, the power of love � and that this decisive challenge shall win the
day.
The question is then posed to us in the strongest and
clearest possible way. Dare we stand in front of the cross and admit that all
that was done for us? Dare we take all the meanings of the word �God� and allow
them to be recentred upon, redefined by, this man, this moment, this death? Dare
we address the consequences of what Jesus himself said, that the rulers of the
world behave in one way, but that we must not do it like that? Dare we thus put
atonement-theology and political theology together, with the deeply personal
message on one side and the utterly practical and political message on the
other, and turn away from the way of James and John and embrace the way of Jesus
himself? Only so, I believe, can we even begin the task, to which the subsequent
lectures will return, of working in our own day with mature, Christian and sober
intelligence to address the problem of evil which still haunts the world which
God loved so much.
