A Cross in the Heart of God

Reflections on the death of Jesus

Samuel Wells

• Publisher: Canterbury Press Norwich
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781786222930
• eBook ISBN: 9781786222954
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

The Canterbury Press Lent book for 2021 focuses on the significance of the story at the very centre of Christianity: the crucifixion. Samuel Wells writes as a theologian and pastor to explore the cross in the purposes of God and how this act brings about salvation.Three sections, each with six short chapters, explore the cross in: - the Old Testament (Covenant, Test, Passover, Atonement, Servant, Sacrifice)- the Epistles (Forgiveness, Obedience, Foolishness, Example, Reconciliation, Boast)- the Gospels (Finished, Judged, Betrayed, Pierced, Forsaken, Mocked)Written with characteristic clarity and wearing its considerable learning lightly, A Cross at the Heart of God will give readers a comprehensive understanding of the story at the heart of scripture, the central event in history and a core tenet of the Christian faith.A study guide with questions and prayers makes this ideal for Lent groups as well as individual reading.

Part 1: The Cross and the Passion of Christ

The key word in this section is context. Having, in the introduction, set out how I understand the cross as the demonstration of the centrality, cost and promise of God being with us, I need now to pause and take account of two dimensions in which this assertion is heard. My argument in this section is that the cross is invariably separated from its political and social context. By setting out that context in some detail and by briefly addressing the conventional ways of talking about the cross, I aim to show why a reassessment of the cross is timely and necessary. The rest of the book amplifies and exemplifies the claims made in this section.

1. The Main Characters

Towards the end their stories, the gospels assemble on stage all the key actors in the drama. Here are the Romans, the ones with the ability to force the issue through military power. Here are the Jerusalem authorities, the Jewish leaders who’d decided that collaboration with the Romans was the only way to survive in a period of foreign occupation. Here are the rebels, Barabbas and the two prisoners with whom Jesus is crucified, who have set their hearts on clearing out the Romans and don’t have much time for the Jerusalem authorities either.

These three groups are the main players. And then, in the background, are the two groups with whom the reader is meant to identify. On the one hand is the crowd, the host of people who project onto Jesus their own hopes for national restoration or personal healing, and swing from adulation on Palm Sunday to baying for blood on Good Friday. On the other hand are the disciples, full of promises of undying loyalty and plenty close enough to see exactly who Jesus is, but nonetheless unravelling in a spiral of stumbling timidity and outright betrayal.

The gospels don’t give us systematic theology or social ethics in propositional form. They give us a story. But that story gives us all we need to know about who Jesus is and what he requires of us. We can see this if we contrast Jesus with the three main players in the Holy Week drama – the Romans, the authorities and the rebels.

Let’s start with the Romans. Every time a Roman general had a successful campaign, he would march on his horse in a triumphant procession into Rome. On Palm Sunday, Jesus marches into Jerusalem on a colt. This is a spoof. Jesus is sitting on a donkey, not a horse: an agricultural tool, not a weapon of war; a tractor, not a tank. It’s hard to see how the Roman governor would have missed a joke directed at him. Jesus is coming to receive what is rightfully his, yet he is doing so not with armies of soldiers, but surrounded by people coming in from the fields, country people, exactly the people most oppressed by the regime. Jesus’ triumphal entry ends not at the Roman palace but at the Temple. It’s pretty clear where he thinks real power lies in Israel. Later, Jesus is asked a question about paying taxes to Caesar. This is forcing him to make a direct choice between the Jerusalem authorities, who went along with Roman domination, and the rebels, who regarded taxes as blasphemy. Jesus’ deeply ironic response – ‘give God what is God’s’ – points to the fact that everything the Romans think they control in fact lies in God’s power. Later again, when Pilate asks, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’, Jesus doesn’t deny it. It’s not surprising Pilate has Jesus executed. These three episodes show that Jesus is claiming an authority way beyond that which Pilate has, and that deep down, he doesn’t take Pilate terribly seriously.

Let’s now look at the Jerusalem leaders. In theory, they were longing for a Messiah to remove the Romans, restore and unite Israel, and inaugurate an unprecedented era of peace. But a bit of historical perspective might be helpful here. There was already a family that regarded themselves as the house of the kings in Israel, and that was the half-Jewish house of Herod. Herod the Great tried to polish off Jesus at birth, and Herod Antipas was now around, eager to finish the job. Herod’s family had brought in the family of Caiaphas from overseas to serve as High Priests. So the High Priest was in the pocket of the puppet king, who was under the thumb of the Roman governor. And all these people garnered large sums of money through extorting tax from the country people. This was not a democracy, and the gospels assume that those Jews who exercised power did so by sucking up to the Romans and oppressing their own people. By riding into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, Jesus is saying he is the real leader of Israel. By questioning the status of the Temple, Jesus is saying he is the true intermediary between God and the people. By debating with each rival group in the Temple precincts as the week goes on, Jesus is saying he has more wisdom than the scribes, more holiness than the Pharisees, more authority than the Sadducees and more power than the Herodians. When brought before the Sanhedrin, Jesus says, ‘You will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power’ – in other words, if you think you’re judging me, the joke’s on you.

So then to the rebels. Once Jesus has dismissed the option of living in Rome’s pocket, it might seem that armed rebellion was the only alternative left to him. Perhaps the most plausible explanation for Judas’ betrayal of Jesus is that Judas assumed Jesus would overturn his own arrest and launch the violent overthrow of Roman rule for which so many longed. So Judas must have found Palm Sunday a bewildering experience: Jesus has the world shouting for him, but does nothing. And even the cleansing of the Temple is a curious kind of revolution: the aggression is directed toward sheep, cattle, coins, tables and doves. No one’s hurt, let alone killed. It is a vivid symbolic gesture, not an element of a violent insurrection. When it comes to the arrest in Gethsemane, Jesus says, ‘Have you come out with swords and clubs to arrest me as though I were a terrorist?’ The scene in Gethsemane makes two things clear. One is that Jesus had established a new form of life that others saw as a political threat. The other is that Jesus had no intention of translating that social programme into a violent revolution.

Any Christian who has lived through 9/11, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the 7/7 bombings and the tyranny of Islamic State could have come to the conclusion that the story that mattered was really all about the government, the religious leaders and the terrorists. These seem to be the people who set the agenda. But the passiontide story suggests that Jesus doesn’t concentrate on the Romans, the Jerusalem authorities and the rebels. These, in different ways, are the people who put Jesus to death. But they aren’t the people the story is about. The story is about the other two groups.

The other two groups are the disciples and the crowd. Like everyone else, neither the disciples nor the crowd come out of the story particularly well. But they portray the two key dimensions of what Jesus is doing in his passion. The crowd represents what we might call the ‘public’ aspect of Jesus’ passion. Jesus dies for a whole bunch of people, some who acknowledge him, some who love him, some who misunderstand him, some who are unaware of him, some who hate him. He dies, in short, for ‘the whole world’. The whole world doesn’t put him to death, but the whole world exhibits the kinds of jealousy, mob spirit, cynicism, fear and sheer perversity that did put him to death. Meanwhile the disciples represent what we might call the ‘personal’ aspect of Jesus’ passion. The death of Jesus is indeed an event in time that brings about the transformation of the whole world. But it’s portrayed in the context of an intense story of intimacy and betrayal. It’s in the intimacy of the Last Supper, as bread is being dipped in the bowl, that Judas slips out to betray Jesus. It’s in the intimacy of the garden, as Jesus holds fast to his Father, that those he has called his friends disintegrate around him. Passiontide is a story not so much about conventional notions of power such as military dictatorship, religious authority or terrorist violence, but about a power that’s at the same time far greater and more intimate than any of them – God’s enduring love for the whole world, and God’s intense love for us, Christ’s intimate friends.

So as we look at the meaning of the cross, we begin to make the transition from the politics, betrayal and terror of the characters around Jesus to the very pressing and sometimes similar issues of our own lives as Christians. And the questions for us as we approach the cross are these three. Number one, Do I assume politics is all about the government, religion all about the professional religious, and power all about the terrorists? Or do I look where Jesus looked, to the breadth of the endlessly diverse crowd and the depth of intimate discipleship? Number two, Do I realize Jesus’ passion is about the whole world, that these days transformed the nature and destiny of the whole world, not just showing us the full horror of human sin but opening out the full possibility of the redemption of all things? Number three, Do I realize that Jesus’ passion is also about me?

To examine the cross is to step out of our assumptions about power – the power that lives in the hands of the government, in the hearts of religious leaders, or in the minds of the terrorists. It’s to gather around the true power in the universe, made present in the fragile form of Jesus Christ – a power that transforms the whole world, and can even transform us.

2. The Standard Approaches

How does Jesus save us? As we explore our understanding of the cross we might do well to set out the historic and widely held answers to that question better to appreciate what our answer to the question might be today.

The first answer to the question focuses on Jesus’ birth. The key date is Christmas Day. It says that Jesus saves us by re-enacting or ‘recapitulating’ every aspect of our human existence, setting right what was out of joint. Thus Adam disobeyed God by eating from the tree, whereas Christ obeyed God by dying on the tree. Christ sanctifies every dimension of human life. We are saved because in Christ the corruptible, finite quality of human nature is joined to the immortal, incorruptible character of God and thus transformed. The crucifixion and resurrection show that Christ also transforms death; but the real moment of salvation is the incarnation itself.

The second answer focuses on Jesus’ life. This is sometimes called the moral theory. It suggests that we human beings are the audience for Jesus. In his kindness and generosity, in his ministry to outcasts, sinners and the sick, in his close relationship to the Father, in his prophetic confrontation with those who kept people under oppression, and most of all in his selfless and faithful journey to the cross, Jesus offers himself as the one who transforms our hearts to follow in his steps in the way of sacrificial love. Think of the words, ‘my richest gain I count but loss and pour contempt on all my pride’. This theory is sometimes described as subjective, because Jesus doesn’t seem objectively to change anything about fundamental reality – it is we who are changed. The danger can be that Jesus simply illustrates what we already knew by methods other than revelation.

The third answer focuses on the suffering laid on Jesus as he went to and hung on the cross. Here the crucial moment is Good Friday. The theory is that humanity had accumulated an unpayable level of guilt before God. Humanity therefore deserved eternal punishment. But through a unique act of grace, God sent Jesus to face this punishment in our place. This is often called penal substitution. The words of Isaiah 53 are very significant and echo through Christian history: ‘surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows … he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities … the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.’ It’s important to note here that what’s most important is that Jesus suffered. While his death is significant and the resurrection is not ignored, the theory rests so much on the necessity of punishment that attention often focuses chiefly on the extent of Jesus’ sufferings. Our imaginations focus on how much suffering it would take to substitute for the sins of the whole world. A characteristically Protestant version of this theory is that Jesus suffered not so much for humanity’s sins in general but for each individual’s sins in particular. Such an objective view of salvation leaves an open question over whether one is automatically saved whether one believes or not.

The fourth answer also concentrates on Good Friday but this time focuses on Jesus’ death. Jesus is a sacrifice that sets right our relationship to God. In this view the problem is one of debt. The most influential view says that the debt is to God’s honour. The failure of humanity to do justice before God creates a terrible imbalance in the moral universe. Only humanity must pay the debt but only God can pay the debt. Hence the God-human, Jesus. When Jesus dies he repays the debt of honour with interest, and it is this interest, known as merit, that humanity can access through the sacraments and thus find salvation. This is a characteristically Roman Catholic view. An older version of this theory also focused on Jesus’ actual death but saw the debt as owed not to God but to Satan. In this view Adam and Eve had sold humanity to the Devil and thus God needed to ransom humanity the way one would redeem a slave. However, Jesus’ death, while succeeding as a ransom and buying us back, was in fact a trick because Jesus rose from death and escaped the Devil’s clutches. Whenever we use the word redemption we hint at this ransom theory, but the theory has in fact been out of fashion for a millennium or so.

The fifth answer focuses on Jesus’ resurrection. If substitution sees salvation as decided in a law court, then this fifth view sees it as a battle. Death cannot hold Jesus; he destroys death and opens out the prospect of eternal life by rising from the grave. The resurrection of Jesus brings about our resurrection by dismantling the hold of death not just once but for all time. Again there’s a significant ambiguity here about whether this resurrection model logically means automatic salvation for all. Either way, the key word is victory. This is the characteristic Eastern Orthodox view. It has achieved a revival in the West particularly among those keen to stress how Jesus’ resurrection doesn’t just save the individual soul but transforms whole societies by dismantling all the social, economic and cultural forces that oppress people.

Looking at the five theories, I’m sure many readers will have been encouraged at some stage in their life to regard only one of them as the whole story and to distrust or disapprove of the others. But I imagine a similar number would like to take the best bits of all of them and simply say, if there’s salvation coming from Christ, bring it on, I’ll have as much as is going, please. It’s important to say that there are scriptural texts that lend support to all five views, so anyone who is in the habit of promoting suspicion around any of them will have the relevant scriptural texts to deal with.

But I want to suggest that there’s a real danger with all five theories. And that is that they’re theories. That’s to say, they’re disembodied constructs that pay little or no attention to the context and contours of Jesus’ life. The single word that epitomizes the context and contours of Jesus’ life is Israel. Most of the theories of the way Jesus saves us exclude almost all the circumstantial detail that makes up the gospels. There’s a good reason for that: these theories set forth ways in which any individual anywhere can find salvation in Christ. But the trouble is, the circumstantial detail is the gospel.

Let me explain. When you hear all these theories together, you get a picture of an agitated God, worried about a code of honour or searching around to find some booty to pay off Satan, subject to some eternal law court that says what God can and can’t do, or fixing a heavenly imbalance as if it were a leaky roof. You see a picture of the Holy Trinity either subject to some eternal rule of engagement that’s not of their own making, or gathered together in the board room scratching their heads over Adam’s fall as if it were a hole in the budget. What’s this got to do with the Jesus of the gospels? Almost nothing.

Instead, the Jesus of the gospels reenacts the story of Israel, going down into Egypt with Joseph like Israel did, beginning at the Jordan like Israel did, facing 40 days in the wilderness like Israel faced 40 years, calling 12 disciples like Israel had 12 tribes and most of all assembling around himself and transforming those facing internal exile in Israel, the leper, the prostitute, the tax collector, the social outcast, just as he came to transform the internal exile of Israel which found itself under Roman occupation. Five hundred years before Christ, Israel had returned from exile not knowing whether it had learned its lessons about sin, redemption and the character of God from its time in Babylon or not. Finding itself in Jesus’ time living under internal exile, it seemed not. Jesus emerged from Galilee with resonances of every major player in Israel’s history. He was the second Adam; he was the one righteous man like Noah; he made a new people like Abraham; he was the new Israel like Jacob; he went down to despair and rose up to save his people like Joseph; he led his people to liberation like Moses; he was the ultimate king like David; he was a healer and...

Table of contents

• Copyright information
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: A Cross in the Heart of God
• Part 1: The Cross and the Passion of Christ
• 1. The Main Characters
• 2. The Standard Approaches
• Part 2: The Cross in the Old Testament
• 3. Covenant
• 4. Test
• 5. Sacrifice
• 6. Passover
• 7. Atonement
• 8. Servant
• Part 3: The Cross in the Epistles
• 9. Forgiveness: Who’s Forgiving Whom?
• 10. Obedience: The Nakedness of God
• 11. Foolishness: The Proof of Love
• 12. Example: Displaying God’s Purpose
• 13. Reconciliation: The Breaking Point
• 14. Boast: The Dirty Work
• Part 4: The Cross in the Gospels
• 15. Finished
• 16. Betrayed
• 17. Pierced
• 18. Matched
• 19. Crucified
• 20. Mocked
• Study Guide