Do Justice To The Event: A Battle

- Where are you goin’?

- I’m goin’ to pick a fight.

One of the words not often associated with the death of Jesus is “battle”. N.T. Wright makes a good case for the importance of this association.

Wright is careful to highlight the consistency between Jesus’s death and his ministry up to that point. Jesus’s prophetic announcement throughout his career was “The kingdom of God is at hand”. In other words, “At long last YHWH is becoming king”. And if YHWH was becoming king, the present rulers of Israel (and the world) needed to be relinquished of their power; they needed to be defeated and dethroned.

Here is where a double twist occurs.

Jews saw Rome as the enemy, the pagan nation that needed to be defeated. If YHWH is to become king, they thought, then the Roman empire must be put to the sword. This was to be the task of the Messiah, after all.

Jesus thought differently, however, and as we saw earlier, that is part of the reason he was killed. For Jesus, Israel’s enemy in need of defeat was the satan; the evil one who went about stealing, killing, and destroying. The mission of Jesus, therefore, was to confront and defeat this enemy. It was the satan who had gripped the hearts of Israel and turned them against YHWH; it was the satan who caused sin and death to reign; it was the satan who made it always winter but never Christmas. But with the kingdom of God at hand, the satan’s time was coming to an end, his spell was being broken. Through Jesus, YHWH was bearing his teeth and winter was meeting its death. Through Jesus, YHWH was shaking his mane and spring was returning once again. The kingdom not of this world was replacing the present kingdom, but it would take a decisive battle to seal the victory.

This leads to the second twist, which is that the battle scene was in fact the hill of Calvary where Jesus died. Jesus went to pick a fight with the following vision: death was to be defeated through a death; victory was to be achieved by a righteous victim; the suffering servant was to be the surprising messiah who would conquer the reign of sin and death once and for all.

Rome was not the enemy, and triumph would not come by the sword. Jesus died because he envisioned a different sort of battle with an enemy even fiercer than ruthless Rome; and more than that, he died because he knew that only his own undeserved death at the hands of evil could complete his life’s work. N.T. Wright phrases it like this:

…Jesus took his own story seriously - so seriously that, having recommended his followers to a particular way of being Israel-for-the-sake-of-the-world, he made that way thematic for his own sense of vocation. His own belief about how the kingdom would come through his own work. He would turn the other cheek; he would take up the cross. He would be the light of the world, the salt of the earth. He would be Israel for the sake of the world. He would be the means of the kingdom’s coming, both in that he would embody in himself the renewed Israel and in that he would defeat evil once and for all. But the way in which he would defeat evil would be the way consistent with the deeply subversive nature of his own kingdom-announcement. He would defeat evil by letting it do its worst to him.

What Jesus talked about throughout his ministry, he demonstrated thoroughly on the cross. But although Jesus called his disciples to take up their crosses follow him, only he could do what he did at Calvary. The hopes of Israel and the hopes of the world rested on his shoulders alone. Neither Israel nor the world recognised this of course. Their human wisdom could not solve the mystery of the cross, so all that was left for them to do was either taunt “The king of the Jews” as he was crucified or mourn bitterly over the death of the one many had hoped would redeem Israel.

To both groups -- the mockers and the mourners -- the battle was lost. Rome had won again, and things would go on as normal. Though Jesus died for different reasons -- the selfish rule of Pilate, the upholding of justice by would-be Law observers, the sense of vocation he himself possessed -- the simple fact was that he died.

On Saturday, the question “Why did Jesus die?” was merely academic. Sunday, however, would change that. Sunday would bring the question to life, and offer answers to be given from that moment on; answers that would demonstrate Jesus to be who he said he was and to have accomplished what he said he would accomplish. One of those answers was given by Paul, who could write roughly two decades later that Jesus "loved me and gave himself for me".

Do Justice To The Event: Double Drama

Why did Jesus die?

We played the blame game in the first couple of posts by casting stones at the Romans and then the Jews. Jesus was executed under a Pontius Pilate looking out for number one, but he was brought to the attention of the Roman procurator by influential Jews who saw this pseudo-Messiah breaking The Law and who decided that the law-breaker needed to get got.

But events were not so simple. This law-breaker claimed to be the law-fulfiller, with his death being the finishing touch to his life’s work. So what can be said of Jesus’s mindset in the lead up to his crucifixion? Can we say that “Jesus embraced a worldview…within which his own death would make sense, and would indeed make more sense than anything else”? As good a place as any to find the answer is the final meal Jesus shared with his friends: the Last Supper.

N.T. Wright calls the Supper a “deliberate double drama”. Being a Passover meal, it retold the old Jewish story of the exodus from Egypt and looked forward to the future return from exile. But, in a shocking twist, Jesus now included himself in this story as its central character. Israel’s story was being incorporated into his own, with long-awaited benefits not only to Israel, but to the world. “Jesus saw the meal as the appropriate way of drawing the symbolism of Passover, and all that it meant in terms of hope as well as history, on to himself and his approaching fate”, says Wright.

All that the Supper symbolised -- forgiveness of sins, the enthronement of YHWH, etc. -- was happening through Jesus. The words spoken during the meal (which display complete disregard for the “No talk of religion or politics at the dinner table” rule) reinforced this kingdom-at-hand story. Jesus spoke of a “covenant” initiated through his death; a death which would bring about “the forgiveness of sins” (Mt. 26:28c). These words are clear echoes of biblical prophecies made during Israel’s exile in Babylon; prophecies which speak of “a new covenant” in which YHWH “will remember your sins no more” (Jer. 31:31-34).

What, then, was the intention of Jesus that night in Jerusalem? Wright has a convincing answer: “Jesus intended to say, with all the power of symbolic drama and narrative, that he was shortly to die, and that his death was to be seen within the context of the larger story of YHWH’s redemption of Israel”.

When contemplating his ministry, Jesus didn’t merely expect to talk; he expected to die.

Do Justice To The Event: Liquidating Undesirables

What have the Romans ever done for us?

One thing not contained on the list was crucifixion. At Calvary the story of crucifixion and the story of Jesus met. What, then, was the story told by the cross? According to Wright,

Crucifixion was a powerful symbol throughout the Roman world. It was not just a means of liquidating undesirables; it did so with the maximum degradation and humiliation. It said, loud and clear: we are in charge here; you are our property; we can do what we like with you. It insisted, coldly and brutally, on the absolute sovereignty of Rome, and of Caesar. It told an implicit story, of the uselessness of rebel recalcitrance and the ruthlessness of imperial power. It said, in particular: this is what happens to rebel leaders. Crucifixion was a symbolic act with a clear and frightening meaning.

What is often neglected is the light that this story sheds on the story of Jesus.

Jesus was executed as a rebel against Rome.

He was an undesirable who was liquidated, falling on the same sword as a political renegade. As Wright suggests,

When Jesus was crucified, the general impression in Jerusalem must have been that he was one more in a long line of would-be, but failed, Messiahs.

Here was the man who was supposed to redeem Israel from her pagan oppressors, the man who would usher in the age of Ross YHWH. But after his crucifixion, hope turned to bitter disappointment (Lk. 24:13-21).

However, was Jesus worthy of crucifixion? Was he a real threat to Rome? Though executed as a rebel, he was surely not guilty of the charge in the conventional sense of the word. After all, what kind of rebel insists on turning the other cheek and going the extra mile? Nonetheless, his announcement that YHWH was becoming king carried with it some sort of threat to all other kingdoms. YHWH’s kingdom may not have been a kingdom of this world, but it was a kingdom that Jesus prayed would be manifested on earth as it is in the heavens, to the detriment of present earthly kingdoms.

Pontius Pilate must have contemplated such things as he was warned by the Jewish authorities that do fail to execute Jesus would be to make oneself an enemy of Caesar. Pilate didn’t want to do what the Jews wanted him to do (apparently he never wanted to do what the Jews wanted him to do), but he also didn’t want to make Tiberius angry. He knew Jesus was innocent of the charges laid against him, he knew he wasn’t the rebel the Jews painted him out to be, but…

And so caught between a rock and a hard place, he washed his hands in an attempt to absolve himself, but the fact remains that under Pilate’s watch, Jesus was crucified. Therefore,

In terms of the Roman authorities, the answer to the question ‘why did Jesus die?’ is that Pilate not only put cynical power-games before justice…, but also, on this occasion, put naked self-interest before both.

Jesus died under the sovereignty of Rome, charged (rightly or wrongly) with sedition. To onlookers, his crucifixion was nothing less than his utter degradation and humiliation at the hands of the empire. The question now becomes, what did his crucifixion look like to those Jews who did their utmost to get him hanging on that cross? Why were they so desperate for Jesus to die?

Do Justice To The Event: Dealing With History

Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who announced to Israel that YHWH was becoming king, and who saw himself as having a special role to play in that inauguration.

This is the first 539 pages of N.T. Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God in a nutshell; this is the story into which the question at hand -- why did Jesus die? -- fits. It is no timeless question answered in timeless truths, but a question which transports us into “the fullness of time”, and a question which yields to us timely answers.

As Wright remarks, by asking “why” we are involving ourselves in the pursuit of human intentionality. There are four such humans to consider: The Roman authorities, the Jewish authorities, Jesus of Nazareth, and 1st century Jews who subsequently became loyal to their crucified Messiah - Jews who could confess not long after Jesus’s death that “he loved me and gave himself for me”. Why, according to these people, did Jesus (have to) die?

And given that he did die, who was responsible? The Romans? The Jewish authorities? What about Jesus? What role did this troublesome but non-violent prophet have to play in his own downfall? Was it an integral part of his vocation, linked with all that went before it? Or was it simply the inevitable consequence that would befall anyone who rocked the boat as much as Jesus did, nothing more and nothing less?

When dealing with these questions we are dealing with history. Real, human history. Not nice ideas or religious jargon, but actions and events within space and time. Of course as with all human history precision is not an option, but complete ignorance doesn’t make anything go away. The death of Jesus remains part of the human story whether we acknowledge it or not; it may even be the pivot, the point at which all that went before it converges and all that comes after it diverges.

Society is not served by suppressing truth or inventing falsehood. The stories must speak for themselves.

The next installment will chart the role Rome had in the story of Jesus’s death.

Do Justice To The Event

Why did Jesus die?

Roughly 1,980 years ago a Jewish man from the insignificant village of Nazareth in Galilee was put to death in a roman cross. Not long after, a tidal wave swept across the Roman empire as the message of Christ crucified began to turn the world upside down. What did these message bearers see in Jesus's death? Of all the would-be Messiah's on all the crosses in all of the Roman empire, why this particular one?

The historical, political and theological answers to the opening question might just provide the clues to why Easter Sunday continues to be celebrated by millions of Christians around the world.

With Easter Sunday not long away now, I thought I'd lead into it by doing some posts (roughly one a week) on a chapter in N.T. Wright's Jesus and the Victory of God that deals with the intentions behind Jesus dying a disgraceful, humiliating death.

It's impossible to extract just one chapter from Wright's magnum opus and retain all of its significance and depth, but I will try my darnedest to do justice to the text that is Wright's attempt to do justice to the event.