…in John’s account, the last words of Jesus are reported as being, “It’s all done” (John 19:30), in other words, “It’s accomplished” or “It’s completed.” The echo is of Genesis: at the end of the sixth day, God completed all the work that he had done. The point was not to rescue people from creation, but to rescue creation itself. With the death of Jesus, that work is complete. Now, and only now, and only in this way can new creation come about.
How then can we interpret Jesus’ death? What models, what metaphors, what constructions can we find to do justice to it? It is, of course, easy to belittle it, to treat it as yet another example of a good man crushed by “the system,” another eager revolutionary who gave his life for the cause. Of course, there is a sense in which that’s true, but if we are to understand Jesus’ own intentions, it is far from the whole truth.
Equally, it is easy to belittle Jesus’ death theologically. This can be done by placing it solely within a framework that speaks of Jesus as the ultimate example of love—although why, without more of a framework, his death would be an act of love it is interestingly difficult to say. Or it can be done by making Jesus the representative model who goes through death to new life and thereby enables us to make the same journey “in him” or “through him.” Or, notoriously, it can be done by imagining a straightforward transaction in which a God who wanted to punish people was content to punish the innocent Jesus instead. This always, of course, leaves unanswered the question of how such a punishment could itself be just, let alone loving.
Each of these models, though, has its point to make. First, as I have argued above, there is undoubtedly a vital sense in which Jesus’ death is exemplary. At every stage in the narrative we see, acted out in the small but vital human details, that sense of healing and forgiveness, that sense of a powerful love going out to rescue and restore, that we saw in the earlier details of Jesus’ public career. He hasn’t, in other words, stopped being the same kingdom-bringing Jesus; on the contrary, what he does on the cross is the culmination and retrospective explanation of all that earlier work.
Likewise, second, there is indeed a sense in which Jesus was “representing” his people, and through them the whole world. He lived in a world of understanding in which it made sense to see the Messiah as standing in for Israel and Israel as standing in for the rest of humankind. But, important though this theme is not only in the gospels but in Paul and elsewhere, it will scarcely carry all the weight required.
There is too, third, a massive sense in which Jesus’ death is penal. Jesus has announced God’s imminent judgment on his rebel people, a judgment that would consist of devastation at the hands of Rome. He then goes ahead of his people to take precisely that judgment literally, physically and historically upon himself. “Not only in theological truth, but in historic fact, the one bore the sins of the many.”* This is both penal and substitutionary, but it is far bigger and less open to objection than some other expressions of that theory. Once you put it together with the previous model (Jesus as Messiah representing Israel and hence the world), you draw the sting of the main objections that have been advanced against it.
But I have become convinced, the more I have read and studied and prayed the story of Jesus, that all these constructions need to be put within a larger one again—the larger one that the gospels themselves are trying to insist on and that seems to me exactly in line with the aims and motivations of Jesus himself. Somehow, Jesus’ death was seen by Jesus himself, and then by those who told and ultimately wrote his story, as the ultimate means by which God’s kingdom was established. The crucifixion was the shocking answer to the prayer that God’s kingdom would come on earth as in heaven. It was the ultimate Exodus event through which the tyrant was defeated, God’s people were set free and given their fresh vocation, and God’s presence was established in their midst in a completely new way for which the Temple itself was just an advance pointer. That is why, in John’s gospel, the “glory of God”—with all the echoes of the anticipated return of YHWH to Zion—is revealed in and through Jesus, throughout his public career, in the “signs” he performed, but fully and finally as he is “lifted up” on the cross.
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*G.B. Caird, Jesus and the Jewish Nation (London: Athlone, 1965), p. 22.
Ted M. Gossard
