The Crucifixion was a Crime: In an age of performative cruelty, we can't see Roman brutality as salvific

[The Great Open Dance]

The crucifixion reveals God’s abhorrence of human-induced suffering. Americans live in an age of performative cruelty. Windows are smashed by government officials, immigrants are locked in filthy detention centers, children are separated from their parents, peaceful protestors are sprayed with pepper gas, lawful observers are thrown to the ground and arrested—or killed.

Oddly, much of this performative cruelty is supported by evangelicals who claim salvation through their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Even as images of violent ICE agents spread throughout the media, support for Trump’s deportation policy remains strong. But why do evangelicals celebrate performative cruelty when Jesus was the victim of performative cruelty? Why doesn’t the brutalization of Jesus by the Roman Empire give evangelicals an allergy to governmental brutality?

The answer lies in bad theology. The word “salvation” is related to the word “salve,” a healing balm for a wound. For too long, Western Christianity has interpreted the death-by-torture of Jesus as salvific: “Jesus was crucified as a substitute for our sins, taking our punishment on himself, granting us eternal life with God.” But the loving God preached by Christ would never choose murderous violence as the means to reconciliation. Brutality doesn’t heal, brutality can’t heal, and brutality hasn’t healed. The crucifixion is the wound. The resurrection is the balm.

Celebrating violence helps no one. The depths of life are unavoidable, and shallow answers to deep questions are like dead weight to a swimmer. Violent atonement theories are shallow answers. As the archetype of useless suffering, the cross speaks to us, but only as a protest against violence, against all the senseless suffering that we inflict on one another.

For this reason, placing the locus of salvation in the violence of crucifixion makes no sense. The disciples had already experienced divine empowerment simply from being in the presence of Jesus and sharing his life. Through this religious invigoration, they recognized Jesus as the Messiah (Mark 8:29), the Son of the living God (Matthew 16:16), and the Savior of the world (John 4:42). Jesus himself implies that his death is not necessary for redemption: When Zacchaeus the tax collector commits to a new life of honesty, the not-yet-crucified Jesus declares, “Today salvation has come to this house!” (Luke 19 ).

No one in the fledgling Jesus community wanted or needed him to die. Then why did Jesus die? As mentioned above, the purpose of the incarnation is to express divine solidarity with life across the entire spectrum of joy and suffering. Jesus reveals the empathic participation of God within the life-giving yet sometimes brutal contrasts that characterize the universe. Abba, our Father and Mother, intends the adversities of embodied life to unite us in their overcoming. Such overcoming grants our lives meaning and consequence.

The Holy Spirit Sophia is our guide in this process, but instead of listening to her, we have divided ourselves against one another in our infinite thirst for finite resources. Despite our choice for division, which is very much a rejection of Sophia’s guidance, Christ incarnated as Jesus, subjecting himself to moral evil as well as natural challenge. He reveals the divine purpose for us in the face of difficulty: alliance, helpfulness, generosity, courage, rationality, perseverance, etc.

He also provides ethical correction to dispense with our self-induced misery. His revelation repudiates moral evil, which acquires power through physical, social, and intellectual violence. In response, moral evil murdered Jesus on the cross.

The cross is the opposite of God. There, moral evil defeated divine love—briefly. There, the Son of God experienced God-forsakenness, as Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). Divinity itself descended into protest atheism, the lament that there is too much suffering in the world for it to have been the design of a good God. Long before Rome perfected crucifixion, the psalmist had praised God: “If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in Death, you’re already there” (Psalm 139:8). Jesus on the cross is the historical expression of the psalmist’s insight into faith: God is with us even in the atheism caused by affliction. God is not just spiritually omnipresent; God is experientially omnipresent. God is empathically, emphatically everywhere.

Propitiatory violence has always offended God. The presence of God in the God-forsakenness of the cross reveals the suffering of God in every useless sacrifice throughout history. Jesus is, in the words of John the Revelator, “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8 KJV). Priests sacrificed animals to appease an angry god, centurions crucified rebels to appease a distant emperor, and overseers flogged serfs to appease a cruel lord. Rather than breaking the chain, Christian theologians developed violent atonement theories that made Abba the Sacrificer and Jesus the Sacrifice.

Jesus himself condemns religious violence as irreligious: “The hour is coming when anyone who kills you will claim to be serving God. They will do these things because they know neither Abba God nor me” (John 16:2b–3). Jesus is the power inverter, the murdered scapegoat who declares the violence of ritual sacrifice unholy. He inverts the violent social order, rejecting revenge for reconciliation and purity for embrace. He inverts the violent economic order, rejecting accumulation for generosity and stratification for equality. He inverts the violent religious order, rejecting respectability for justice and rigorism for kindness. In the words of René Girard, “The God of Christianity isn’t the violent God of archaic religion, but the nonviolent God who willingly becomes a victim in order to free us from our violence.”

Violence and oppression are sinful. If “Jesus died for sinners,” then what does his death do for those who are sinned against? If Jesus dies for the sins of the oppressors, then how does he die for the sufferings of the oppressed? In truth, Jesus died for the oppressed, as the oppressed, demanding an end to oppression on the part of all oppressors.

The failure of Christian theology to make this point has allowed Christians to gleefully oppress. James Cone points out that racist “Christians” in twentieth-century America could hang Blacks from lynching trees while worshipping Jesus on the cross, without irony.

If the story of Jesus ended with the crucifixion, then the cosmos would be eternal night. The cynics who “know how the world works” would be right: cruelty would be more useful than kindness and power more useful than love. If Roman nails had the last word, then hope would be a lie and faith would be foolish. Sacred meaning would drain out of the universe to be replaced by calculated opportunism. We could no longer gaze upon the beauty of God. We would instead be condemned to casting furtive, fearful glances over our shoulder. Yet this cursed situation did not arise because, by the power of God, crucifixion yields to resurrection, despair to hope, and hatred to love. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 199-201)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Cone, James. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2011.

Crossan, John Dominic. Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. San Francisco: Harper, 1994.

Girard, René. Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.

Moltmann, Jürgen. The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015.

[Srkdqltr]

1. I think,

The world has always had folks who like to inflict pain on others and themselves. Most of all the folks who interpreted the Bible. That is why we have so many thinking the pain and suffering is somehow making one better in God's eyes.
That is also why we have so many stupid oppressive rules in religion.
Why these hateful people are listened too I'll never know.
That was never Jesus's message ever.

[TomSlick]

2. Substitutionary atonement is a difficult concept but is scripturally inescapable.

I find it difficult to understand why God would establish a system in which it was essential for his Son to die in order to secure the salvation of humanity.

The passage you cite, that Jesus is "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” (Revelation 13:8) means that Jesus being killed was the plan from before the beginning.

The proclamation of the early Church was "For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures." 1 Corinthians 15:3-4

That Jesus died to expiate our sins has been a stumbling block for many since the earliest days of the Church. "But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness...." 1 Corinthians 23 However, to reject that core belief is to reject what has always been a fundamental tenant of Christianity.