The death of Jesus and the weakness of God [Peace and the Bible #14]

Ted Grimsrud—March 15, 2024

Christianity has focused a great deal of its theology on the death of Jesus and its purported cosmic significance. This emphasis has not had an altogether positive result. To mention just one of the problematic outcomes, viewing Jesus’s death as the necessary sacrifice that somehow enables God to offer salvation to sinful human beings has placed an act of terrible violence at the heart of Christian faith—thereby greatly weakening the peaceable impact of Jesus’s life and teaching. When some sort of punitive “justice” that needs to be “satisfied” by Jesus’s violent death is seen to be part of the essence of God’s character, it greatly increases the likelihood that Christians will also see themselves and their institutions as agents of such “justice”—that is, as agents of divinely approved violence. The long legacy in the “Christian” West of the state as the wielder of such violence in warfare and in criminal justice bears witness to the dark legacy of theological interpretations of Jesus’s death.

I suspect that part of the appeal for seeing Jesus’s death as salvific for Christian theology has been a large emotional investment in the notion of God being victorious and in control. If Jesus is God Incarnate and the Savior, how can it make sense that he would die such an ignominious death? How can it make sense that God would face such a defeat? How can it be that God’s control could be breached by such a horrendous and blasphemous act as executing the Christ? One way to understand traditional Christian atonement theology that makes Jesus’s death into such an efficacious act is to recognize it as a way to turn defeat into victory, to turn weakness into overwhelming power. But what if such a move actually has led to many problematic consequences—turning a peaceable story on its head and making it into a story that has underwritten a great deal of violence? And what if such a move actually misconstrues the story of Jesus’s death itself—and in doing so misses the main points of that story that would indeed have major peacemaking consequences? Perhaps it is no surprise that the truly peaceable and transformative message we find in Jesus’s life and teaching has been so seldom evident in the long history of Christianity these past 2,000 years.

The actual story of Jesus’s death

I think the early interpreters of the story of Jesus’s death, the ones through whom our understandings of that story are filtered, did indeed themselves cast the story in a way that contributed to the later move to see Jesus’s crucifixion as salvific and not his life and teaching. However, if we try to read the stories we have on their own terms with a critical awareness of the later distortions, we may find a core visible that helps us reconstruct a different understanding of the meaning of Jesus’s death.

The gospels make it clear that Jesus’s place as exalted savior followed from the quality of his life. He taught with authority and insight. He liberated the captives by displaying the power to cast out demons and otherwise overthrow the power of the satanic Powers. He healed the blind and the otherwise disabled. In many other ways, as well, he brought good news to the poor. He also challenged the authority of the religious leaders, cast out the money changers from the temple, and scorned the power of the Roman Empire. He died the death of a powerful prophet who, like his ancient forebears, challenged the power elite and embodied the core message of Torah; he “proclaimed the year of the Lord’s favor” (Lk 4:19)—the message of Jubilee that captured the healing intentions of God to bring down the powerful and lift up the lowly (Lk 1:52).

So, in its most basic meaning, Jesus’s death simply followed from his life. He lived faithfully and did not waver even in face of hostility, persecution, and terrible suffering—even to the point of the most horrific, shameful, vicious death the Roman Empire could inflict on one seen as a threat to its domination. Jesus did not waver, even though near the end he prayed for God to provide him a way out. He claimed he could call down legions of angels and overwhelm his captors. However, no escape was offered, and no heavenly warriors came to rescue him. Jesus was killed. And it seemed like his movement would die with him as almost all his friends abandoned him.

Certainly, Jesus’s quality of life, confirmed by the way he faced death, had its own power. In fact, it had enough power that he couldn’t stay buried and be forgotten. If his resurrection carried saving power, it was power that stemmed from his life. His resurrection most of all was a vindication of that life: This is the way of life God honors. Jesus’s embodiment of Torah and the message of the prophets reveals God’s will for humanity.

The meaning of Jesus’s death follows from the reasons he was killed (his life of resistance) and the way his execution by the main human institutions of law, order, and religion exposes the idolatries of those institutions. That this execution actually was an act of rebellion against God by these idolatrous institutional Powers was confirmed when God raised Jesus from the dead. God thereby turned defeat into victory and turned the punitive retribution of the Powers against Jesus on its head, resulting in Jesus’s vindication.

A model for life, not a doctrine

It is crucial, though, that we do not turn either Jesus’s death or his resurrection into doctrines. The point is not that an all-powerful and a retributive God needs a violent sacrifice in order to forgive or shows his power through some sort of mighty miraculous act that gets its main meaning from defying the laws of nature. Whatever meaning the death has and whatever meaning the resurrection has, to be true to the story of Jesus and to be powerfully redemptive for us, need to be connected inextricably with his life. What is redemptive about Jesus’s death is that he died as a model of faithful living. He loved the vulnerable and resisted domination all the way to the end. What is redemptive about Jesus’s resurrection is that God vindicates his life with it and strengthens the call to imitate his way of life that led to his death (“take up the cross and follow”).

The great Powers of Jesus’s time remain alive and active in our world. So, when he resists them and manifests a way of life free from their control, he remains our necessary model for humane living today. Empires and nation-states continue to demand loyalty and death-dealing violence from those who live within them—and to visit pain and even death upon those who resist. Religious institutions continue to collaborate with empires and to demand subordination to their top-down authority and to limit access to the divine that is under their control. Cultural exclusiveness continues to shape people to create and enforce boundary lines between the “true members” and the Other that underwrite discrimination and violence toward non-insiders.

These Powers in Jesus’s day (and today) claim to be God’s agents in policing and enforcing the rules of the Domination System. Jesus’s defiance did cost him his life, but it also exposed the Powers as idolatrous and dependent upon the deception and consent for their status. When the deception is brought to the surface and the consent is refused, the Powers’ power will be greatly diminished. To venerate Jesus as the revelation of God among human beings, and to valorize his death and resurrection, all should lead to the empowerment of his people to follow his path of defiance and empowerment—not to autonomous doctrines divorced from transformative living.

God’s weak power

In all of these elements of the meaning of the story of Jesus, we should recognize that they do manifest the power of God—but it is a “weak” kind of power. God is not overwhelmingly victorious. God’s victory is subtle, easily misunderstood. The power of God is the power of persistent love, a kind of power that easily resisted. Perhaps no aspect of the history of Christianity reveals the weakness of God’s power as much as the ways that Christianity turned the story of Jesus on its head. God could not stop Christianity from embracing the very Empire that executed Jesus and from making the cross a symbol for militaristic violence and a symbol for a retributive God whose love and mercy are scarce, not abundant in the way Jesus taught and modeled.

God could not prevent Christianity from creating an atonement theology that provided an incoherent solution to a problem that does not exist. The Christian doctrine of the atonement emerged from the constructive work of Anselm, Luther, and Calvin. It has argued that Jesus’s death was a sacrifice that somehow satisfies God’s requirements for making salvation possible. This doctrine has never made sense. Why is an all-powerful God unable simply to forgive, if forgive is what the God wants? And why would we think we have a problem with needing a way to gain God’s forgiveness when the Bible from start to finish teaches that indeed God is always merciful—a truth made overwhelmingly clear in Jesus’s unconditional love and mercy that he practiced and taught. God has communicated this message of mercy and confirmed it by the healing this message has always created. But God could not force people of faith to embrace it rather than to construct theologies of retribution and necessary violent sacrifice that muted it.

Yet, the history of Torah and the prophets, and the history of Jesus as on-going presence in the world, is a history of persevering love and mercy that continually does find expression, if not in the centers of power and privilege and religiosity, then among the very same poor and vulnerable to whom Jesus originally proclaimed his good news.

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