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How the Crucifixion Changed God’s Relationship with Us

A COUPLE OF harrowing episodes of father-child sacrifice stand out in the Hebrew Bible. One, which we’ve already considered, is archetypal for the death of Jesus: Abraham takes Isaac to a mountaintop and, just as he’s about to plunge a dagger into his son’s chest, he’s thwarted by an angel who provides a ram in exchange. Everyone from Paul to Kierkegaard has compared Isaac to Jesus.

But the other story is far more terrifying.

In Judges 11 we’re told that Jephthah was the son of Gilead. Because his mother was a prostitute, Jephthah was driven out of the family compound as a teenager, and he became a renowned outlaw. But when times got tough for Israel in their running battle against the Ammonites, they reconciled with Jephthah and made him commander of their army. Jephthah’s negotiations with the Ammonites came to naught, so he decided to take his men into battle. But before he left for war, he vowed an oath that if the Lord granted him military victory, “Whoever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return victorious from the Ammonites, shall be the LORD’s, to be offered up by me as a burnt offering.”¹ His forces were victorious, and upon his return Jephthah was devastated to see his daughter, his only child, emerge from his home, dancing and singing at her father’s return. He explained his vow to her, and she asked that she might have two months to wander in the wilderness and mourn the fact that she would die a virgin. Jephthah granted her request. Two months later he killed and burned his beloved daughter.

Commentators often try to find a moral in the story of Jephthah and his daughter. “Don’t make egotistical promises to the Lord!” they preach, “Don’t bargain with God!” But in the text, there is no moral. There is only anguish, including an exhortation that the daughters of Israel spend four days every year, wandering and grieving for Jephthah’s unnamed daughter. The story of Jephthah and his daughter does not elicit a moral; the only appropriate response is grief and mourning.

Filicide—the killing of one’s own child—is among the most horrific of all crimes, an abomination against God and nature. We can sense that horror in the biblical stories of Abraham and Jephthah.

So it’s not without context when we read of Jesus crying out to his Father, Abba, in the Garden of Gethsemane and then wondering aloud why his God has forsaken him as he hangs dying on the cross.

Did God kill Jesus? We’ve come far enough now to answer that question.

No, God did not kill Jesus.

This is not filicide. This is closer to deicide, the killing of a god—the killing of God.

Where Was God When Jesus Died?

God infuses all that is; God is everywhere. This is indisputably part of Jesus’ message about God. And because of the mystery of the Trinity, we can also say that God was both within Jesus on the cross and witnessing his death from another vantage point.

Many people want there to be a nonviolent atonement. They want God to be off the hook for Jesus’ death. They usually want the Jewish Temple leaders off the hook as well. Rome alone is responsible for the crucifixion in this view—Jesus was lynched by an imperial power, and God used that lynching to show the ultimate weakness of all imperial and colonizing powers. Jesus’ death was unnecessary for our reunification with God, they argue, but God brought good out of it anyway.

We can agree with these critics insofar as we have seen that God definitely did not require the blood sacrifice of an innocent victim in order to atone for human sin. But even though God didn’t require it, God was present as Jesus died. God chose not to stop the execution, as we have seen, because God’s chosen deportment is one of self-limitation and humility. That’s God’s posture throughout the ages with Israel, and it didn’t change on Good Friday. In fact, it reached its apogee on that day.

God’s power had been evident many times during Jesus’ life. One of the most frequent phrases in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke comes after a sermon or a healing or a nature miracle by Jesus, when the people around him are described as being “amazed with his power and authority.”² And in an episode that is repeated in each of those Gospels, Jesus is confronted by the Sadducees with a legalistic question about marriage in the afterlife. His response to them is that they understand neither the scriptures nor the power of God. In the afterlife, Jesus says, God’s power to resurrect will obliterate all of the categories of this world. And it’s in God’s power to resurrect that Jesus places his trust.

But Jesus’ trust in God’s resurrection power was tested during Holy Week, and his faith flagged. At the climax of the passion—beginning in the garden and ending on the cross—Jesus wondered aloud whether God would rescue him and, finally, why God had abandoned him. These verses are not like Jesus’ other utterances—they’re not parables or sermons or pithy exhortations. These are existential pleas, cries to God, not unlike the prayers and cries of dereliction that you and I have let fly into the unknown, hoping for an answer.

God stood aside and allowed Jesus to be crucified. God laid down the power to intervene, and that opens God to the charge of being an accessory to the crime. This isn’t unique to the crucifixion. Any time a horrific act of violence happens, we ask, Where was God? Why didn’t God stop this?

In the film, God on Trial, a group of condemned prisoners at Auschwitz convene a judicial court asking just these questions—judging whether God is culpable for the Holocaust. One prisoner mocks another for praying, asking if he’s helping God to make up his mind about who will die. Another prisoner tells him to stop, saying that questioning God is blasphemy: “The Lord our God can hear you, even here.”

“He hears me, and he does nothing about it,” the mocking prisoner responds. “He’s a bigger bastard than I thought. He hears me; he does nothing about it. He should be here, not us. He’s an evil bastard. We should put him on trial.” And they do, convening a rabbinical court with three judges and a rabbi acting as a living Torah. The trial commences, and the court hears testimony from both sides.

God is charged with breach of contract for breaking his covenant with the people of Israel. The petitioners to the court do not question God’s existence, but they do question God’s character, God’s motives. One claims that the ways of God are inscrutable and should not be questioned, similar to the arguments of Job’s friends. Another argues that God is using Hitler to cleanse the Jewish people, the same way that God used Nebuchadnezzar. A physicist claims that it’s irrational to believe that God has singled out one small group of people on one small planet to be favored above all others in the cosmos.

Finally the rabbi, the “living Torah,” stops his praying and interjects. He tells of the Egyptians and the Moabites and the Amalekites, all of whom were brutally murdered by the Israelites at God’s command. “We are becoming the Moabites,” he says. “We are learning how it was for the Amalekites. . . . God is not good. He was never good. He was only on our side.”

Then the rabbi says of God, “When he asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, Abraham should have said no. We should have taught God the justice that was in our hearts. We should have stood up to him.”³

The beauty of God on Trial is that it opens the door to question God. And, in the rabbi’s closing words, it even opens the door to Judaism’s millennia-old assumption that God is on their side. The film is based on a fictional account from a play written by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. Wiesel, however, has a very different answer than the rabbi about the presence of God in moments of horror. In his Holocaust memoir, Night, Wiesel recounts another story about God’s presence. Standing in a crowd being forced to watch the hanging of an angel-faced child at Auschwitz, Wiesel heard someone ask, “ ‘For God’s sake, where is God?’ And from within me, I heard a voice answer, ‘Where is He? This is where—hanging here from this gallows.’ ”⁴

God is here. That’s Wiesel’s answer. God is present, on the gallows, in the gas chambers. To the cry of godforsakenness—Where is God?—the response is quiet presence. Our God is not Zeus, throwing lightning bolts from on high. It’s not even the God of Exodus, plaguing Egypt until the Pharaoh releases his slaves. This is the God who meets Elijah in a still, small voice. This is the God with whom Jesus seeks quiet communion when he steals away from the disciples for moments of prayer.

God’s power is presence, quiet presence.

We so easily forget this. We lose track of God’s presence, especially during moments of anguish and terror. Jesus is no different. In the Garden and on the cross, he sought assurance from God. He asked. But God’s answer wasn’t lightning bolts. It was presence.

“Only the Suffering God Can Help”

At one point during God on Trial, a prisoner asks, “Who needs a God who suffers?” This question may as well have been asked by a first-century Jew, wondering about the Apostle Paul’s claim that the long-awaited Messiah had come not in power but in suffering.

Holocaust-era Christian theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer struggled against the forces of evil and was ultimately lynched by the Nazis for his part in a plot to assassinate Hitler. Few theologians have had so poignant an experience of suffering as Bonhoeffer. While imprisoned he wrote many letters, including the letter of July 16, 1944, in which he told his friend Eberhard Bethge that we should live in the world as if God did not exist. This is what God wants us to do, Bonhoeffer writes: “God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us.” This, for Bonhoeffer, is the first step in leaving behind religion and truly following Christ. “Before God and with God we live without God,” he writes. “God lets himself be pushed out of the world onto the cross.”⁵

Human beings are inherently religious, Bonhoeffer continues. We want to find ways that God’s power manifests itself in the world. We want God to intervene. We want deus ex machina—God in the machine. But that’s not only a mistake, it is unbiblical: “The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help.”⁶

That’s a beautiful line, but we’re still left to figure out how the suffering God helps us.

In days past, and even today, what homo religiosis wants from God is power. Be it a warrior general on an ancient battlefield, sacrificing animals and asking for the gift of victory, or a present-day TV preacher promising the masses that he’ll channel God’s power and heal all illnesses in exchange for a love gift (cash, check, or credit cards accepted), we go to God in hopes of obtaining a bit of the power that created the universe. In the past, people felt powerless in the face of the weather, the empire, disease, or the tyrannical lord who lived on the nearest hill. Today many of us have gained mastery over some of those things, but we still struggle with feelings of powerlessness—we feel trapped in governmental bureaucracy that we can’t escape, climate change that we cannot seem to stop, wars that never end, and relationships torn by brokenness that we cannot heal—divorce, mental illness, addiction. For all of the advances we’ve made, we still often feel helpless and vulnerable.

But Jesus’ life and death challenge our understanding of God. No longer is God a distant fellow with massive amounts of power, waiting to mete out that power to whomever says the right prayer or offers the appropriate sacrifice. Now God is one of us, among us, suffering alongside of us, experiencing our feelings of powerlessness.

The crucifixion decisively shows that omnipotence, the characteristic that seems invaluable to God, is in fact not definitive of God. Whether omnipotence is an underlying aspect of God, or one that God gave up for a time, is pure conjecture by us. What we know is that God is one with the powerless, one with the hopeless, one with the broken. And we know this because of Jesus. Jesus is the most fully realized revelation of God that we’ve got, and what we can see of God in the life of Jesus is the perfect example of self-limitation and humility.

Many of us were raised being taught that God is a bundle of omnis—omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. But the God we find in Jesus is unconcerned with the power that comes in these omnis. Instead we have a God who comes to us in presence and humility.

Now we’ve got a whole new way of life, made known in the way of Jesus’ life and death, which is defined by humility and even suffering. Some have criticized this perspective, saying that it romanticizes victimhood and offers no hope to those who are victimized and abused: is a God who laid aside power and allowed himself to be tortured really bringing good news to a woman who is abused by her husband or a young boy who is sold into sex slavery? Only from a position of power and privilege is victimhood somehow considered noble. This corrective must be noted, and this danger avoided. But the amazing thing about the cross is that both the victim and the victimizer, both the oppressed and the oppressor, are liberated. God plays both of those roles in the event of the crucifixion. In Jesus, God is the victim; in God the Father, God is at least allowing the oppression. In God and in this event are wrapped up everything it means to be human. So the crucifixion does not valorize victimhood, it redeems the victim. And in an unexpected twist, it also redeems the victimizer.

What Jesus did that is different from other forms of victimization is that Jesus suffered on behalf of others, which is entirely different than unnecessary and unwarranted suffering. Or take another word applied to Jesus’ death: sacrifice. If we think of a virgin thrown into a volcano as a sacrifice to appease the angry gods, we know that’s a barbaric and terrible act. Yet if we see someone perform a virtuous act on behalf of another, we commend that person for being “self-sacrificial.” A sacrifice, voluntarily given, is a beautiful thing; it’s a gift that costs the giver something. We value these acts as virtuous, and rightly so.

During Jesus’ final week of life, Luke recounts, he saw a sacrificial gift made, and he pointed it out to his disciples:

           He looked up and saw rich people putting their gifts into the treasury; he also saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins. He said, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them; for all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in all she had to live on.”⁷

God took a similar course, giving up almost everything that is distinctive about God—the omnis—in order to find common ground with human beings. This was already humble, but ultimately, as Bonhoeffer says, God was even “pushed out of the world onto the cross.” According to Paul, this total humiliation of the divine is “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.”⁸ But it’s a road map for life to the Christian. The way of Jesus is one of self-limitation and self-sacrifice—always freely and voluntarily entered into, never coerced or forced. Remember the passage cited in chapter 14 about Jesus’ last supper with his disciples? On Jesus’ last night, he washed his disciples’ feet and then, joining them at the table said,

           Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.⁹

Jesus’ entire ministry was equality in action: he spoke to a Samaritan woman, healed those who were too “unclean” to enter the Temple, and ate with sinners and tax collectors. And here, on his last night, he puts that lifestyle into a conclusive teaching: a servant and a master are peers, colleagues, equals.

As a result of his life, his teaching, and his death, the distance between God and humanity has been obliterated. It is no more. The master has joined the servants. And the appropriate response to that, right from Jesus’ own lips, is that we too humble ourselves, serve one another, and take up our own crosses of suffering.

God’s Solution to Our Problem

We’re still left to solve the question of what it means that Jesus died for our sins. Most theologians start with the concept of sin and then work toward Jesus’ death, showing how that act conquered the problem. But we’ve gone in the other direction, investigating Jesus’ death as an act of solidarity between God and humanity, and now we’ve got to consider how this death dealt with sin. To do that, we’ve got to figure out what sin is.

Rabbi Joseph likes to say that the genius of the Apostle Paul was that he took what was corporate and communal and made it personal. The atonement that Israel sought in ancient times was always on behalf of the entire people, the entire nation. The sacrifices on the Day of Atonement put all of Israel back in right standing with God. Personal forgiveness was not on the menu. At its best, this brought a sense of the collective and the communal to people, something that we are sorely lacking in our individualistic age. But at its worst, individuals got to hide behind the “sins of the people,” avoiding their own personal culpability. As we saw earlier, there was no mechanism in ancient Israel by which an individual was forgiven of sin.

With Paul—that is, with Jesus as interpreted and explained by Paul—that changed. Now it’s not about the nation or the people; it’s about God and me. And this emphasis became even more pronounced in the early church.

The New Testament brims with words for sin—at least half a dozen, each with a different nuance. One means to commit an injustice, another means lawlessness, and another has a more juridical sense. Yet another means to “lose one’s way”—literally, to “fall down.” But the most common word, used 173 times, is hamartia, and it means to miss the mark, to fall short of a goal, to fail.

Before Jesus’ arrival, sin was pretty clear-cut. If you disobeyed the laws of the Torah—which everyone inevitably did—your sins were put in the big pot of Israel’s sins. On the Day of Atonement, everyone took care of that, collectively. But Jesus introduced a problematic element to this relatively straightforward equation. He changed our relationship to the law: he allowed his disciples to pick grain on the Sabbath, he healed on the Sabbath, and he taught that the law was to be the servant of humanity, not vice versa. The very ones who’d been thought to uphold the law most diligently were said by Jesus to be in conflict with the law. Jesus called them “blind guides,” a “brood of vipers,” and “whitewashed tombs.” He accused them of accentuating the details of the law while neglecting the “weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith.”¹⁰

Suddenly, what was sin was less than clear.

Jay Bakker, pastor and author and famous son of infamous televangelists, is one of my dearest friends. I first met him in 2007, when we spoke at the same conference. Jay had gained some notoriety for changing his mind on whether homosexuality was a sin, and he became one of the first evangelical leaders to publicly affirm gays in the church. I had watched a documentary in which he was featured, and I was excited to meet him.

As we walked down a street from the conference to our hotel, I pelted him with questions about homosexuality and sin. And then, purely by accident, I said something that changed my conception of sin—and maybe his, too.

“It seems that you’ve got a box called ‘Sin,’ ” I said. “And now you’ve decided to take homosexuality out of that box. But the problem is, what are you going to take out of that box next? The problem is not with what’s in the box or outside of the box. The problem is with the box. You need to get rid of your Sin Box.”

As you might guess, we’ve had a good laugh several times since about that. “Where’s your Sin Box?”

“I don’t know. I must have left it somewhere.”

But there’s a more serious underlying issue. As Christians, we often protest the charge that our faith is little more than a list of rights and wrongs, of dos and don’ts. But we persist in thinking that “sin” is a bounded set, a box—some things are inside it, and other things are outside, and the debate between different versions of Christianity is what’s in and what’s out. Slavery used to be outside the Sin Box, but now it’s inside. Gambling used to be in, but now it’s out. And homosexuality—well, it depends on whom you ask.

But sin isn’t a box. Sin is an ailment. Sin is a chronic disease, and we all live with it. Some of us manage to live with it better, controlling the disease, and others among us struggle against sin but are controlled by it. And some of us it destroys.

Behavior isn’t the disease; sin itself is the disease. That is, sin must be thought of as a condition rather than an activity.

Think of someone who has arthritis or asthma or HIV/AIDS. The sufferer of rheumatoid arthritis could go years with no symptoms or could have a nasty flare-up. But swollen and painful knuckles isn’t actually arthritis: it’s a symptom of arthritis. The arthritis itself is an autoimmune disease in which your body attacks itself—specifically, antibodies in the blood mistake the cells in the lining in the joints as foreign invaders and attack them. There is no cure; there is only treatment of the symptoms.

Paul wrote that sin came into the world through Adam, “and so death spread to all because all have sinned.”¹¹ Like a plague, sin spread. We have learned that the early church accounted for this sin-disease biologically, spread through semen, from father to child. But we don’t need to embrace that mistaken notion to nevertheless affirm that we are each beset with a chronic condition in which we fall short of perfection. We lie, we cheat, we lust, we dehumanize, we marginalize, we fly off the handle. We show the symptoms of the sin-disease that we each carry. It’s unavoidable. It is part of the human condition.

For Jesus and his followers, sin and disease were linked. Physical infirmities were seen as resulting from sin—either personal or corporate. When asked about this link regarding a man born blind, Jesus said that neither the man’s sins nor his parents’ sins were the cause of his blindness.¹² But for his disciples, those were the only two options.

In many other Gospel episodes, Jesus heals those who are sick, and he simultaneously forgives them of their sin. His opponents are scandalized, though they sometimes don’t know which is worse: that Jesus touches the unclean, eats with tax collectors, and heals on the Sabbath, or that he claims to be able to forgive sins. Jesus became renowned for his fellowship with sinners, even being called a “friend of sinners”—meant as an insult by his accusers, but clearly a compliment in the eyes of the Gospel writers.¹³ What had been a curse was actually a chance to dine with the Messiah.

And in a long stretch of miracle-healing stories in the Gospel of Matthew, we find this paragraph:

           When Jesus entered Peter’s house, he saw his mother-in-law lying in bed with a fever; he touched her hand, and the fever left her, and she got up and began to serve him. That evening they brought to him many who were possessed with demons; and he cast out the spirits with a word, and cured all who were sick. This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah, “He took our infirmities and bore our diseases.”¹⁴

Matthew takes this quote from the famous “Suffering Servant” section of Isaiah. Prior to Jesus, Jews had not thought this passage was about the Messiah, but the Gospel writers and Paul connected those dots. In Isaiah, physical infirmities and diseases are inseparable from sin, as the very next verse from the prophet makes clear:

           But he was wounded for our transgressions,

               crushed for our iniquities;

           upon him was the punishment that made us whole,

               and by his bruises we are healed.¹⁵

In his life and ultimately in his death, Jesus takes our ailments upon himself—that’s a huge part of the humility of God and God’s solidarity with humanity that we find in Jesus. Our ailments are both physical and spiritual, and Jesus embraced both. Even before Jesus, Jews considered the coming messianic age to be a time of great healing—no more sin, no more disease. When the first Christians embraced Jesus as the one who inaugurated the messianic age, they found in him the healing that was long promised.

So if we can rejigger our understanding of sin, we can see how Jesus died for our sin. Jesus doesn’t just wipe away our sins: he bears them; he carries them. And on the cross they crush him, just as they so often crush us. But three days later, at the resurrection, Jesus the Christ, the Risen Lord, overcomes the very ailment that crushed him. In his rising, we see that the ailment of sin that is endemic to our human condition is not the end of the story. Sin is not insurmountable. Jesus rises to new life, still bearing the scars of his earthly torture but finally overcoming the consequences of sin. And as Paul makes clear over and over again in his letters, we are promised this same new life. We can live in the midst of the illness of sin with the hope that we, too, can overcome it. The good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection is that in Jesus of Nazareth, God entered fully and completely into solidarity with us so that we can find solidarity with God in the Risen Christ.

We’ll Never Be Alone Again

What have we learned? From the beginning of time, God has practiced humility and self-limitation. Maybe it’s the only way that God could be in an authentic relationship with finite creatures, or maybe it’s because God simply thought it best, but in either case God started by retreating enough to create the cosmos. Then God withdrew enough to let Israel chart its own course, for both good and ill. And ultimately God was humbled in a way that neither the Hebrews nor the Hellenists had thought possible, by inhabiting a human being—for that matter, a human being of humble origins. God built a bridge between humanity and divinity, and then God walked over it.

When God fully entered the human experience in Jesus, new vistas of understanding were opened. Joy, pathos, trial, temptation, happiness, grief—God went from observer to participant in the whole gamut of human existence.

And then some things you’d never expect God to experience—existential loneliness, godforsakenness, atheism, death—even that became part of the life of God. In the Garden, Jesus prays for a reprieve, and he receives no answer. And on the cross, just moments before his death, Jesus cries out in anguish and dereliction, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” That is the pivot point of all cosmic history, for in that moment God became fully human. Only when God felt abandoned, alone in the universe, did God gain total empathy with the human condition.

Many have tried to explain just what shifted in the God-human relationship because of Jesus’ death. Almost all have assumed that the change took place in us. God never changes, they assumed, so the crucifixion must change us—or it must fulfill some requirement that God had that we can’t fulfill on our own. And that’s not wrong, for surely the crucifixion changes us, just as it changed Jesus’ disciples who witnessed it. But it also changed God.

For two millennia, Christians have found in Jesus a brother, advocate, and friend. Uniquely among the world’s religions, the Christian church has preached a personal God, a God who wants to be in an intimate relationship with us. God is no longer the abstract, immaterial concept of the Greeks, nor is God the fearsome warrior of the Hebrews. Now God is our friend. “Friend of sinners!” was an insult hurled at Jesus, but in fact it’s both a compliment and our hope.

The beauty and power of the resurrection is that our friend didn’t just die on that cross. He lives on, offering us ongoing friendship. Even death couldn’t kill this friendship between God and humanity.

And even more than that, God offers us the ceaseless presence of the Holy Spirit—described in the Bible as the power of God, our Advocate, our Comforter, and our Counselor.

In other words, everything after the crucifixion is meant to ensure that we never again feel forsaken by God. The resurrected Christ is our everlasting friend, and the Holy Spirit is the abiding presence of God. We may at times feel alone, but since the crucifixion God has made sure that we aren’t alone.