Did God kill Jesus? Short answer, no. Long answer, it's why we're making a video. First of all, thanks for dropping by the channel. If you're not subscribed already and if you're intrigued by some of the work that we do here, then hit subscribe, and we can continue this conversation together.

That said, if you are really interested in this conversation, then stick around until the end. I have some information about my next book and how you can get an advanced copy if you're interested in reading about revelation through the peaceful lens of Jesus. But back to our question for today, did God kill Jesus? We have just made our way through Easter, and we are now in the season of Eastertide, which is the fifty day celebration of resurrection that follows, and that's lovely. But I think for a lot of us, particularly those of us steeped in the evangelical industrial complex, our relationship with Easter can feel a little bit complicated.

I mean, yes, we love resurrection, and we are glad that Jesus died, quote, for us. But sometimes there is also this sort of niggling feeling like it doesn't quite add up. God is the source of this beautiful story of triumph and life and all of the different ways that story takes root in us. Resurrection is lovely, sure, but why did it have to happen in the first place? If resurrection was always the goal, does that mean that death always had to happen?

And if that always had to happen, who gets the credit or perhaps better said, the blame for that death? Yes. Of course, it was humans who crucified Jesus. We know this. But is God the one who is ultimately pouring out wrath and anger and violence on Jesus in the cross?

So couple of things here to think about today. First of all, this framework comes from a particular theory of the cross called PSA or penal substitutionary atonement. And the PSA story goes like this. Sin is so powerful that it can actually separate us from God. And sin is so effective at that that the only way to overcome it is through a death or through the shedding of blood.

Now God desperately wants to forgive, but God is bound by the rules of sin management. This will often be described as God being both loving but also bound to uphold justice. So therefore, God institutes a series of sacrifices, animal sacrifices, to cover the sins of the people, allowing God to forgive. However, that is just a precursor to the real endgame, which is for God to be incarnated into the human story, to live a perfect human life, and then to be sacrificed back to God as the ultimate final sacrifice that can finally appease or propitiate God and end all sacrifice. And that is Jesus on the cross.

Now that said, in most PSA formulations, that ultimate final sacrifice is not as ultimate as you might actually think it is, because it doesn't actually forgive all sins. It enables God to forgive all sins. Humans, you and I, we still have to accept that sacrifice on our behalf and become Christians for God to actually forgive us. But this is actually a pretty recent innovation in Christian thought. It comes about, during the Reformation, so about five hundred years ago, and has its roots farther back in a guy named Anselm who wrote around the turn of the first millennia.

Now his metaphor for atonement and cross was the idea of a feudal lord who demands satisfaction from a peasant that has offended him. And I mean, what can a peasant offer to satisfy the offense that he's caused against a feudal lord? Well, not much else. And so another lord has to step in to make things right, to make satisfaction. But the story that we understand today of a legal framework, how we have a penal substitution penalty that comes about in pursuit of justice that comes from around the 15.

It's a transformation of what Anselm thought about, but contextualized in that moment in history. That kind of makes sense if you know a little bit about history. Around that time, monarchies are giving way to nation states all across Europe, and the driving worldview at that time is the shift away from divine monarchs that rule by fiat toward a citizenship that governs itself by certain inalienable rights. And those rights have to be protected in legal structures that become the backbone of this movement away from monarchy. And so it makes sense that around this time, the legal idea of breaking the law and paying a penalty becomes formative, not just for theology, but in all of the ways that humans thought about their lives and their place in the world.

Now I'm not a fan of penal substitution, and we'll get to why in a moment here. But I absolutely do understand why it was an appropriate and a contextual way of speaking about the cross. In a lot of ways, it democratized Christianity because now it wasn't just up to a priest if you were to be forgiven. There was a formula now, a system, a legal process that you could participate in and apply to to know that you were forgiven. Okay.

That's the good part. What's the problem? Well, first of all, it doesn't actually work legally. If my brother murdered someone and I said, look, I know he's a bad guy, but I love him and I will take his place and I will go to jail for the rest of my life, you would not still let my brother go free. That's just absurd.

The penalty applied to me has no restorative value for my brother. It also has no protective value for society at large. By the way, I don't have a brother, so you can sleep easy tonight. But this is just not how an actual legal system works. It's like parts of the system have been turned into a metaphor and applied to the cross, but it hasn't been brought over wholesale.

Which also brings us to a second problem. What is the point of the penalty in this story? Because it's not restorative, it's not protective, that means the penalty is entirely retributive. In other words, God just wants to punish someone. Now some people will say, no.

God wants to love, but God has to punish someone. God has to maintain justice. But I would say, well, one, we've already established that it's not really very just at all. And two, if God doesn't want to do this, why doesn't God just not do it? God is God.

God doesn't have to follow rules like the rest of us. God doesn't have to do anything God doesn't like. God is God. In fact, if God does have to follow rules, then God isn't really God at all. God is just the biggest being that we know of that is bound by a set of cosmic rules that somebody else has put in place, and that someone else, well, that is really God.

By the way, if you think about it, in that sense, the way that we have elevated our theological ideas above the concept of God actually feels like we've made ourselves God, but that's another story. A PSA works on a very superficial level, but the logic begins to break down quite quickly once you start to think critically about the whole story. Now, I should say that there are those who will say, no. It's hard to hear this, but it's true. God actually does just want to hurt sinners.

God does enjoy violence. God wants to pour out divine wrath on the world. And my problem with that, even though I do think it is more consistent with the PSA story, my problem with it is I don't think it's consistent with scripture. But also, I think if you believe in a god like that that is violent, you will inevitably find yourself becoming violent, and that, I think, is a real problem with a lot of our theology. I know Preston Sprinkle.

I was on his podcast a few months ago. He's a great writer on Christian nonviolence, and I absolutely believe his commitment to that story. But he will make the argument that nonviolence is for us as Christians, as creations of God. Violence is exclusively the domain of God. And I think that's his honest reading of scripture.

And I honestly, I I do appreciate how truthful he is about that hard truth, but I fear that if we honestly do believe that God is and God can be and God chooses to be violent at times, that we will eventually find ourselves in a situation where we justify that kind of violence to ourselves. And that's a problem because I believe not only that we should be thoroughly nonviolent, but that the reason we are nonviolent is because God is. Even more importantly though, I believe the scriptures are divinely inspired stories that point us to Jesus. But I also believe that Jesus is the divine logos or the word of God in the world that shows us who God is. Everything is like looking through a glass darkly.

Jesus is God revealed to us. So scripture points to Jesus, and Jesus illuminates God. And Jesus is entirely committed to the way of peace even to the point of death. What we see on the cross is a God who would die rather than kill. We are seeing God more clearly than we have ever seen God before on the cross, and that tells me that God is and always has been entirely nonviolent even if we didn't fully understand that.

So let's talk about some of those tough passages that seem to lead in different directions, and then we can talk about an alternative to PSA. First of all, one of the most important and famous verses when it comes to imagining God pouring out divine violence on Jesus on the cross is Isaiah fifty three ten. It's that famous line from the Psalm of the suffering servant. It was God's will to crush him. Sometimes this will even be translated, it was God's pleasure to crush him.

I mean, what do you do with that? Pretty clear. Right? God wanted to smush Jesus. Well, first of all, we should understand that that passage is generally not understood to be a messianic passage.

The Jewish people did not actually see this verse pointing to the Messiah at all, but to the suffering of Israel as they followed and stumbled their way toward God. Now granted, as Christians, we do read the Hebron scriptures differently than they did, and I think that's okay. I mean, as long as we're not trying to impose our reading or assume that our reading is the only one or the most intuitive one. I think it is important to understand that in the light of Jesus, we do read history different than other people do. But it's interesting that we have taken the Psalm of the suffering servant and applied it to Jesus when the Jewish people didn't even imagine it to be a passage about the Messiah.

And also understand this, the New Testament writers didn't seem to either. The New Testament very frequently uses images from the Hebrew scriptures, particularly from Isaiah, but not this one. And why is that? Maybe it's because the passage is not actually as clear as we think it is. In the Septuagint, which was the Greek translation of the Tanakh that was most familiar to Jewish people around the time of Jesus and when the New Testament writers were writing, this passage was translated very differently than it is in our Bibles.

Interestingly, the Old Testament in our Christian Bibles today are translated from Masoretic texts that were copied down around, 1,000 to 1,100 of the common era. So they're only about a thousand years old. The Septuagint goes back about 2,000, and it's a Greek translation of those same Hebrew scriptures. It's actually older than the Hebrew manuscripts that our old testaments are translated from. But in that Greek Septuagint, it says not that it was God's will to crush him, but that it was God's will to cleanse him of suffering.

That's actually the line that most of the New Testament writers would have been most familiar with and would have had available to them when they were writing, a line that came from the Greek translation provided by the best Jewish scholarship of around the time of Jesus. Now the discussion of that translation and why it differs so wildly is too big for this video. But the point is this passage isn't not nearly as conclusive or tidy as we might have been told that it is. And particularly within Jewish thought, it has a much richer history of nuance and thought and complexity that we often don't carry with us into our Christian, conversations. Now hold on to that and think about a passage like Romans one eighteen, another famous one.

The wrath of God is being revealed against all of the godlessness and wickedness of the world. And, yes, that does sound like an angry God, and God is, in fact, pretty angry here. But look at what Paul says. You'll step back from maybe the ways that you've heard this used before and just read it at face value. God's wrath is being revealed against what?

The godlessness and wickedness of humanity. God is not angry at you and I. God is not angry at Jesus. God is angry at the sin, all of the hurt and the pain and the brokenness that we cause in the world. And, of course, God is angry about that because God is love, and therefore, anything that breaks love breaks God's heart.

So wrath as an image is there in our New Testament, but it's not retributive because it's not directed at those who sin. Wrath is restorative because it is directed at the effects of sin in the world. God's anger does not destroy. God's anger repairs what has been destroyed. Okay.

So let's go back to the cross now. What is happening there? Well, a lot is happening, obviously. That is part of the rich beauty and history of Christian theology. We have theories of the atonement, not doctrines of the atonement because we have always understood that the cross is too big to be reduced down.

Death is defeated because God enters into it with us on the cross. Amen. The powers of the world are shamed because God surrenders to them, and in that shows them to be powerless on the cross. Amen. The oppressed are liberated because God joins them in their suffering.

Amen. All of these are alternative stories to the PSA one that we talked about earlier. But also on the cross, Jesus takes our place in the ultimate expression of forgiveness and nonviolence, and we are made finally at one with God. Amen. Now you might ask, if Jesus takes our place, isn't that penal substitutionary atonement?

Aren't we back at that same story? Well, no, because there is no penal here. Absolutely. It is a clear biblical metaphor that Jesus is a substitute for all of us. That goes all the way back through all of the scriptures, even back to the scapegoat of Leviticus that takes on the sins of the community and then is driven out into the wilderness away from them.

And as Jesus comes into view carrying his cross, John says, behold the lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world and a callback to that image from Leviticus. So, yes, absolutely, God steps in for us, but it's not to absorb the hatred of God on our behalf. As we've established, God is motivated by love for us, not hatred for us. Though Jesus steps in to take our place and show us what sin has done, what sin is doing to us. One of the most powerful forces in human socialization is the presence of an outsider.

In fact, often we derive our social identity not primarily from who we are or who we are with, but often from who we are not or who we are against. We tend to form our in groups, and then we fight like hell to protect them. And the truth is this creates a form of peace among us. It's actually much easier to get along with each other when we know who the bad guys are. And this may have started by accident.

Some small tribal community, millennia ago, stumbled onto the idea that a scapegoat blaming someone for our problems and then casting them out made us all feel a lot better. Over time, that became ritualized into sacrifices and systems, but slowly, it came to shape the way that the human story was delineated. To be human is to have an enemy. That creates all kinds of justification for violence in our lives and all through the human story. Justification for violence, for greed, for in grouping, for punitive policing, for racism, for patriarchy, for all kinds of broken behaviors.

If we can show that one person is the source of our problems and we can push them aside, we can create all kinds of coherence, all kinds of cohesion and peace together. Now it keeps the peace, but only at the cost of those who are pushed away. And this is the root of our sin, the root of all of the justification for all of the violence that we have done all throughout human history. They are to blame. And so now Jesus comes along, one from God with no debt to human violence, when he consistently rejects every opportunity we give him to scapegoat someone else, and yet we still kill him.

In fact, we conspire together, all of us, his followers, his critics, his detractors, those in power, they all find a way to become complicit in his death. And yet in that moment, when Jesus is on the cross and all of our violence is directed at God, what does God say back to us? God says, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing. They don't understand the scapegoat mechanism. They don't understand this sinful drive to scapegoat another and drive someone else to put their sin on someone else.

This is God in Jesus accepting our worst and offering us an end to the cycle of violence. There is no retribution here. There is no anger here. There's no violence here. There's no God in opposition to Jesus here because this is what the wrath of God actually looks like.

It's against the sin of the world. It's against all of the ways that we turn on each other. God is angry enough at sin to become sin, as Paul says, to become our scapegoat, and in that, to open our eyes to all of our violence through all of human history, all of the ways that we have scapegoated, pushed aside, cast out, expelled, exorcised each other. Every time we push another away, a neighbor, another nation, every time we scapegoat in any of those examples, we always find a way to justify our sin. But here, with Jesus on the cross absorbing all of our hate and returning it to us with love, there is absolutely no justification for our actions, no justification for our violence, and in that, there is only the faithfulness of Jesus that justifies us.

God does not need a cross to forgive. God does not need blood to forgive. Those are images of the cost of God's forgiveness. They are not what enables God to do anything because God is God and God is love, which means God has always been welcoming, forgiving, embracing, finally, to the point where God reveals it all to us, showing us the cost of our sin and taking our place. The cross is a salvation that frees us from bondage to the idea that violence can be redemptive.

It is the divine example that should have put to death our imagination of sacrifice once and for all. Jesus takes our place. Absolutely. He absorbs the sin of the world, your sin and my sin, and he offers it back to us as grace. The cross is the wrath of God.

Absolutely. It is God showing us just how angry God is at everything that hurts us and just how far God is willing to go in order to fix it all. The cross is God killing Jesus, jumping through hoops so that God can finally forgive, not a chance. Because God is God, and God has always been forgiving all through the life of Jesus. The cross is so much more than a loophole.

It is the final expression of God's grace breaking into the world and freeing us from the imagination of sacrificial violence. And the most beautiful part of all this is, is that for two thousand years now, we have had this incredible myriad of ways that we have thought about the cross. This mosaic of images that allow us to move closer to the heart of divine love. Christ is Victor and the idea that Jesus enters into death and overcomes it for us. The escape though that reveals our violence to us and allows us to walk away from it.

Even PSA that shows us that there is a legal framework to approach God through and that we don't need to jump through the hoops of appeasing someone else. We can come directly to the grace and justice of God and appeal to that, and God will forgive us. Even in some ways, PSA has been profound. But understand that all these myriad of ways when they come together give us a more full, beautiful, more robust image of what is happening on the cross, and that in itself is the heart of the Christian story. That God's grace is too big to be captured in one story or one theory.

It is always in the multiplicity of ways that you share your story and I share mine, and we come to the cross and marvel at the grace of God that we are welcomed into that truth. Now, if you made it this far in the video, thank you. But I did promise a bonus, a chance to read and review my new book on the nonviolence of Revelation before it is released. There are limited copies available available to advance readers before the public release in July 2022. And if you are already interested in preordering a copy and reading it and would like to read it early, then you can head over to my website at jeremyduncan.ca.

Click on the books button, and then just below the image of upside down apocalypse, there is a button to join the launch team. Click on that, and we will get you set up with a link so you can download and get reading. I would love to hear your thoughts, even early as we make our way towards the public launch. But this idea that the way we think about God, the way that we understand the grace and the nonviolence of God is so important because it will inevitably seep into the ways that we treat our neighbors, our loved ones, our friends, and maybe just as importantly, our enemies. This is at the root, both of our conversation today, but also this nonviolent reading through the lens of Jesus that I wrote about in Upside Down Apocalypse.

So hit subscribe, ding that bell. We will see you Sunday. Thanks for making it this far. See you soon.