Fleming Rutledge The Crucifixion Quotes

From beginning to end, the Holy Scriptures testify that the predicament of fallen humanity is so serious, so grave, so irremediable from within, that nothing short of divine intervention can rectify it.

Here is an important distinction with far-reaching implications for Christian behavior. The deeds of Christians in this present time — however insignificant they may seem, however “vain” they may appear to those who value worldly success — are already being built into God’s advancing kingdom.

Perhaps the strongest statement we can make about the resurrection in this book about the crucifixion is that if Jesus had not been raised from the dead, we would never have heard of him.

Justice for everyone is an alarming thought because it raises the possibility that it might come upon oneself after all. As the author of Ephesians puts it, “by nature” we are all “children of wrath, like the rest of mankind” (Eph. 2:3).

The Son of God did not come to make good people better but to give life to the dead.

If our preaching does not intersect with the times, we are fleeing the call to take up the cross. We can learn from the example of Dostoevsky, who in The Brothers Karamazov used material that he read in the newspapers to give a human face to the problem of evil.

The truest way to receive the gospel of Christ crucified is to cultivate a deep appreciation of the way the biblical motifs interact with each other and enlarge one another.

Gross injustice demonstrates a basic premise: in our world, something is terribly wrong and cries out to be put right.

Although people feel blessed in the presence of a holy man who wants the world to be right and people to be happy, the holy man cannot make that happen.

The New Testament writings all presuppose that the fallen human race and the equally fallen created order are sick unto death beyond human resourcefulness.

If sin is not exposed, named, and renounced, then there has been no justice and God is dishonored.

Only those who are forgiven and who are willing to forgive will be capable of relentlessly pursuing justice without falling into the temptations to pervert it into injustice” (Exclusion and Embrace, 123).

If we think of Christian theology and ethics purely in terms of forgiveness, we will have neglected a central aspect of God’s own character and will be in no position to understand the cross in its fullest dimension.

God did not change his mind about us on account of the cross or on any other account. He did not need to have his mind changed. He was never opposed to us. It is not his opposition to us but our opposition to him that had to be overcome, and the only way it could be overcome was from God’s side, by God’s initiative, from inside human flesh — the human flesh of the Son.44 The divine hostility, or wrath of God, has always been an aspect of his love.

By becoming one of the poor who was deprived of his rights, by dying as one of those robbed of justice, God's Son submitted to the utmost extremity of humiliation, entering into total solidarity with those who are without help.

Sentimental, overly “spiritualized” love is not capable of the sustained, unconditional agape of Christ shown on the cross. Only from the perspective of the crucifixion can the true nature of Christian love be seen, over against all that the world calls “love.” The one thing needful, according to Paul, is that the Christian community should position itself rightly, at the juncture where the cross calls all present arrangements into question with a corresponding call for endurance and faith.

Resurrection in and of itself was not unheard of; after all, gods who died and rose again were ubiquitous in the ancient Near East. 22 The unique feature of the Christian proclamation is the shocking claim that God is fully acting, not only in Jesus’ resurrected life, but especially in Jesus’ death on the cross. To say the same thing in another way, the death of Jesus in and of itself would not be anything remarkable. What is remarkable is that the Creator of the universe is shown forth in this gruesome death.

Only God can execute a regime change in which the tyrannical Powers are displaced and overthrown. This is the story of the purpose of God, “which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fulness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph. 1:9-10).

begin to see that when we say God will “justify” rather than merely “acquit,” the action has a reconstituting force — hence the insufficiency of the courtroom metaphor “to acquit.” God’s righteousness is the same thing as his justice, and his justice is powerfully at work justifying, which does not mean excusing, passing over, or even “forgiving and forgetting,” but actively making right that which is wrong.

The imagery of rescue and victory places the themes of reconciliation and forgiveness into another context altogether, where they are brought in under the heading of God acting to make right what has been wrong (rectification). Then, and only then, can the whole complex of ideas and images be located where it belongs, on the battlefield of Christ against the Powers. This is the overarching panorama against which to place the imagery of the Great Assize, or Last Judgment.

The use of the term “the crucifixion” for the execution of Jesus shows that it still retains a privileged status. When we speak of “the crucifixion,” even in this secular age, many people will know what is meant. There is something in the strange death of the man identified as Son of God that continues to command special attention. This death, this execution, above and beyond all others, continues to have universal reverberations. Of no other death in human history can this be said. The cross of Jesus stands alone in this regard; it is sui generis.

The crucifixion is the touchstone of Christian authenticity, the unique feature by which everything else, including the resurrection, is given its true significance. The resurrection is not a set piece. It is not an isolated demonstration of divine dazzlement. It is not to be detached from its abhorrent first act. The resurrection is, precisely, the vindication of a man who was crucified. Without the cross at the center of the Christian proclamation, the Jesus story can be treated as just another story about a charismatic spiritual figure. It is the crucifixion that marks out Christianity as something definitively different in the history of religion. It is in the crucifixion that the nature of God is truly revealed. Since the resurrection is God's mighty transhistorical Yes to the historically crucified Son, we can assert that the crucifixion is the most important historical event that has ever happened. The resurrection, being a transhistorical event planted within history, does not cancel out the contradiction and shame of the cross in this present life; rather, the resurrection ratifies the cross as the way "until he comes.

Why did Christ “give himself up for us”? To whom was this “offering” made? What did this “sacrifice” accomplish, if anything? When we contemplate Jesus on the cross on Good Friday, what do we see? There is no dramatic rescue scene in view. Jesus does not seem to be taking anyone’s place. There is no obvious reason for his being where he is. All indications are that he is suffering a penalty for something he did not do; that much is clear. But what would lead us to conclude that he was being punished on behalf of someone else? Why does Jesus need to be sacrificed in the first place, and why, in the words of the familiar verse from Ephesians, is he being sacrificed for us?

The action of God’s grace precedes our consciousness of sin, so that we perceive the depth of our own participation in sin’s bondage simultaneously with the recognition of the unconditional love of Christ, which is perfect freedom. We recognize that love, moreover, not from the depths of the hell we were bent on creating for ourselves, but from the perspective of the heaven that God is preparing for us. In the victorious presence of the crucified and risen One, the whole company of the redeemed will throw off every bond and join in a celebration of mutual love and joy where no one will be a wallflower and everyone will be able to dance like Fred Astaire and Michael Jackson combined. Thus “Lord of the Dance” is truly an apt title for the risen Christ and for the kingdom of God: “The Great Dance . . . has begun from before always. . . . The dance which we dance is at the center and for the dance all things were made. Blessed be He!”10

The preaching of the cross is an announcement of a living reality that continues to transform human existence and human destiny more than two thousand years after it originally occurred.

In the Bible, the term “apocalyptic” (apokalypsis) encompasses a worldview in which the truly significant battle is the ongoing one between the Lord God of Sabaoth2 (Hebrew, meaning armies) and the Enemy, who deploys the principalities and Powers (Eph. 2: 2). This contest on the heavenly level is enacted on the earthly level by struggles large and small in the realm of human affairs —battles waged not with worldly weapons but with the spiritual armor of God (Eph. 6: 11-17). 3

The cross of Christ is the touchstone of our faith. From the beginning it has caused offense, as we have seen in Paul’s statement that the cross is a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles. It is typical of American Christianity, as of American culture as a whole, to push the cross out to the margins, because we prefer a more upbeat and triumphalist form of proclamation and practice. The Great Recession put a crimp in our style for a brief time, but it has not canceled out the disturbing trends in our culture toward self-centered lives based on consumption, sensation, and instant gratification —all this coinciding with the exponential growth of the gap between the superrich and the struggling middle class, not to mention the gap between those barely holding on and the truly poor. The “word of the cross” (I Cor. 1: 18), in contrast, calls the Christian community to embrace struggle on behalf of others as the way of discipleship.

To summarize, then: the crucifixion is the touchstone of Christian authenticity, the unique feature by which everything else, including the resurrection, is given its true significance.

Christian faith has never — either at the start or now — been based on historical reconstructions of Jesus, even though Christian faith has always involved some historical claims concerning Jesus. Rather, Christian faith (then and now) is based on religious claims concerning the present power of Jesus. . . . Christian faith is not directed toward a human construction about the past; that would be a form of idolatry. Authentic Christian faith is a response to the living God, whom Christians declare is powerfully at work among them through the resurrected Jesus.55

Theologian Bruce L. McCormack puts it well: God will not allow anything to stand in the way of his love. The holiness of the divine love is its irresistibility. God’s will to love the creature will not be stopped by the will of the creature to resist that love. God’s love will reach its goal, even if the path to that end lies through condemning, excluding, and annihilating all resistance to it. God’s love turns to wrath when it is resisted, but not for a minute does it cease to be love even when it expresses itself as wrath.

the meaning of Christmas is that God is invading the territory held by the Prince of Darkness. The definitive closure of this cosmic invasion, the V-Day to its D-Day, will be the final Day of God. 190 On that last day there will be only one Ruler, only one Lord. Scripture is quite clear and unambiguous about that. The Judge of all the cosmos will not be Satan. Radical evil will have no status in the day of judgment, or the day of final reconciliation, as Volf calls it. 191 “Death shall have no more dominion” (cf. Rom. 6: 9). If evil is the absence of good, then the victory of our Lord and of his Christ will be the absence of evil, “for ever and ever.

The Christian life of obedience is, therefore, not a pilgrimage toward a goal, as is commonly supposed. It is a witness or signpost to that telos (end, goal) that has already been achieved by Christ the Kurios and will be consummated in the last day by the action of God

should be clear by now that this making-right, or rectification, is not a process. It is already true, in Christ; but it is true eschatologically, from the perspective of the End. The now–not yet dynamic is operative here, as always.

Christ’s recapitulation of the human story does not simply invite us into the divine life. There is an objective reality about it; it has happened over our dead bodies, so to speak.

Wonders occur in groups that study the Bible together, because the Word has power to create a community of discovery that is much more than the mere sum of its individual parts.

In the cross of Christ, we see something revolutionary, something that undercuts not just conventional morality but also religious distinctions across the board. Christ has died for the ungodly, the unrighteous

reflect the new way of seeing: the human situation is so tragic that there is no answer from within history. The Christ event is therefore the invasion of this world by Another, who is retaking for himself the world he created.

the gospel is a message of deliverance from the grip of evil and Death.

Jesus’ public ministry . . . was not a drama played out on an empty stage. . . . Especially in a creation infested with sin, the proclamation and enactment of the kingdom of truth and justice is never an act of pure positing, but always already a transgression into spaces occupied by others.

Indeed, “theory” is a poor word to choose when seeking to understand the testimony of the Bible. 14 The Old and New Testaments do not present theories at any time. 15 Instead, we find stories, images, metaphors, symbols, sagas, sermons, songs, letters, poems. It would be hard to find writing that is less theoretical.

It is God’s new creative act, his great reclamation project that is even greater than the creation itself, because whereas we are “wonderfully created,” we are “yet more wonderfully restored.”30

Christologies on a spectrum showing the extent to which they allow the human weakness or the divine power of Jesus to become apparent, Mark would be at one end and John at the other, and in between Matthew would be closer to Mark and Luke closer to John. Yet the portrayal of Jesus in John and in Luke is not the same. The Johannine Jesus does not manifest the forgiveness and healing bestowed by the Lukan Jesus; the Lukan Jesus does not exhibit the hauteur and the power evident in the Johannine Jesus. 41

Few outside academia would know that the incongruities so frequently cited today as proof of the Bible’s unreliability were noted many centuries ago by such as Origen and Calvin.

logizomai) or “reckoning” of the sinner as righteous (dikaiosyne) is not a “legal fiction” as it has sometimes been called. It is not simply a declaration of amnesty, which would be the “passing over” of sin — an unacceptable solution that we have been protesting against for several chapters. It is actually a speaking (“wording”) into (logizomai) righteousness. That is what God’s Word (logos) is able to do. In the Old Testament, God’s Word is performative; it creates what it names.

101 God’s justification of sinners is not a forgetting, nor is it simply forgiveness. It is a definitive, wholesale, final assault upon and defeat of Sin, understood as a Power, and the creation of a new humanity.

the two poles of Christ’s exalted divinity and his suffering humanity as explicitly as does Hebrews. The result of this undertaking — the salvation of humanity — from out of the inner being of the Holy Trinity is, incredibly, that the hearts and minds of sinful human beings should be eternally perfected and at rest in the near presence of the heavenly Father.

it should now be generally agreed that any concept of hilasterion in the sense of placating, appeasing, deflecting the anger of, or satisfying the wrath of, is inadmissible. The more important, and truly radical, reason for firmly rejecting this understanding of propitiation is that it envisions God as the object, whereas in the Scriptures, God is the acting subject.99 This is especially noticeable in Romans 3,

The case being tried involves a question of ultimate truth — the question of who God is and where he stands; and for just that reason, it is God who will inevitably do the judging.

the wrath of God is always exercised in the service of God’s good purposes. It is the unconditional love of God manifested against anything that would frustrate or destroy the designs of his love. A

The true “punishment” for sin, Paul is suggesting here (and Paul conspicuously never uses the word “punish”), is Sin itself.

The drift away from the Bible has weakened the church.

becomes clear that whereas life in Christ results in obedience, this “obedience of faith” (Rom. 1:5; 16:26) is not accomplished by a human choice of one of two ways.25 There is a decisive difference between a call to obey and a transfer to a new world

God’s justice, as Desmond Tutu insisted, is not retributive but restorative.64 It is natural that many do not understand this, because “God’s love, resisted, is felt as wrath.

Oh villain! Thou art condemned into everlasting redemption. Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing

In the present time, God’s “wording” (logizomai) of his new creation proceeds largely in a hidden way. The invincible transforming power of God’s coming future is acting simultaneously in and through the deeply flawed realities of the present human situation.

verse 4 in chapter 14, for instance: “Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To his own kurios (master) he stands or falls. And he will stand, for the Kurios (Master or Lord) is able to make him stand” (NIV).

For Paul, it is not God, but the curse of the Law that condemned Jesus.76 In his death, Paul declares, Jesus was giving himself over to the Enemy — to Sin, to its ally the Law, and to its wage, Death (Rom. 6:23; 7:8-11). This was his warfare. That is one of the most important reasons — perhaps the most important — that Jesus was crucified, for no other mode of execution would have been commensurate with the extremity of humanity’s condition under Sin.

the entire human race is heir to what John Henry Newman called a “vast primordial catastrophe,” and that only a stronger power from outside ourselves can repair the breach.

In other words, God’s righteousness involves not only a great reversal (“the first will be last”) but also an actual transformation and re-creation.

the central idea in the concept of justification (dikaios). The righteousness of God is the same as his power to make righteous — to rectify what is wrong.

Although in the present day, “evil” has become the preferred word, Sin and Death with their captive the Law are, for the apostle Paul, the sum of all evil.

there has never been a satisfactory account of the origin of evil, and there will be none on this side of the consummation of the kingdom of God. Evil is a vast excrescence, a monstrous contradiction that cannot be explained but can only be denounced and resisted wherever it appears.64

Furthermore, we are so accustomed to seeing the cross functioning as a decoration that we can scarcely imagine it as an object of shame and scandal unless it is burned on someone’s lawn.

As Placher well knew, there is no analogy from the side of the fallen creation that “works.” None of the symbols, images, motifs, and themes “work” in any logical way, either as analogies or as theories to explain what God in Christ is doing on the cross.

The truest way to receive the gospel of Christ crucified is to cultivate a deep appreciation of the way the biblical motifs interact with each other and enlarge one

The New Testament is from beginning to end a living witness to the apostolic preaching. The cross was meant to be preached.

It is the living significance of the death of Jesus, not the factual details concerning it as a historical event, that matters.

The work of theology is the process by which the church continually rethinks its message.17

The Christ event derives its meaning from the fact that the three-personed God is directly acting as one throughout the entire sequence from incarnation to ascension to Last Judgment.

The world’s religions have certain traits in common, but until the gospel of Jesus Christ burst upon the Mediterranean world, no one in the history of human imagination had conceived of such a thing as the worship of a crucified man.

We will be best enriched by the meaning of the crucifixion in all its manifold aspects, not just as an intellectual construct, but as dynamic, living truth empowering us for the living of these days.

There is no more important calling for the church in our time than claiming the self-identification of the God who is the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The unique feature of the Christian proclamation is the shocking claim that God is fully acting, not only in Jesus’ resurrected life, but especially in Jesus’ death on the cross. To say the same thing in another way, the death of Jesus in and of itself would not be anything remarkable. What is remarkable is that the Creator of the universe is shown forth in this gruesome death.

The deeds of Christians in this present time — however insignificant they may seem, however “vain” they may appear to those who value worldly success — are already being built into God’s advancing kingdom. In other words, Christians do not simply look to the cross of Christ with prayerful reverence. We are set in motion by its power, energized by it, upheld by it, guaranteed by it, secured by it for the promised future because it is the power of the creating Word that “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Rom. 4:17).

The believers of the future will be brought into the near presence of Jesus, not just in the sense that the stories of his life will be retold, but because the apostolic preaching, by the action of the Spirit, makes Jesus present.

The well-known passage in Micah 6:8 ('does the Lord require of you . . . ?') declares that justice and mercy are two foundational aspects of God's character. . . . forgiveness is by no means as simple or expeditious as is often suggested; it is a complex and demanding matter. The question of forgiveness and compensation really should not be discussed apart from the question of justice.

Therefore, so long as we live in this fallen world, we are simul iustus et peccator (saint and sinner simultaneously), until the destruction of the "old Adam" is completed as God makes all things new (Rev. 21:5; Isa. 42:9; 43:19; Gal. 6:15).

A policy of 'forgive and forget' can produce lasting harm on the political level as well as the personal. Peace without justice is an illusory peace that sets the stage for vengeful behavior later on. The strength to persevere in the struggle is found in knowing that the wounds remaining in human society after great atrocities are the wounds of Christ himself, now risen and reigning but still the Lamb standing yet slain (Rev. 5:6). The wrath of God, which plays such a large role in both the Old and New Testaments, can be embraced because it comes wrapped in God's mercy. . . . The wrath of God falls upon God himself, by God's own choice, out of God's own love. The 'justice connection' may not be clear to those who are accustomed to privilege, but to oppressed and suffering Christians in the troubled places of the earth, there is no need to spell it out. God in Christ on the cross has become one with those who are despised and outcast in the world. No other method of execution that the world has ever known could have established this so conclusively.

The scandalous “word of the cross” is not a human word. It is the Spirit-empowered presence of God in the preaching of the crucified One.

The Holy Spirit, so central to New Testament writings as diverse as those of Paul, John, and the author of Acts, inhabits the message and empowers the speaker, so that the proclamation of God’s act in Christ is the new occasion of creation, issuing from the Trinitarian power of the originating Word itself.

The scandalous “word of the cross” is God’s own Word. The link between scandal and God is in itself irreligious; this is another aspect of the uniqueness of the Christian message.

The question this raises is this: On the cross, was Jesus was simply “showing” us something, or was something actually happening?

Indeed, as some of the Protestant traditions recognize, the symbol of a cross per se can all too readily become a mere token or amulet leading to superstition and magical thinking. Even worse, when detached from its significance, it can and often has become a sign denoting allegiance to a cause that mocks the very One who died in that way — the cross of Constantine, the Crusaders, and the Ku Klux Klan.

There is a fundamental syntactical distinction between saying “we question the Bible” and “the Bible questions us.

In other words, the new understanding imparted by the Bible comes from a source lying beyond our ability to frame questions.

Thus, in Colossians 1:5-6, the Word is described not as the content of the apostles’ preaching and mission, but as the active agent, the subject of the verbs: “the word of the truth, the gospel which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and growing.

For example, gnostic devaluation of the material world offers two views of our sexual nature, both of them conducive to a libertine style of life. Either the sexual act is thought to be intensely spiritual, offering access to the divine, or it is a matter of no importance one way or the other, since the flesh is unspiritual. Either way, the gnostic is free of sexual restrictions. Paul seems to have some such teaching in mind when he says to the Corinthians, “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? . . . Shun [sexual] immorality. Every other sin which a man commits is outside the body; but the immoral man sins against his own body. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God?” (I Cor. 6:15-19). The biblical view of sexual relations is earthy and “fleshy” in a way that is utterly foreign to most “spiritual” thought. Paradoxically, the freewheeling sexual attitudes often seen in the various forms of gnosticism arise out of indifference to the lasting importance of the body. The idea that the indwelling Holy Spirit, God’s gift in baptism, puts a different valuation on the body (understood literally), with consequences for sexual behavior, is Christian, not gnostic. It is therefore not difficult to understand why some variation of the gnostic view would be very appealing in our permissive society.

In an earthier style, the African American preacher Johnny Ray Youngblood, whose lapses and deficiencies were well known to his congregation, declares: “This thing [the Word of God] is a two-edged sword. It whips back and cuts the hell out of me and then comes forward and cuts y’all. And the truth of God’s Word is not predicated on my lifestyle. It is predicated on God’s word itself. He sends sinful men to preach to sinful men. I’m just another beggar, tellin’ other beggars where to find bread.