The Cross and the Kingdom

Salvation is a favourite topic of Evangelicals. The Gospel in a word. The point of the cross. We are pretty clear on what we are saved from - our personal sins that separate us from God. Thanks to the cross, we are able to have a relationship with God. Ideally, we are sanctified a bit along the way. Then we die and go to Heaven.

This is the way I learned the gospel. This is the way I have explained the Gospel to others. I don’t believe this any more.

Through the journey of the last ten years, it seems to me that this Gospel summary is hardly Gospel at all; rather it is a myopic picture of the smallest aspect of Christ’s work on the cross and God’s purposes for the cosmos. Salvation, personal and corporate, in the narratives of Israel and the teachings of Jesus is a far more complicated and all-encompassing idea than just providing atonement, propitiation, satisfaction, and any other polysyllabic theological word on behalf of my personal sins.

The brokenness of this world is hard to miss. We know that all creation groans, longing to be freed from the mess, repaired, recreated. It is into this larger context of brokenness that our personal sins fit. No one sins in a vacuum - in all our actions we are simultaneously responsible agents and victims of other people’s sins, structural sin, cosmic brokenness. Being victims does not absolve our personal responsibility but neither does freedom-of-choice negate the real sin and evil of the world around us. It is into this complicated and messed-up world that we hear the message of the prophets and Jesus himself - the in-breaking Kingdom of God.

From Jesus’ parables, we know that the Kingdom is a kingdom of grace, of turning the current order upside-down and setting things right that have gone very, very wrong. With the exception of one notable group, Jesus’ gaze toward others is one of grace and mercy. We see this in the woman who weeps over his feet in the house of Simon. We see it in his many healings of lepers. We see it in his casting out of demons (which interestingly also often lack a mention of the individuals sin). We see it in his calling of Levi and those he eats with that evening. We see it in Zacchaeus. We see it in the woman caught in adultery. Why does Jesus see these people with compassion? Not all of these individuals came to Jesus broken and repentant - some did like the prostitute, some became repentant like Zacchaeus, others were brought against their will and show no sign of anguish over their sin like the woman caught in adultery. And yet, in Jesus all found compassion, healing, and freedom.

When we look at each of these examples and consider the setting, the social circumstances, and the societal structures, we see that no one existed in isolation, committing their personal sins apart from the larger system of brokenness. Matthew and Zacchaeus both were making a living working for the empire, making money in the way that tax-collectors did. Yes, it is wrong to defraud people, but the entire system of empire and oppressive taxation is also wrong. The prostitute and the woman caught in adultery were both wrong in their sexual decisions but so were the men who employed, objectified, and abandoned them, as was the social system that offered no opportunity for women without family. Only the Pharisees and religious authorities seem to provoke Jesus’ anger - interestingly enough, they are the ones who are concerned with personal purity and piety and who are responsible for at least some of the societal systems that condemn, oppress, and alienate.

Let’s consider a modern example. A 14-year-old Christian girl has a distant and verbally abusive single mother and doesn’t know her father. In her search for love, she sleeps with her year-10 boyfriend and becomes pregnant. Afraid to tell anyone, she has an abortion. When that relationship comes to an end, she continues to have sexual relationships with other men, and eventually, due to disappointment and frustration, women. Is she sinning in having sex with all these people? Did she sin in having an abortion? What if she was raped by her uncle rather than sleeping with her boyfriend; does that change our attitude toward her? Does it change the nature of her sin? These are the real complexities among which all our actions take place and among which our sins are committed. It begs the question, is her personal sin really the biggest problem here or is it the dysfunctional family and society in which she lives that fosters alienation and abuse?

The cross is truly the way of forgiveness and freedom, but it is much bigger than my personal sin. Throughout the gospel of John, Jesus makes it clear that his work is for the world, the cosmos. Jesus’ death is to fix for the brokenness of the whole mess and to provide the means of freedom, restoration and wholeness for the whole world. We often forget that forgiveness happened in the Old Testament - there is no evidence in Law or the prophets, and certainly not in the poetry, that the forgiveness that YHWH gave his people throughout the history of Israel wasn’t real forgiveness. But this forgiveness didn’t change their very nature as human beings. What Jesus’ death offers is freedom from sin, which makes us a totally different order of human – we are recreated humans, and that is evidenced as we are filled with and empowered by the very spirit of YHWH himself.

Over the past ten years, I’m beginning to see that the cross is about the complete undermining of the current world order, it is the sacrifice to redeem it all, to restore completely our systems, our societies, our relationships, ourselves. It is this revolutionary and comprehensive grace, freedom, and restoration that is the heart and character of the Kingdom of God. In the same way that we cringe at the “Christian” who uses grace as a means for “sin to abound” so we ought to cringe at the “Christian” who uses grace as a means of personal salvation, failing to engage in the radical restoration for the cosmos as a whole. As we, filled with the Holy Spirit, become formed into the image of Jesus, we get to partner with God in bringing his freedom and his restoring, recreating Holy Spirit to all the broken systems, oppressive structures, and exploitative practices that keep all of creation, even those created in the very image of God, in slavery.

Our job, friends, is not to continue affirming the fallen-ness of things but to usher in the Kingdom of God, the restored, recreated, upside-down new heaven and new earth for which Jesus gave his life and which he guarantees in his resurrection.