In his work on the Incarnation, St Athanasius asks why it was necessary for Jesus to suffer such a horrific and ghastly and humiliating death by public crucifixion? “Surely,” he speculates, “it would have been more suitable for Him to have laid aside His body with honour than to endure so shameful a death.” Why did Jesus not after a long life die quietly in his bed?
I find St Athanasius’ question arresting. If Jesus did have to die, and if a quiet, “natural” death was out of the question, then why not some more honorable death? Why not death in battle? Or by assassination? Better still, why not die as, say, Socrates died, with dignity and under his own power?
The answer, I submit, has to do with the nature of sin’s effect on human condition. It was inevitable – but not fated! – that Jesus would die this way, a death at the hands of the powers. This humiliating and ghastly crucifixion was perfectly fitting. Athanasius discerns the appropriateness of Jesus’ crucifixion:
Again, the air is the sphere of the devil, the enemy of our race who, having fallen from heaven, endeavours with the other evil spirits who shared in his disobedience both to keep souls from the truth and to hinder the progress of those who are trying to follow it. The apostle refers to this when he says, “According to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience” (Eph. 2.2). But the Lord came to overthrow the devil and to purify the air and to make “a way” for us up to heaven, as the apostle says, “through the veil, that is to say, His flesh” (Heb. 10.20). This had to be done through death, and by what other kind of death could it be done, save by a death in the air, that is, on the cross? Here, again, you see how right and natural it was that the Lord should suffer thus; for being thus “lifted up,” He cleansed the air from all the evil influences of the enemy.
I believe Athanasius is on to the truth.[1] Jesus’ death is a death at the hands of the powers, and it had to be just so. It was not “the Jews” or “the Romans” who killed Jesus, not Judas, Caiaphas, or Pilate, though all of them certainly bear some responsibility. Instead, it was the power structures under the sway of evil influences that brought him to the cross. As St Paul says, it was “the rulers of this age” who crucified him (1 Cor 2.8).
In saying this, Paul reminds us that we cannot separate the human, the institutional, and the supernatural as they bear on the specific, concrete situation, even if we can distinguish them abstractly. The powers, in all three senses, crucified Jesus, and Jesus overcame all of them.
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The apostles often speak of “the world,” referring to the totality of those structures and forces that are set against God. This is evident, for instance, in 1 Corinthians 1 and 2, where Paul speaks of the “rulers of this age” who operate according to “worldly wisdom” and “the spirit of the world.” It is clear also in Galatians and Colossians, where Paul speaks of the “basic principles of this world” (Gal 4.3; Col 2.8, 20).
We see, then, that “the world” is a way of referring to the influence of the powers. In that light, it is important to consider what the New Testament says concerning the world, for it will help us identify the powers and to know what our response to them should be.
As has already been mentioned, Satan is named as ”the god of this world” (2 Cor 4.4) and it is admitted that the whole world lies under his control (1 Jn 5.21). The world is given over to corruption, so that “everything in the world – the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does — comes not from the Father” (1 Jn 2.16). The whole world, says St. Paul, is a “prisoner of sin” (Gal 3.22). The world is “dark” (Eph 6.12), corrupt (2 Pet 2.20) and corrupting (Jm 1.27).
Christians are not possesed of the spirit of the world (1 Cor 2.12) and the Spirit at work among us is greater than the powers of the world (1 Jn 4.4). Christians are not to love the world (1 Jn 2.15), for
Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God (Jm 4.4)
Although the Scriptures make it unmistakably clear that the world is against God and that God is against the world, that is not the final word. God is against the world for the world. God has reconciled the world to Godself – even though the world does not (yet) know it (2 Cor 5.19). Christians are not the enemies of the world, but its allies, though they are treated as enemies. “We have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world” (1 Jn 4.14). As Bonhoeffer argues it is also the world, and not merely humanity, for which Christ died and was resurrected.
The reality of the world has been marked once and for all by the cross of Christ, but the cross of Christ is the cross of the reconciliation of the world with God, and for this reason the godless world bears at the same time the mark of reconciliation… A life of genuine worldliness is possible only through the proclamation of Christ crucified… (Ethics, 292).
The world remains the world because it is the world which is loved, condemned and reconciled in Christ… The “world” is thus the sphere of concrete responsibility which is given to us in and through Jesus Christ (Ethics, 229).
The death of Christ is the result of the world’s wisdom so that the cross is the sign of the world’s enmity toward God; the powers are against God, and they demonstrate this by their rejection of and killing of Jesus, who is God-with-us. Yet the cross is also the result of God’s “foolishness,” which overcomes the world’s resistance, and the unmistakable sign of God’s goodwill toward the world.
In the cross, Jesus defeats the powers – for their own good; as Bonhoeffer says, he dies so that the world might be truly the world, that human interaction might have the fulness for which it was intended. This is precisely what Paul argues in Colossians, where he claims both that Christ defeated the powers (2.15), triumphing over them by the cross, and that he reconciled them to God and to their original purpose (1.16-20). “The cross is therefore, at the same time, both the affirmation of God’s hatred of sin and its foul consequences (especially the defacing of his image in his human creatures) and the affirmation of his steadfast determination to save humanity and the world” (N. T. Wright, Colossians & Philemon, Tyndale NT Commentaries, 117).
The powers had to be defeated for they had been perverted, and were being used perversely. The Fall meant “a triple estrangement,” as Wright says: between God and humanity, humanity and the world (that is, the powers), and between God and the world. But God, being God, would not let this stand. “He came to his own…”
As N. T. Wright explains, the powers “angry at [Jesus'] challenge to their sovereignty, stripped him naked, held him up to pubic contempt, and celebrated a triumph over him.” Yet, on the cross
God was stripping them naked, was holding them up to public contempt, and leading them in his own triumphal procession – in Christ, the crucified Messiah. When the ‘powers’ had done their worst, crucifying the Lord of glory incognito on the charge of blasphemy and rebellion, they had overreached themselves… (Wright, 116)
Because of the cross, the resurrection means the arrival of new creation, of a new world in which all the “old” is overcome and “its behaviour, its distinctions of race and class and sex, its blind obedience to the ‘forces’ of politics, economics, prejudice and superstition” are rendered obsolete (Wright, 116-117).
How does the cross accomplish this defeat-for-the-sake-of-reconciliation? I’ll answer that tomorrow.
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[1] Of course, as St Athanasius knows, the “air” is not the gaseous substance which we breathe; instead, it is the sphere of spiritual dynamics and effects. This is not the place to discuss ancient cosmology, but this needs to be said: the idea that the powers – personal and impersonal – exercise their influence in human affairs via the “air” is not as odd to us as might first appear. Berkhof, rightly in my opinion, insists that the ancients intuited that the powers worked on us “from above,” that is, from a sphere that is beyond our explanation or control. He also notes that even we “enlightened” moderns speak of something being “in the air.”
