Therefore in this moment Jesus and Israel were faced with an entirely new situation, and that new situation demanded a new interpretation. To argue that Jesus never spoke before about his blood, about substitution and atonement, is not to the point. It assumes that the existence of individuals and of nations is carried on outside history. But the new interpretation Jesus gives in this very moment when the people of God is at the point of squandering its election for the sake of the world does not happen just anywhere and at any time. It happens at the Passover meal, at one of the holiest hours of the Jewish year. Jesus interprets his death as a final and definitive saving decree of God. Israel’s guilt, concentrated in Jesus’ death, is thus answered by God: he does not withdraw election from his people but instead truly allows that people to live, even though it has forfeited its life. That is precisely what the Bible means by “atonement.”11
In this interpretation Jesus makes use of Scripture in masterful fashion. He is familiar, of course, with the texts about the Sinai covenant, sealed with atoning blood;12 he knows the texts about the new (= renewed) covenant that sets aside Israel’s sins after it has broken the Sinai covenant;13 he knows above all the texts about the Suffering Servant who gives his life and takes the guilt of the many on himself.14 The Servant, of course, is Israel,15 but Jesus can see himself as the embodiment of the true Israel.
In interpreting his death in the light of the Torah and the prophets, did Jesus deny his previous message? Precisely the contrary is the case. Jesus had proclaimed the reign of God as a reign of God’s mercy and kindness. When he now, in the crucial hour before his death, sets before the eyes of the participants in the meal in definitive signs that God is holding fast to the covenant with Israel, indeed, that God is renewing the covenant and assuring this people of new life in spite of everything, he reveals the true radicality of God’s mercy. We must truly say that only in the interpretation Jesus gives to his approaching death does his message of the reign of God achieve its ultimate power and shape. And here, with utmost clarity, appears definitively the “being for others” that was implied in his message from the beginning.
If there are again and again exegetes who simply deny that Jesus could have understood his death as an existential representative substitution for the many and an atoning sacrifice for Israel, that is not really based on questions of historical criticism. Their decision has already been made beforehand, long before the historical discussion has begun. Rudolf Bultmann made that clear, with the honesty that was his, when in his famous essay on “New Testament and Mythology” he wrote:
How can my guilt be atoned for by the death of someone guiltless (assuming one may even speak of such)? What primitive concepts of guilt and righteousness lie behind any such notion? And what primitive concepts of God? If what is said about Christ’s atoning death is to be understood in terms of the idea of sacrifice, what kind of primitive mythology is it according to which a divine being who has become man atones with his blood for the sins of humanity?
16
Precisely here the course is set for historical demonstrations that present themselves as logical and certain. People living in the wake of the European Enlightenment can no longer reconcile concepts such as representative substitution and atonement with the autonomy they have gained by so much struggle.17 But are they really irreconcilable? What is meant by representative substitution and atonement only becomes an irritant when the experience of the people of God has been forgotten. For life in the people of God, representative substitution and atonement are simply elementary. They detract nothing from the dignity and independence of the human being.
Representative Substitution
Israel’s existence always depended on individuals who believed with their whole existence. That the scarlet thread of salvation history was never broken depended on Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Amos, and Isaiah; on King Josiah, on John the Baptizer, and on many others. Others could enter into their faith and so come to believe in their own right. It is not a language game to say of Abraham that whoever blesses him will be blessed, and that through him all the families of the earth achieve blessing (Gen 12:3). Jesus’ representative substitution for the many is no exotic exception but the culmination and ultimate distillation of a long history of representation in Israel. Only by way of representative substitution can faith be handed on at all.
Nevertheless, representative substitution never means dispensing others from their own faith and repentance; it is meant to make both those things possible. True representation does not infantilize; it desires nothing more strongly than that the other should be free to act. It is done so that one person takes the place of another, not to “replace” that one, but to enable the other person to take possession of her or his own place.18
In this sense we depend on others, our representatives, from the beginning of our lives to the end. As children we needed our parents, who fed and clothed us, wiped our noses, and enrolled us in school, until finally we could do all that for ourselves. Then we needed teachers, who with endless patience taught us to read and write and do arithmetic. And that others help us, introduce us to new knowledge, lead the way for us by their abilities, show us solutions—that will go on till the end of our lives. Even as adults we are constantly dependent on the competence and abilities of others.
We could add example to example here. Every person, every society lives through an infinite number of representatives. It is the same with the people of God, which is an even more dense network of representation. For it is still more true of the life of faith than it already is for everyone: a human being needs help; on our own we would inevitably shrivel and die. Every believer lives out of the faith of another who preceded her or him in faith—parents, friends, great models of faith, the faith of the saints. Even to believe in the first place we need the help of others. The statement abstracted from Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, “You can because you should,”19 is highly questionable. Against the background of Jewish-Christian tradition it ought to be: “You can, if you are willing to be helped.” 20 The supposedly “autonomous person” who thinks she or he needs no help and no representative, of course, does have them: for example, the media that all too often think for us, shape us according to their dominant images, and thus incapacitate us without our realizing it. People always have representatives. It is only a question of which ones.
Atonement
The aversion of people today to the idea of atonement is even greater than their discomfort with the idea of representative substitution. There is, as we have seen, a serious reason for this. For today’s people atonement is only the “service” or “action” by which a debt is paid, or it is the “punishment” imposed by a judge as retribution for a crime committed. This puts a lot of baggage on the word “atonement” from the outset. Does God really want us to be punished for our sins? Or that someone else should be punished for our sins in our place?
The biblical idea of atonement means something different; in fact, it turns the notion of atonement common today on its head. Of course, that in turn raises the question whether we can still use a word when its content in the Bible is altogether different from what is understood by it today. Shouldn’t we just replace it with a word we can understand better, such as “reconciliation”?
In what follows I will continue to talk of “atonement,” because we are interested here not in the word itself but in the subject, what Jesus expressed in the sign-actions at his last meal and accomplished through his death. But I am fully aware of the language problem. Therefore in this section I will often put “atonement” in quotation marks, so that readers will know that this is not about the word as we understand it today. It is about what the Bible means when it uses the word.
What does the Bible mean by this word, so much misunderstood and so easily misinterpreted today? “Atonement” is nothing but representation carried to the ultimate, namely, representative substitution that often extends even to death for others. Of course, this descri
ption is inadequate; it is only an initial approach. We can only understand what “atonement” really means if we look at the difference between “atonement” in the Old Testament sense and in the world religions. In the latter the whole matter of sacrifice is often nothing more than a symbolic replacement to pay for sin, often even a self-punishment people impose on themselves to cause the deity to feel gracious toward them or to appease it. The religious person gives the gods something that belongs to her or him in order to receive something in return, something important to the person. Such people give something valuable, perhaps even what is dearest to them—even, it may be, one of their own children—in order to be certain of receiving what is desired.
With this sacrifice people seek to bring the powers that influence their lives to their own side. They perform an atoning sacrifice in order to be pure once more before the gods. Perhaps, they think, the punishments due them can be reduced by making a sacrifice. In any case, atonement falls within a diverse category of actions to be performed. The initiative comes from the human side, for the securing of one’s own life. For that purpose people develop a whole variety of cultic mechanisms, and in doing so they always run the risk of making use of the deity and rendering it instrumental to their own purposes.
Israel was familiar with all the atonement mechanisms just described. After all, it had been in Egypt and it was familiar with the cultic sites in Canaan. It had been exiled to Babylon and was aware of the rituals of atonement practiced there. It had seen through it all and rethought it in light of its experience of God. Essentially, it had turned the concept of atonement in the religions on its head. For in Israel all “atonement” proceeds from God, as God’s own initiative. “Atonement” is a new enabling of life given by God. “Atonement” is the gift of being able to live in the presence of the holy God, in the space where God is near, despite one’s own unholiness and constant new incurring of guilt. Effecting “atonement” means not appeasing God or making God amenable to reconciliation, but allowing ourselves to be rescued by God’s own self from the death we deserve.21
Israel knew that human beings cannot work off their own guilt and that both “atonement” and forgiveness must come from God. “Atonement,” like covenant and the forgiveness of sins, is God’s gracious order, into which the human being can only enter. In all this, biblical thought—at least as regards the power of distinction—is clearly different from the religions.
Certainly the real question has not yet been answered. We could state it somewhat as follows: If everything comes from God’s initiative, why is there any need for “atonement” at all? If God himself has created “atonement,” just as he created forgiveness, why not simply forgive? Why can God not simply decree: your guilt is absolved; everything is forgiven and forgotten? Why is it not enough for catechesis and preaching simply to speak of the immeasurable readiness of God to forgive, or of God’s endless love, or even of God’s “crucified love”?
The answer is: if I simply say “God forgives everything on condition that I acknowledge my guilt,” the reality is too quickly covered up. The consequences of sin are not really taken seriously. Sin does not just vanish in the air, even when it is forgiven, because sin does not end with the sinner. It has consequences. It always has a social dimension. Every sin embeds itself in human community, corrupts a part of the world, and creates a damaged environment.22
Even if God has forgiven all sin, the consequences of sin are not eliminated. What Adolf Hitler set in motion was by no means eliminated from the world by his death in April 1945, even if he was contrite and even if he himself was forgiven. The fearful consequences of National Socialism poison society until today, and they are still nesting in the lives of the surviving victims, even in the lives of their children and grandchildren.
So the consequences of sin have to be worked off, and human beings cannot do so of themselves any more than they can absolve themselves. Genuine “working off” of guilt is only possible on a basis that God himself must create. And God has created such a base in his people, and in Jesus he has renewed and perfected it.
Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary General of the United Nations, who died on 17 September 1961 in a plane crash near the border in Katanga while on a mission to try to resolve the civil war in the Congo, offers us a text that can help us better understand the connections we are discussing here. It is in his diary, published after his death under the title Markings:
Easter, 1960. Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who “forgives” you—out of love—takes upon himself the consequences of what
you
have done. Forgiveness, therefore, always entails a sacrifice.
The price you must pay for your own liberation through another’s sacrifice is that you in turn must be willing to liberate in the same way, irrespective of the consequences to yourself.
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This utterly penetrating observation, validated by Dag Hammarskjöld’s own life and death, makes it clear what is at stake when we talk of representative atonement: love forgives, but it cannot forgive the consequences of sin because they are long since buried within history. The chain of causality set in place by sin continues of itself. If love is genuine it therefore not only forgives but takes responsibility for the consequences of what the other has done. And that costs something. It cannot happen without sacrifice, and it can only succeed if many work to heal the consequences of others’ guilt. Dag Hammarskjöld indicates that when he says that one’s own liberation obligates one to give oneself for the liberation of others. So arises a new chain of causality that works against the causal chain of guilt.
When the New Testament tradition speaks of Jesus’ atoning death, it means that through his death—which was utterly and entirely death for others, self-emptying to the ultimate degree, agap in the most radical sense—he broke through the causal chains of evil in the world and created a new basis on which it is possible to work off the consequences of sin.
“Atonement” and the People of God
So Jesus’ death did not effect any magical redemption applied to the redeemed in some mysterious and opaque manner. That Jesus died for our sins does not mean that we ourselves need no longer die to sin. His death is not a substitute action but the cause and enabling of a process of liberation that goes on. But the social basis on which it continues is the eschatological people of God, which had already begun with the creation of the Twelve. But it was only Jesus’ self-surrender for the sake of Israel, even to death, that made possible the new chain of causality and endowed the world definitively with redemption and liberation. The Fourth Evangelist says it in an impressive image:
Standing near the cross of Jesus was his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home. (John 19:25-27)
This scene may indeed signify the legitimation of the Beloved Disciple as witness to the tradition.24 But there is something still more fundamental at work here: Jesus is founding a new family, the basis on which people who have nothing at all in common can join together in unreserved solidarity. It is the place where true reconciliation with God and one another is possible. But human beings cannot of themselves create that possibility. It must come from the cross and be founded in the death of Jesus.
I have tried to show that in Jesus’ death his message of the reign of God reached its most profound depths. When, at the Last Supper, he interpreted his coming death as a representative “atoning death” he did not take back his previous proclamation of God’s mercy but instead demonstrated the social reality of that mercy. God is not content merely to forgive. In the death of Jesus God bestows the social location where guilt and its consequences can be eliminated. A message about the loving Father God separated and isolated from that whole context
not only fails to recognize the powers in society; it also ignores the web of evil in history. It takes no account of the world’s reality. It is absolutely unworldly.
In view of Jesus’ previous proclamation, however, his death shows something different: it reveals in all clarity the hidden and humble form of the reign of God as I spoke of it at the beginning of this book, in chapter 2. The reign of God does not come without persecution and sacrifice. It comes precisely where Jesus himself can do no more, but surrenders and sacrifices himself for the sake of God’s truth. How did Jesus’ self-sacrifice look in its concrete form?
Chapter 17
His Last Day
It is impossible to write a life of Jesus with the fullness and linkage of events required by a biography. The gospels do not provide the material—with one exception, namely, Jesus’ last day. That can be rather precisely reconstructed on the basis of the passion account in Mark’s gospel. Behind Mark 14–15 there must stand ancient traditions, carefully handed down, and behind those traditions the memories of eyewitnesses, because these two chapters recount a connected set of events and offer an unusually large number of concrete details.
Merely a glance at the numerous personal names found in Mark’s passion account is enlightening: Simon the Leper, Judas Iscariot, Peter, James, John, Pilate, Barabbas, Simon of Cyrene, Alexander, Rufus, Mary Magdalene, Mary the (daughter?/mother?) of James the Younger, Mary the mother of Joses, Salome, Joseph of Arimathea. On the other hand, Mark does not speak of the current high priest by name. Matthew and Luke saw this omission and corrected it. In contrast to Mark, they name the high priest: he was called Caiaphas (Matt 26:3; Luke 3:2; cf. John 11:49). This could be evidence that the passion narrative Mark is drawing on is very ancient. The New Testament scholar Rudolf Pesch argued that if someone telling a story today simply refers to the president, in general the reference is taken to be to the one currently in office and not an earlier one.1 In the same way, the pre-Markan passion story spoke of the high priest. Does it then go back to the time when Caiaphas was still in office? He was high priest from 18 to 37 CE.
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