Triumph

        What happened on the cross?

        When it comes to theories of the atonement, one may be forgiven for thinking that there is only one choice. The “substitutionary atonement” theory, in which Jesus dies to placate God’s wrath toward sinful humanity, dominates the contemporary church. But there are other options. One of these is called Christus Victor, because it depicts the cross as the means and emblem of Christ’s victory over the powers that hold the world in bondage. The writer of Colossians 2:15 says of Jesus, “He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in [the cross].”

        The imagery comes from the world of first-century warfare, in which victorious generals would march home leading a triumphal parade, sometimes called simply a triumph, consisting of generals, soldiers, and booty they had captured. The enemy commanders had to bear the public shame of their defeat before the eyes of the victor nation.

        In Christus Victor, the predicament in which humans find themselves is not a sentence of death due to sin, but rather bondage to and oppression by what the New Testament variously calls rulers, powers, authorities, thrones, and principalities. Walter Wink says that a combination of factors go to constitute these powers. The actual human being holding a position of power is involved, of course, but there is also power invested in the position itself, and there is an inner spiritual nature that animates and finds expression in the outward form. Pontius Pilate, for instance, was a powerful person, but his power derived not only from his own personal attributes but also from the power inherent in the position of Roman prefect of Judea and from the spirit of Empire that he represented. In a similar way the high priests were the outward manifestation of the power of Tradition, Religion, and Myth that had molded the Jewish people over centuries.

        When the writer says Jesus disarmed the rulers and authorities and triumphed over them in his cross, not only is he making the counterintuitive claim that Jesus’s death on the cross signaled the defeat of those who conspired to put him there, but he is also saying that it wasn’t just the high priests and prefect who were disarmed and defeated. It was the whole system of oppressive power that created the conditions in which a good man like Jesus could be put to death. Jesus took on this “domination system” nonviolently throughout his whole life. The system used the violence at its disposal to put him to death, but God reversed the verdict, vindicating Jesus in the resurrection.

        By raising Jesus, then, God invests the cross with its meaning and power. God did not put Jesus there—the powers and rulers representing the domination system did that—but God did use Jesus’s death to disarm the system and make a public example of it. The powers exposed their true nature by condemning and killing the one who had come to disclose God’s true nature as nonviolent love, but in remaining faithful to his vision of God to the very end Jesus was able to absorb all their violence and hate within his own being. When he rose up on Easter morning, he brought the powers with him . . . as captive prisoners in his triumphal procession.

        So what happened on the cross? Did a vengeful God take out his wrath against humanity on his own son so that we could walk free? Or did the nonviolent emissary of a nonviolent God come up against a violent adversary and defeat it in the most unexpected way imaginable? I find the latter scenario much more faithful to the character of God that Jesus came to reveal. At the cross the justice and radically inclusive love of God encountered the oppressive violence and hate of the domination system . . . and won. Not by fighting fire with fire, but by flooding the darkness with light.