A Fresh Perspective

Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice said, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46). These words of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel are equivalent to Jesus’s words in John’s Gospel, “It is finished.” The Gospels of Mark and Matthew include only one saying of Jesus from the cross: His cry of abandonment, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The other six sayings of Jesus are found in Luke and John. In Mark and Matthew the emphasis is on Jesus as a participant in our suffering. Jesus shares our pain and loss. Jesus knows what it is like to feel forsaken, even by God. Jesus, for the most part, is a passive victim. In Luke and John, Jesus is still a victim, but he is not passive. There is no sense of Jesus feeling forsaken in Luke or John. In Luke’s portrait, Jesus dies as a courageous and faithful martyr. We need both portraits. We need to know that God suffers with us, that God identifies with our experiences of forsakenness and feelings of abandonment. But we also n...

“Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus makes three statements from the cross. The first we considered  in the last blog : “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” The second word above is also a word of lavish grace uttered to a criminal hanging on the cross next to Jesus. Only Luke has this promise of Jesus to the criminal. In Mark and Matthew both criminals ridicule Jesus. It’s possible that Luke’s version was part of the oral tradition passed down to him, though I think it is more likely that Luke intentionally altered Mark’s account to give us a snapshot of the gospel as he understood it. According to Luke this criminal exonerates Jesus: “We are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” Three times in Luke’s passion narrative Jesus is exonerated. First by Pilate, then by this criminal hanging with Jesus, and finally by the centurion at the end of the crucifixion scene ...

A phrase in the contemporary Christian song, In Christ Alone , has sparked a great deal of discussion lately. The phrase in question reads, “as Jesus died/the wrath of God was satisfied.”  The phrase reflects a particular interpretation of the saving efficacy of Jesus’ death that is popularly called substitutionary atonement. It is one of several ways Christians have tried to make sense of the rather loose and varied New Testament metaphors employed in reference to the atoning significance of Jesus’ death. This became the dominant view in the Western Church when theologian Anselm explained Jesus’ death as a satisfaction of divine honor using the framework of the feudal system in the 11 th century. Progressive Christians level numerous criticisms against any theory that would demand Jesus’ death by God as a payment/punishment for sin or satisfaction of divine justice, which would seem to legitimize violence and make God guilty of cosmic child abuse. The primitive de...