God's Problem (20 page)

Direct Links Between Suffering and Salvation

The idea that God could make something good come out of something evil, that salvation could emerge from suffering, eventually took a turn in the thinking of some of the ancient writers, a turn toward the suggestion that salvation in fact
required
suffering. This turn had already been made by the time we reach Second Isaiah, the prophet of the Babylonian exile whom we met in chapter 3. As you’ll recall, Second Isaiah speaks of “the servant of the L
ORD
” who suffers on behalf of the people, and whose suffering in fact brings about God’s salvation:

As I tried to show earlier, the prophet himself identifies this “suffering servant” as the nation of Israel (e.g., Isa. 49:3: “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.”). In its original context, Isaiah 53 was insisting that the suffering of the exiles in Babylon had “paid” for the sins of the nation and that, as a result, salvation could now come. The people would be forgiven and returned to their land, where they would enter into a restored relationship with God. The suffering of exile, then, was vicarious suffering: the pain and misery of one was counted as a kind of sacrifice for another.

This is the way the passage came to be read later by Christians, but with a decided twist. In their view, the “suffering servant” was not exiled Judah; it was an individual, the future messiah, whose suffering and death would be considered a sacrifice for the sins of others. Although none of the New Testament authors ever explicitly quotes Isaiah 53 to show that Jesus himself was the “suffering servant” who “was wounded for our transgressions,” the
thought
of Isaiah 53 appears to stand very much behind the doctrines of atonement that we examined in chapter 3. Without citing the Hebrew Bible passage directly, for example, Paul speaks of “the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as an atoning sacrifice that comes through faith in his blood” (Rom. 3:24–25).

An even more poignant statement can be found in 1 Peter 2:22–24, which speaks of Christ’s passion as follows:

Here Isaiah 53 is clearly in mind and alluded to, although not explicitly quoted.

My point in looking at passages like this in chapter 3 was to stress that their logic of atonement is predicated on a classical model of sin leading to punishment; without a punishment, no reconciliation is possible for sin. Now we are examining a close corollary from a slightly different perspective. Not only does sin lead to punishment (hence Christ had to suffer if he was to deal with sin), but suffering can be redemptive (this suffering for sin brings about salvation).

This is Paul’s teaching throughout his letters. As he states in 1 Corinthians: “For I handed over to you as of first importance what in turn I had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3). Paul was particularly committed to this idea that salvation could come only through the suffering and death of Jesus. As he reminded the Corinthians, for example, “I decided not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ—and this one crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). In other words, in Paul’s proclamation of the gospel, it was only the suffering death of Jesus that brought salvation.

To make sense of Paul’s doctrine of salvation through Jesus’ death, we need to dig a bit deeper into Paul’s thought. Paul may be one of the favorite authors of many Christian readers today, but in fact he is very difficult to understand in places, even for professionals who devote their lives to interpreting his writings. Paul was a
deep thinker, and occasionally an obtuse writer. All the same, one thing is patently clear from his letters: Paul was firmly convinced that a person could be put in a right standing before God not by keeping the prescriptions of the Jewish Law, but only by having faith in the death of Jesus.

One of the problems that Paul confronted in his life and ministry involved the numerous non-Jewish people converting to become followers of Jesus. Jesus himself, of course, was Jewish, as were his disciples. Jesus was born a Jew (as Paul himself admits; Gal. 4:4), he was brought up a Jew, he worshiped the Jewish God, kept the Jewish Law, followed Jewish customs, became a Jewish teacher, gathered Jewish followers, and taught them what he considered to be the appropriate interpretation of the Jewish Law. For many in the early church, then, it made sense that anyone who wanted to be a follower of Jesus first had to become Jewish. For Gentile men this meant that they had to be circumcised—since circumcision was required of all Jews by the Torah itself—and for both Gentile men and women, it meant keeping sabbath, observing Jewish food laws, and so on.

Paul, however, thought otherwise. For Paul, if a person could be made right with God by converting to Judaism and keeping the Jewish Law, there would have been no need for Jesus to have died in the first place (Gal. 3:21). The fact that Jesus—God’s messiah—died must mean, in Paul’s thinking, that God wanted him to die. And why was that? Because there needs to be a perfect sacrifice for sin: sin requires punishment, and Jesus bears the punishment. Out of pain comes salvation; Jesus’ pain, our gain.

But there was more to it than that for Paul. In one passage of Paul’s letters, he indicates that Jesus specifically had to be crucified. Why couldn’t he just die of old age? Or if he had to be executed, why not by stoning? This is where it gets a bit complicated. Paul believed that even though the Law of God was a good thing—it was, after all, the law God himself had given—it had ended up bringing a curse upon people. People were controlled by forces of
sin and were driven to violate the Law against their own (and God’s) will. And so the Law, rather than bringing salvation, brought a curse. It commanded obedience but did not provide the power for obedience. As a result, everyone stood condemned, under the curse of the Law (see Rom. 7).

In Paul’s thinking, Christ took the curse of the Law upon himself. He did this by being cursed by the Law. As Paul states it in one of his denser passages: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’” (Gal. 3:13). Paul is here quoting a passage from the Torah, Deuteronomy 21:23, which originally indicated that a person was under God’s curse if his executed body was exposed by being hanged on a tree. Well, in a sense Jesus’ body was hanged on a tree, precisely because he was crucified (rather than, say, subjected to stoning). The fact that he was hanged on a wooden cross (tree) showed that he was cursed. But he must not have been cursed for anything that he himself did—after all, he was God’s messiah. Paul indicates, then, that Christ must have taken the curse of others upon himself, by being cursed on the tree. And so by suffering the death of crucifixion, Jesus removed the curse that lay upon others for their violation of the Law.

Salvation required suffering. For Paul, even more than that, it required the horrific suffering of crucifixion.

A Vivid Portrayal of Salvation Through Suffering

Paul’s letters predate by some fifteen or twenty years the first of our New Testament Gospels, Mark. Scholars have long wondered whether the Gospel writers were influenced by Paul’s writings. At the end of the day, it is difficult to know for sure. Never do the Gospels quote Paul, obviously, and in many respects their views stand at odds with Paul’s: Matthew, for example, appears to teach that followers of Jesus
do
need to keep the Law (see Matt. 5:17–20); and there is a real question of whether the Gospel of Luke teaches a doctrine of atonement.

But Mark’s Gospel clearly does, as we have seen. In Mark, Jesus declares that “the son of man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45; a verse that Luke omits).

Mark’s view that the horrible suffering of death is itself redemptive can be seen with particular clarity in his account of the crucifixion itself. When I teach this passage to my students, I constantly remind them that when they are reading Mark’s account, they are
not
reading Luke’s or John’s. Each author has his own way of portraying Jesus’ passion, and we do a disservice to all of them if we pretend they are saying the same thing or have the same understanding of what the crucifixion meant, theologically.

The sheer pathos of the scene is striking in Mark (chapters 14–15). Jesus is silent during the entire proceeding (unlike, for example, in Luke). He has been betrayed by one of his disciples, Judas; he has been denied three times by his closest follower, Peter. He has been rejected by the Jewish crowds, condemned to death by the Roman governor, mocked, tormented, and tortured by the Roman soldiers. While he is being crucified, both of the criminals crucified beside him mock him, as do the leaders of his people and all those who pass by to see him hanging there. There is nothing in the scene to mitigate the sense that Jesus himself does not understand what is happening to him or why: betrayed, denied, mocked, forsaken, and abandoned. At the end, in despair, he cries out his only words in the entire proceeding: “My God, my God, why have
you
forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). I take this to be a genuine question. At the end he felt forsaken by God, and he wanted to know why. He then utters a loud cry, and dies.

Even though, in Mark’s account, Jesus may not have understood what was happening to him, the reader does. For immediately upon Jesus’ death, Mark tells us, two things happen. The curtain in the Temple is torn from top to bottom, and the centurion who has just overseen the crucifixion cries out, “Truly this man was the son of God” (Mark 15:38–39). Both events are significant.

The curtain of the Temple that ripped in half was all that separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the Temple precincts. The
Holy of Holies was the place where God himself was believed to dwell on earth, in this otherwise empty room into which no one could go, except once a year on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) when the Jewish High Priest went behind the curtain to make a sacrifice for his own sins and then a sacrifice for the sins of the people. This curtain was what separated God from everyone else. And when Jesus died, according to Mark, the curtain was destroyed. In Jesus’ death, God is now available to everyone.

And the centurion comes to realize it. Many people (as we will explore later in this chapter) had trouble believing that Jesus could be the messiah, the son of God, if he was crucified as a lowly criminal. Would God let that happen to his messiah, of all people? The centurion is the first person in all of Mark’s Gospel to realize that yes, Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, not despite the fact that he was crucified but precisely
because
he was crucified.

Jesus’ death, for Mark, is a redemptive event. It is probably significant that Mark portrays Jesus as somewhat uncertain before the end. People in Mark’s own community may have been suffering persecution as Christians, and may have wondered if there could be any purpose, any divine intent behind it. For Mark there definitely is. Behind the scenes, God is at work in suffering. It is through suffering that God’s redemptive action is performed. Suffering brings salvation.

Salvation That Comes Through Rejection

Although the death of Jesus is the clearest instance in the New Testament of redemptive suffering, there are other instances as well, some of which have to do with the rejection and persecution of the early Christians.

The book of Acts, our earliest history of the Christian church, was written sometime near the end of the first century—it is often dated to 80–85
CE
—by the same author who produced the Gospel of Luke.
¹
Scholars continue to call this author Luke, even though
his work is anonymous and there are good reasons for thinking that whoever he was, he was not the Gentile physician who was known to be a traveling companion of the apostle Paul. It is fair to say, though, that Paul is this author’s ultimate hero; nearly two-thirds of Luke’s account of the spread of Christianity throughout the Mediterranean (the theme of Acts) is devoted to the missionary exploits of Paul. (Some of the things he says about Paul’s teachings and travels stand at odds with what Paul himself says in his letters; that is one reason for thinking that the book was not written by one of Paul’s own companions.
²
)