Rethinking the Cross
The cross isn’t about God hating humanity because of our sin; it’s about God hating sin because it hurts humanity.
Public Theology is based on the work of Zach W. Lambert, Pastor of Restore, an inclusive church in Austin, Texas. Zach’s first book, Better Ways to Read the Bible, will release on August 12, 2025 and is available to preorder today. All of the content available at Public Theology is for those who identify as Christian, as well as those who might be interested in learning about a more inclusive, kind, thoughtful Christianity. We’re glad you’re here.
Easter is coming. Since many of us are in the process of rethinking faith and how to interact with it in healthier ways, we need to rethink the framing of this holy day. Easter is crucial to the uniqueness of Christianity— our God did not sacrifice humans for himself but sacrificed himself for humans.
But most of us have heard Easter touted as a story about God’s violent anger toward humanity’s sin, an anger so raging that he had to pour out his wrath on something or someone, and that happened to be Jesus.
I have good news for you:
The cross doesn’t tell the story of a God hating humanity because of our sin; it’s about God hating sin because it hurts humanity. It’s not about defeating evil humans; it’s about defeating the evil that hurts humans. This distinction is vitally important.
The most famous sermon in American history (in my opinion) is called Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. It was written and preached by Jonathan Edwards in 1741, a man who many consider to be America’s most influential theologian. I have some serious issues with Edwards, one of the most prevalent being that he was an ardent defender of chattel slavery and an enslaver himself.
I also take issue with the way he taught so many people about the character of God. That part of his legacy lives on as he continues to be a huge influence in dozens of seminaries and for many of the most prominent modern theologians.
This is how he portrays God:
“The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked. His wrath towards you burns like fire; He looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire. He is of purer eyes than to bear you in his sight; you are ten thousand times as abominable in His eyes as the most hateful, venomous serpent is in ours.”
Yikes. Now, even though the language has been toned down over the last few hundred years, this idea that God is perpetually angry and disgusted with humanity is still a popular one in many churches and seminaries. The story goes that God’s anger and disgust at humanity was so great that it led him to pour out his wrath for us and our wicked ways upon Jesus, leading to his death on the cross.
In this version of the story, God plays an angry Father wanting to punish his children, but Jesus, playing the role of the protective Mother, stands in front of the children and takes the punishment from the Father as a substitute for her kids (a theological theory called “penal substitutionary atonement”). To be blunt, it’s an abusive and false picture of both who God is and what happened on the cross.
*Note: this interpretation also has some real theological problems when it comes to the Trinity because it claims that God the Father killed God the Son.
I could go on and on about this, but suffice it to say, I don’t think that version remotely resembles the story of the cross or the story of Scripture more broadly, especially when we consider Genesis and the story of how our faith began.
Scripture says that in the beginning, God created the world and everything in it, and he called it “very good.” It was filled with beauty and majesty and perfect peace between all living things, including God’s image-bearers: humans.
But not everything in God’s “very good” world was perfect. In Genesis 3 we are introduced to a serpent who is depicted as evil incarnate, the physical embodiment of the spiritual reality of evil in this world.
The serpent told humanity to break God’s rule and eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This temptation was about much more than fruit. Evil-embodied offered humanity the option to spurn God’s rule and be in charge of everything around them, including themselves. In short, evil offered humanity power.
It’s vital for us to understand that this was real power being offered and the temptation was too much for humanity. Adam and Eve gave into the influence of evil and inadvertently presented evil-embodied its first foothold in the world.
And when that happened, the abundant goodness of the relationship between God and humanity was broken. Humanity demanded to be their own rulers and God gave them their wish.
We get to be in charge. We get to rule.
But, unfortunately, we’ve invited something to rule alongside us, and it’s not the goodness of God. Scripture calls it:
“The prince of the power of the air…” Ephesians 2:2
“The ruler of this world…” John 12:31
“The god of this age…” 2 Corinthians 4:4
This is evil embodied and Scripture says it has come to “…steal and kill and destroy.”1
That it has been “…a murderer from the beginning and has nothing to do with the truth.”2
That it “…prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.”3
This Evil Embodied is the same one who was crouching at Cain’s door, pushing him to murder his brother, Abel.
The same one who whispered in Pharaoh’s ear to murder all of the Israelite children in Egypt to maintain his power.
The same one who battled against Jesus throughout his life and ministry.
The very same one that humanity has been giving into ever since.
And when we give into the influence of evil by hurting ourselves or or others, God grieves. The Bible calls this sin, and sin has consequences: broken situations and broken relationships.
This is where Jesus comes in. He is the offspring of the woman that God predicted would crush evil’s head under his heel. God doesn’t just want to forgive sin, he wants to fix the brokenness caused by it and, ultimately, do away with that brokenness for good. God saw humanity hurting and was compelled by his great love to help; in order to accomplish this task, he has to do away with the power behind sin: evil.
This helps us understand the why behind both Jesus’ life and death.
Think about the life of Jesus we see recorded in the four Gospel accounts - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It’s Jesus walking around and fixing the brokenness caused by evil and sin:
Healing the sick
Giving sight to the blind
Feeding the hungry
Setting slaves free
Pursuing justice for the oppressed
Making the marginalized feel seen and loved
And forgiving sins
As he does all of this, Jesus is declaring that the Kingdom of this World, the one led under the influence of evil, is no more. There is a new Kingdom, the Kingdom of God, and a new King, Jesus Christ.
This battle between good and evil begins to culminate on the night before Jesus dies on the cross. He is betrayed by Judas, arrested by the religious leaders, and proceeds to speak.
Then Jesus said to the chief priests, the officers of the temple guard, and the elders, who had come to arrest him, “Am I leading a rebellion, that you have come with swords and clubs? Why didn’t you arrest me in the Temple? I was there every day. But this is your moment, the time when the power of darkness reigns.”4
Jesus is allowing darkness to reign. He is inviting evil to do its worst to him.
“In the four gospels the story of Jesus is set in counterpoint with the story of evil: of the snake in the garden, the tottering tower of Babel, the power of Pharaoh killing the babies (think of Herod in the gospels), of rebellious Israel, wicked priests and kings, false prophets, idolatries to left, right and centre. Jesus goes on his way, announcing that this is how God is becoming king, and apparently drawing onto himself as though by a magnet all the evil in the world, from the shrieking demons in the synagogue to the plotting priests in the Sanhedrin and ultimately to the pathetic representative of the Ruler of the World.
Judas and Pilate merely bring into sharp focus what is going on all along. And Evil – Sin with a capital S – is gathered together into one place and does its worst, the worst thing imaginable, killing the one true Man, the one genuine Israelite, the Word made flesh.
The Gospels tell the story of how the power of evil in the world reached it climax. It’s like a vortex of evil coming to one point in order that then it’ll do its worst and so be exhausted. Unless we read the Gospels like this we are falsifying them. As we do when we chop them into tiny snippets and turn them into moral lessons, or even, heaven help us, into abstract theological lessons.
They are the living story of how the Lord of life drew the powers of evil on to himself and, by dying under their weight, disarmed and disabled them so that from now on they are a defeated rabble.”
N.T. Wright, How God Became King
On the cross, Jesus forgives our sins and begins reversing the brokenness caused by them. He goes to war with the evil behind sin. Jesus allows evil to do its worst, to kill him, but then he overcomes death with life by rising from the grave and declares once and for all that evil is no match for the love of God in Christ.
Through coming down as Jesus, God is doing for humanity what we couldn’t do for ourselves. Jesus made a way for restored relationship with humanity and broke the power of evil in our lives.
A Christianity which teaches that the cross was simply a vehicle for an angry God to forgive humanity is completely unrecognizable from the story told in Scripture. Not only that, it’s confusing. How many of you have ever wondered why Jesus had to die in order to forgive sins? It simply doesn’t make sense. Jesus constantly forgave sins during his ministry on earth and nothing had to die in order for the forgiveness to be effective, so why would God the Father need to exhaust his wrath to the point of murder in order to calm down enough to forgive?
No matter what Jonathan Edwards says, God is not some angry deity waiting on the edge of his seat to smite humanity, only held back by Jesus who pleads with him not to hurt us. We’ve taken a story about God crushing evil and made it into a story about God crushing his son. We’ve taken a story about God destroying sin and made it about God almost destroying us.
But the truth is that God doesn’t hate humanity because we sin. He hates sin and the evil behind it because they hurt humanity. I can’t emphasize it enough: Jesus did not come to save us from God’s wrath. Jesus, who is God in the flesh, came to save us from evil, sin, and death—the true objects of God’s anger.
“The crucifixion is not what God inflicts upon Jesus in order to forgive; the crucifixion is what God endures in Christ as he forgives… Jesus did not shed his blood to buy God’s forgiveness; Jesus shed his blood to embody God’s forgiveness!
God did not kill Jesus, but Jesus’s death was a sacrifice. Jesus sacrificed his life to show us the love of the Father. Jesus sacrificed his life to shame the ways and means of death. Jesus sacrificed his life to remain true to everything he taught in the Sermon on the Mount about love for our enemies. Jesus sacrificed his life to confirm a new covenant of love and mercy. Jesus sacrificed his life to Death in order to be swallowed by Death and destroy Death from the inside.”
Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God
The story of the cross is robust. It’s abundant. It’s beautiful and freeing and complex. Reducing the cross to a simplistic tale about God forgiving our personal sin is tragic. Through his death and resurrection, Jesus saved us from the consequences of sin, but that’s only a part of it; the cross is also about Jesus saving humanity from evil and its effects.
This is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This is Good News.
John 10:10
John 8:44
1 Peter 5:8
Luke 22:52-53
That was important. Too many people are afraid of God because they've been taught false things about him.
Yes! How tragic is this false idea that has caused unspeakable harm. It has made many people conclude we need to be like this “wrathful God” who is much more like Zeus than YHWH, and we have fashioned ourselves in his horrible image. We have embodied hate and rage and vengeance, all in the name of faith. It is inexcusable.
I even read this ideology in some pages of the scriptures…as I am learning, many of the writers were still so influenced by the ideology of paganism, where sacrifices had to be made in order to appease fickle gods, they themselves viewed Jesus’ sacrifice in this way.
May the truth about the Love of God for us all wash over our hearts and minds again and again until there is no room in our thinking for this kind of barbarism.