Justice in the Resurrection

In the trial and execution of Joshua ben Adam a man was brought to justice This kind of thing happened all the time, and in this world continues to happen all the lime. Civil and religious structures cannot exist without "law and order". Those who break the law have to be brought to justice. This means punishment or pay-back time.

In the case of Joshua being brought to justice, we will miss the whole point of the story if we caricature the legal authorities as out and out "badies". On the contrary, these were the best religious and civil authorities that the civilized world of the day had to offer. The main actors in this drama of bringing a man to justice were not evil men bent on perverting the course of justice. but simply men who had the responsibility of carrying out justice according to law.

During Joshua's public ministry be was constantly accused of being "a glutton and a drunk", a Sabbath breaker, and a violator of the holiness code, especially due to his custom of eating with unclean people. When he caused a great disturbance in the temple precincts by overturnng the money exchange facilities and chased people away with a whip, be was accused of profaning the temple. According to a strict interpretation of the Torah, all these offences carried the penalty of death. If there was any difficulty making any of those charges slick, there was one law whose clarity could not be avoided: the Torah decreed that if there arose a prophet who led people astray from obedience to the law, he most certainly be put to death. (See Deuteronomy 13: 1) So the Jewish authorities finally arrived at this simple consensus: "We have a law. and by that law he ought to die. (John 19:17)

Joshua was handed over to the Roman authorities, not because there was any distinction between civil and religious powers in those days. but simply because Rome had reserved to itself the right of capital punishment. Rome had very severe laws relating to all matter of sedition, rebellion, and unlawful assembly. Galileans were especially suspect. The Romans had already executed a large number of re. hellions spirits from Galilee. That Province had become notorious us a breeding ground of insurgents, Zealots and Messianic crackpots. Furthermore, the Roman law decreed that Caesar was the divine "son of God". No rivals were to be tolerated - anywhere! No Galilean rabble-rouser was going to stand a chance of survival in this climate. Even if Pilate did not relish putting Joshua to death, he had no option as an instrument of Roman law.

In any case, Joshua was just another insignificant man brought to justice. (We say insignificant since there was almost no mention made of him in any contemporary Jewish or Roman circles.) But for the astonishing intervention of Easter he would have disappeared from history without leaving a trace.

However impressive the Galilean teacher may have been to his little band of supporters, he appeared pathetically weak as he was quickly arrested and hurried off to a brutal execution. All faith and optimism on the part of the disciples vanished. They fled into hiding like cats, not waiting around to witness the final scenes in their doomed cause. If they as much as showed their faces around Jerusalem they were liable to be rounded up and crucified as sympathizers according to the Roman practice.

There was one final insult to add to the dead and buried cause of Joshua hen Adam. He not only died totally discredited in the eyes of the highest judicial authorities in the world, both religious and civil, but as it appeared, he was totally discredited in the eyes of God. The law of Moses had decreed that anyone hanged on a tree was cursed of God. (See Deuteronomy 21: 23). The later accounts of his body being embalmed and laid in a rich man's grave are not well attested. It is quite likely that his body endured the ultimate insult of Roman crucifixions -- no decent burial, but thrown into pits to he scavenged by dogs and carrion.

In any case, the death of Joshua was the ultimate scandal that early Christianity wrestled to come to terms with. Lapide suggests that a very large portion of the New Testament was driven by the effort to explain it. But the untimely death of Joshua was a brutal, senseless tragedy. It had no meaning in itself. Death is an enemy which seems to empty life, goodness, love and whatever is beautiful in life of any meaning. Millions of others, most of whom have been unknown and unsung, have suffered the same fate as Joshua hen Adam. They have been cruelly tortured, burnt alive, butchered, or left to perish of hunger, thirst, or the depravation of human company. It has been done to them too in the name of justice, the law, God! The world seems to he ruled by idiots and bureaucrats who, the moment they get behind the wheel of this juggernaut called "the justice of the law", run people down. Religious authorities have not been exempt from grinding up their share of human bones. The death of Joshua ben Adam stands as a paradigm for the justice of this world, the justice of man, the justice of the law.

When the powers of this world had brought Joshua ben Adam to their idea of justice, a higher court was convened to bring him to another kind of justice.

The Lord executes justice...for all who are oppressed. (Psalm 103: 6)

He will deliver the needy when he calls for help, the afflicted also and him who has no helper...he will rescue their lives from oppression and violence, and their blood will be precious in his sight. (Psalm 72:12-14)

The man whom the rulers of this world condemned to the most ignominious death was now "declared to he the son of God by the resurrection from the dead". (Romans 1:3) God highly exalted him and gave him a name which is above every name. (Philippians 2:9) "He raised him from the dead...far above all rule and authority and power and dominion." (Ephesians 1:20, 21) "God made him to be both Lord and Christ - this Joshua whom you crucified." (Acts 2: 36)

In the resurrection "the justice of God is revealed". (Romans 1:17) This justice is a scandal to the world, not just because it totally reverses the judgment of the world, and not only because it is a saving justice for the oppressed, but it is a scandal because it is "the justice of God apart from the law". (Romans 3:21) Unlike the justice of the law, it is not a justice that is calculated, measured out, and pays back lit for tat. It is the justice that the Old Testament prophets began to anticipate, that Joshua ben Adam tried to illustrate in quite outrageous stories or tried to act out in his compassion for the oppressed. It was the justice he still trusted in when he was overwhelmed by utter failure and total disaster.

The thing which made Easter so electrifyingly liberating was the perception that the resurrection of Joshua was of monumental significance for the entire human situation. Joshua's exultation to the right hand of God was the revelation of God's final solution to the human condition. For the God who has called the human t-ace from the evolutionary mud of creation into consciousness and the awareness of himself has a destiny for this creature which will not be abandoned:

Thou hast made him a little less than God,
And dost crown him with glory and majesty!
Thou has made him to rule over the works of Thy hands;
Thou hast put all things under his feet. (Psalm 8: 5,6)

Like The Hound of Heaven - "with majestic haste and unperturbed pace"-- the Creator has pursued that goal through the long course of history, sometimes losing the battles but never losing the war.

Can a woman forget her nursing child,
and have no compassion on the son of her womb?
Even these may forget,
but I will not forget you. (Isaiah 49: 15)

For I know the plans that I have for you, declares the Lord,
plans for welfare and not for calamity, to give you a future and a hope. (Jeremiah 29: 11)

The justice of God is not a justice of the law. It is out of all proportion to anything remotely deserved. It breaks through all categories of what is logical or measurable. Like life itself, it is a gift of inconceivable generosity. It is all this because it is a justice based on fidelity to his own covenant of love.

The Lord's loving kindnesses indeed never cease,
For his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
Great is Thy faithfulness. (Lamenations 3:22,23 )

The good news of Easter is that death is not the final word. Life was not intended to end in the tragedy of the grave. The justice of God turned what was a paradigm of all human tragedies into the celebration of the triumph of life over death, of love over hate. The words of Joshua were vindicated: "Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot destroy your life". (Matthew 10:.38) "God is not the God of the dead but of the living." (Matthew 22:32) Or as he said on the day of his death to the dying thief, "You will be with me in Paradise today." (Luke 22:43)


THE RETREAT OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION

The Retreat from the Centrality of the Resurrection

The message of resurrection was absolutely central to the first Christians. That is quite clear from the accounts given of their preaching in the book of Acts. The central thing was not the divinity of Christ nor his atonement on the cross. These were issues which developed later and assumed the ascendancy. But the original gospel was the word of the resurrection.

If the resurrection had remained central, that great gulf between Joshua's preaching of the kingdom and the church's preaching of other things -- a problem which many scholars are now very aware of - would not have developed. For the heart of Joshua's preaching of the kingdom was the scandal of God's saving justice, and in the gospel of his resurrection the same justice of God was revealed. (Romans 1:17) The kind of justice Joshua gave his life for, God executed in his resurrection from the dead.

But it did not take long before other issues supplanted the centrality of the resurrection. In our issue of Verdict called A Theology of Resurrection which we published 15 years ago, we documented the testimony of both Catholic and Protestant scholars that the church did not have a theology of resurrection. It is well known that Catholicism made the Incarnation central to its theology while Protestantism had made the atonement of the cross the central thing. The resurrection was largely relegated to the field of apologetics wherein the so-called proofs of the resurrection were used to establish the claims made for the divinity of Christ and the exclusive role of the church as possessor of the keys of heaven.

The retreat from the centrality of the resurrection began when the church tried to mitigate what appeared to be the scandalous features of Joshua's birth, life and death. The resurrection had convinced Joshua's followers that God himself had exalted him to the status of "son" or "Messiah". No honor was too great to be conferred upon him, and this pressed them to embellish his history in keeping with his status.

To start with they had to deal with the scandal of a Galilean Messiah. Galileans were held in very low esteem by the orthodox Jews of Judea. Galileans had the stigma of being something like provincial hicks. It was generally held that no prophet would come from Galilee; and to suggest that the royal Messiah would come from Galilee was almost akin to blasphemy. Then added to that was the scandal of Joshua's very irregular conception. So about .50 years or two generations on from Easter we have the introduction of very contrived stories in Matthew and Luke to show that Joshua was not born in Galilee at all. but in Judea (an account not supported by either Mark or John). We will pass over for now how the church softened the scandal of his baptism by John (Why baptize a sinless man?), and the scandal of his radical table fellowship, and we come to the greatest scandal of all: How could an utterly discredited Galilean who died in such public disgrace possibly be the Messiah?

The church explained away the scandal by saying that the death of Joshua was a sacrifice to pay for the sins of the world. That is to say. Joshua was not only murdered at the hands of man carrying out the law, but he was slain by God himself as he carried out his far more terrible law. The whole focus hereby turned from the saving justice of the resurrection, which is a justice "without the law", to the punitive pay-back kind of justice.


The Retreat to the Justice of the Law

What all this means is that the Christian religion made a full retreat to the old justice of the law which ben Adam repudiated and which God exposed and shattered in the justice of the resurrection. As we will see, the church breathed new life into the old justice of the law and earned legalism far beyond anything Judaism had ever known. Focusing on salvation by death on the cross rather than by the life of the resurrection, the whole system of Christian theology became a schema of Latin justice from beginning to end.

The whole Christian theological system, whether Catholic or Protestant, begins with the premise of God having a law which requires of man perfect obedience to his every decree to the utmost degree.

There was supposed to be a time when man and woman were sinlessly perfect and qualified to render that kind of obedience to God's law. There was said to be no death or imperfection in the world anywhere - presumably there was a time when even the fish in the sea did not eat one another!

God's law decreed zero tolerance! One strike and you're out! So for a single misdemeanor these first humans were locked out of God's favor, abandoned in this earth like some kind of leper colony, and sentenced not just to temporal sufferings, misery and death, but to eternal damnation along with all their offspring who inherited their original sin. Death also spread across the whole face of nature as a result of one act which incurred the full penalty of the law.

(This myth of the Fall, recited above, is just the orthodox Christian version of a recycled old Babylonian myth which should have been discarded ages ago as sheer intellectual rubbish. But as we will see, it gets far worse.)

The penalty for the smallest infraction of an infinite law had to be an infinite punishment.

Since the honor and integrity of this law had to be maintained. God could not forgive unless the demands of his law were fully met and the penalty for transgression be paid in full. Someone had to win for us divine acceptance and unlock the gates of heaven.

The condition of salvation is exactly what it always has been - perfect obedience to the law of God. In the active obedience of his life, Christ perfectly kept the law for us in every decree to the utmost degree. Then in the passive obedience of his cloth he paid the infinite penalty of our sins. According to this premise, he had to be an infinite person to satisfy an infinite law.

The justice of God's law, having been satisfied by his infinite merits, God is now able to forgive us without violating the honor of his law. He can save us in a way which vindicates his regime of legal justice. According to all the "good" theologians, our salvation is only a means to a higher end - the vindication of this justice of the law.

It is in the application of Christ's merits that a difference developed between Catholics and Protestants. The Catholics said that in response to faith God justifies the sinner by making him just by in infusion of the grace won for him on the cross. The Protestants said that God forensically declares him just by imputing to him the merits of Christ's active and passive obedience, after which he begins the process of making him just by an infusion of grace. We won't go on with all the subtle legal argument about imputare and efficare, faith formed with charity versus faith alone, the ordo salutus what not. The whole dispute was based on the premises of the Latin legal frame-work which both sides accepted. This entire frame-work must now be discarded. It is not only based on a world-view which is already at least two thousand years out of date, but on religious imagery of a Fall and a lock-out from God that Joshua ben Adam totally discarded.

Now let us refocus the main point in this brief sketch of Christian orthodoxy. From beginning to end it is a gospel according to law and a system of legal justice. The resurrection scarcely comes into this theology at all. How could it be otherwise since in the gospel of resurrection "the justice of God without the law is manifested". (Romans 3:21) That is to say, the resurrection is the scandal of a saving justice which transcends all legal categories because it is a justice based on the unconditional acceptance of divine love which never at any time contemplated locking anyone away from an unbrokered fellowship with God. It would be more excusable to believe in the Flat Earth, and certainly less psychologically damaging, than to carry on with views of God's justice that are in some respects worse than bad paganism.


The Retreat to a Deified Messiah

Scholars now generally agree that the earliest believers, being Jews, held to a strict Jewish monotheism. Joshua was believed to be "the son of God" in their traditional sense of being elected and anointed as the Messianic king. Any fair reading of the three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) finds no evidence that these authors believed that Joshua ben Adam was God. A man of God, certainly! God in the form of a man, certainly not! James Dunn (Unity and Diversity in the New Testament) takes the view that the development toward a full-blown Incarnational theology (ie., Jesus is God) was an inevitable and necessary maturing process of the Christian faith.

In one sense the transformation of Joshua ben Adam to the Jesus God was inevitable, given the retreat to a religion of a legal, pay-back justice centered in Christ's death. If you then put that in the context of the myth of the Fall and a law demanding an infinite penalty for human sin, who else could pay the price and unlock the gates of heaven but a member of the Godhead? There is a certain logic to this legal religion, but it is completely out of kilter to the scandalous, liberating justice of the resurrection. It is the theology of God in a legal box, and an old Latin one at that!

We need also consider how turning Joshua ben Adam into one who comes into this world as God greatly diminishes the original story of the resurrection. Where is the glorious surprise and scandal of God's justice if the man who rises from the dead is God himself?. Given that his birth was supposed to be so supernaturally spectacular with angel choirs and royal visitors etc., and given that he walked on water and confidently foretold his own death and resurrection, Easter was no surprise but a foregone conclusion. And does God need anyone to raise him from the dead? And if God highly exalts the risen one and gives him a name which is above every name (clearly the language of adoption), is not this rendered meaningless if he was God to start with? Is this merely a ceremony wherein God puts his name where it always was, and puts himself on the throne of the universe where he always was? Or was the resurrection the surprising, scandalous generosity of God in raising from the dead and oppressed and discredited man who staked everything on God's faithfulness?

The resurrection of God in the guise of human nature is too much like all the old pagan myths of dying and rising gods which were venerated in every culture of the pagan world. The Greek cities into which the Christian gospel spread were full of these myths. But transforming the risen one into the Deity himself puts an infinite gulf between him and the rest of humanity. As we have said, there is no surprise if it is the immortal Deity himself who rises from the dead according to the teaching of the Christian religion. Neither is this kind of Easter good news to ordinary mortals like the rest of us who are victims of human tragedy - unless we are lucky enough to be Christians who believe all the right things about the Incarnation, Trinity, and belong to the true church outside of which none can be saved. For what the Deification of the risen one inevitably does is to torn the good news of Easter into an exclusive monopoly by a totalitarian religious system. Everything in this appalling system is based on merits and pay-back justice. Christ, according to this system, was raised from the dead and exalted to the highest place in the universe because he merited it. The resurrection itself along with the atonement on the cross is all a system of merited justice. But on top of this, this Christ is said to have a surplus fund of merits which be will now dispense through ministrations of the church upon individuals who comply with the required conditions such as joining the church by baptism and believing the received teaching on the divinity of Christ, etc. So the message of Easter got tamed into an exclusive religious cult which is light years removed from the original article.

The more we recognize that Joshua ben Adam was truly human and only human, the more we will appreciate that the story of his resurrection is God's word of love and hope to the whole human race without distinction. This was never meant to be made into an exclusive, much less a triumphalistic cult. The resurrection belongs to people everywhere without distinction of race, religion, gender or anything else. It speaks clearly to every human being that God will execute justice for. all that are oppressed. When God gave us life he did not intend that his boundless generosity should end in the tragedy of death. This is the. meaning of Joshua ben Adam's resurrection and it carries with it the same spirit of generosity and reckless self-giving which marked the life of the man who staked everything on God's justice.

The more we recognize that Joshua ben Adam was truly human and only human, the more we will appreciate that the story of his resurrection is God's word of love and hope to the whole human race without distinction.

The justice of God is not a justice of the law. It is out of all proportion to anything remotely deserved. It breaks through all categories of what is logical or measurable. Like life itself, it is a gift of inconceivable generosity. It is all this because it is a justice based on fidelity to his own covenant of love.

The thing which made Easter so electrifyingly liberating was the perception that the resurrection of Joshua was of monumental significance for the entire human situation. Joshua's exultation to the right hand of God was the revelation of God's final solution to the human condition. For the God who had called the human race from be evolutionary mud of creation into consciousness and the awareness of Himself has a destiny for this creature which will not be abandoned:

The good news of Easter is that death is not the final word. Life was not intended to end in the tragedy of the grave. The justice of God turned the tragedy that was the paradigm of all human tragedies into the celebration of the triumph of life over death, of love over hate.

R. Brimsmead

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