“Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out.” -John 12:31

When I agreed to contribute six blog posts to the Reformed Journal, little did I consider that my blog run would reach its finish line with Holy Week, a quagmire for theology if ever there was one. It’s here we reach the pinnacle of Christian doctrine and a hornet’s nest of intra-Christian disputes over atonement, redemptive suffering, divine violence, and so forth. 

And yet, most Christians would concede that here lies the heart of the Gospel. No other season in the church year holds more at stake for Christian proclamation and practice. Getting to the heart of things requires discerning God’s paradoxical presence amid extreme violence and suffering. We must, as the Lenten hymn exhorts us, 

Go to dark Gethsemane,
You who feel the tempter’s pow’r;
Your Redeemer’s conflict see;
Watch with Him one bitter hour;
Turn not from His griefs away;
Learn of Jesus Christ to pray. (Jame Montgomery)

A friend of mine, the prophetic preacher and Duke Divinity professor Jerusha Neal, offered me a way into the ambiguity of this week. In response to reports that ICE agents had smashed a car window to arrest a seamstress in Baltimore, she wrote, “As Holy Week begins, I am watching scripture come to life.” 

If the idea that the violence around us finds resonance in scripture repels us, it may be that we have no stomach for the drama of evil found in the pages of the New Testament. Joining in Jesus’ journey toward Golgotha, during Holy Week we look evil full in the face, and, well, we often end up flinching.  

Our favored renditions of the passion often exchange offense for vapidity—as if we were forced to choose between Jesus’ death as an appeasement to a bloodthirsty God or the unfortunate outcome of a bad weekend in Jerusalem.

But the scandal of Holy Week lies less in the fact that Jesus refused to remain aloof from human violence than in the fact that the violence to which Jesus subjected himself still defines our world today. 

For many years I have assigned my undergraduates a theology paper with the option of analyzing a couple of theological accounts of evil. The students are required to conclude the paper by taking some kind of stand of their own. After multiple years of receiving papers that address evil only by explaining it away, I’ve come to doubt that 19-year-olds are ready to draw any conclusions here (shocker, I know). 

I have spoken with and read accounts of those who, given the reality of evil, need to be convinced that there is a good God. But, if my student papers are any indication, there are also a great many Christians in our context who need to be convinced that there is evil. 

Scripture attests that on the cross of Christ, God directly took on the powers of Sin and Death (Heb. 2:14-15, Col. 1:13). These powers are immediately manifest in the forces of Rome, a regime whose ferocity is evidenced by the fact that it regularly nailed its enemies to public crosses. But scripture knows of a further source of this evil in the even more sinister powers that hold the world at large in their grip: Sin, Death, and “the ruler of this world” (Jn. 12:31).

The idea that Jesus drew evil out into the open to turn it against itself is shocking. We would rather not have to see evil. We would rather it be annihilated out of sight. Why couldn’t Jesus’ work have consisted of a bloodless triumph of goodness, in which all the world’s occupants acknowledged the goodness of God and fell down in worship?  Why this ugly scene?   

Presumably, because what we don’t know about ourselves is that we, too, are in thrall to the darkness. God brought this to light in Jesus’ confrontation with evil. In other words, the cross issues a judgment upon you and me that is also our liberation. On the cross, “In this suffering and dying of God Himself in His Son, there took place the reconciliation with God, the conversion to Him, of the world which is out of harmony with Him, contradicting and opposing Him” (Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1, 250-51).

So, too, the gospel is where we can go not to be ‘gaslit’ about the fact that things are out of joint. 

Perhaps we take an inventory of the darkness in recent months alone?  

Just two weeks ago we learned that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was “accidentally” sent by our president to a prison in El Salvador. Abrego Garcia is the husband of a U.S. citizen, and the father of a five-year-old daughter. He was in this country legally, but now he’s 3,000 miles away, in a maximum-security prison notorious for human rights abuses. The only branch of our government to speak up for him so far has been the courts, and it remains unclear whether our administration will comply with them. 

For 18 months now, apart from one short-lived ceasefire agreement, Israel has been pummeling Gaza in response to a gruesome terrorist attack perpetrated by Hamas that killed roughly 1,200 Israelis. Since then, more than 50,000 Gazans have been killed. The UN reported on Friday that 36 recent Israeli airstrikes had killed only women and children. 

Need I go on?  

If you are wary of high-flown atonement theories, I offer only this: the cross discloses that evil is real and has us all in its thrall—even you and me. But it reveals that in Christ, God subverted the darkness such that evil turned against itself. 

Whether you or I are able to articulate the nuances of a full-blown theology of atonement, the central mystery comes through with clarity in the pages of the New Testament: In Jesus’ suffering and death God exposed evil in order to overcome it, including the evil which still daily captivates you and me, but also the evil that imprisons the cosmos at large. By absorbing it himself, by exhausting it, by allowing it to destroy itself, by taking the wind out of its sails, Jesus freed you and me to live into a renewed relationship with God, with one another, and with creation at large.