Towards an Empire-Crucifixion Theology

Towards an empire theology.

In the days and weeks leading up to Easter, I saw several posts asserting that Jesus’ death on the cross was about him being a victim of imperial violence. Essentially, Jesus’ death on the cross was the fault of the Roman Empire.

While not untrue, such a perspective in my opinion, flattens and diminishes what Christians have seen for thousands of years as having spiritual significance to being simply a historical accident, a tragedy even, but nothing more.

Yet, clearly there is truth to the assertion that Jesus’ death the result of the Roman Empire. For one, its important to name that reality so as not to perpetuate anti-Jewish biases. Second, pretending the Romans weren’t involved leads to a sort of hyper-Calvinistic/a-historical story where the context of the story doesn’t matter (I think it does) and that the Romans were simply just pawns used by God to complete the process.

To give credence to what many of these folks recently having been saying on social media, Jesus was a victim of empire. Roman rule was brutal and corrupt. Jesus certainly did challenge the status quo and the ruling authorities (even if some of those authorities were technically Jewish, they still aligned and maintained power via their allegiance to Rome). There is certainly a strong undercurrent of empire throughout this story.

Yet again, to suggest that Jesus’ death was simply about imperial violence reduces its significance and leaves it rather as a historical footnote, inspiring no doubt, but ultimately mattering no more than any other martyr or victim of imperial violence. So, I began to wonder, what would it look like to construct a theology around the imperial violence? Not simply flattening Jesus’ death but recognizing the historical, contextual, and spiritual significance.

What if, in Jesus’ death and ultimate resurrection, Jesus identifies with every victim of violence, Jesus encounters the all the sin and evil empire can muster, yet ultimately defeats it, revealing and rendering Empire as weak and limited? What if, in defeating one, if not the most, powerful empire of all time, through Jesus’ incarnation in first century Palestine, God has revealed Godself to be preeminent and powerful over all evil and unjust empires? And more, what if, in his crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus defeats sin and death, but also gives others (us) the power to also defeat such sin and death—giving us the power and privilege to not simply be victims but winners?

What I’m trying to extrapolate here is that Jesus’ crucifixion and death was not a senseless tragedy or historical tragedy, but a planned and purposeful action by God (not in the “predestined” Calvinistic sense, but more in the idea that God knew what God was doing. God chose that time and that place to come and incarnate among humanity, recognizing that such a result was likely (perhaps inevitable) to happen. To say it another way, through God’s immense wisdom and vision (setting aside the question of omniscience or omnipotence), God chose that historical context, even though God could have chosen another historical context, but knew (foreknew?) that that time and place was the best place and time in which to act. Therefore, God’s action in Jesus was exactly that—divine action—not historical accident.

In defeating empire and sin and death, Jesus redeems humanity, freeing us from the grips of empire and sin and death.

Obviously there is some crossover here with other atonement theories, such as Christus Victor and Girard’s Mimentic Theory.