The New Situation
We have to consider the whole matter still more radically. It is false, to begin with, to reduce Jesus’ preaching of the reign of God to a timeless message about the timeless essence of God. That is as unbiblical as anything can be,8 for the nearness of the reign of God is not something timeless, as far as Jesus is concerned. The reign of God is not something to be had always and everywhere. It has its hour. For him it is unique, self-contained, to be grasped now, not something that can be repeated at will, an eschatological offer from God. In that, it resembles John’s baptism, which also had its unrepeatable hour. Jesus could build on the movement the Baptizer had begun. Without his call for repentance the good news would not have been possible. Like John’s baptism, Jesus’ preaching is a once-and-for-all address by God to Israel. The salvation offered by Jesus must therefore not be detached from its historical situation.
If Jesus encountered more indecision than faith in Galilee, and if now in Jerusalem Israel’s representatives rejected him—indeed, made sure that he would be killed—then Israel was rejecting the reign of God. But if Israel refused to accept the reign of God it abandoned the whole meaning of its existence, squandered salvation for itself and the nations, and made God’s action in choosing Israel absurd. That is the only way to explain the terrible seriousness of the judgment sayings Jesus spoke over Israel toward the end of his public activity. He must have reckoned with the definitive refusal of the people of God when, for example, he said:
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you, desolate. (Matt 23:37-38)
“Your house” is the temple. The “your” only sharpens the point of the judgment saying. It is no longer the common sanctuary, the holy house for all Israelites, but “your house.” It is abandoned to Israel; that is, it is abandoned by God.9 At the hour when God’s eschatological messenger was done away with there had to arise a situation in which nothing was any longer as it had been at the beginning of Jesus’ appearance in Galilee—a situation in which Jesus’ proclamation, “the reign of God has come near,” could never again be simply repeated. Because in that case grace itself would have been rejected.10 Indeed, we have to phrase it even more sharply: not only would grace have been rejected, but in the very moment in which God gives himself totally to his people Israel in Jesus, when, so to speak, he shows his innermost self and does his utmost—in that very moment the highest religious authorities of that very people he had cared for over the centuries and struggled for since Abraham reject him.
Therefore in this moment Jesus and Israel were faced with an entirely new situation, and that new situation demanded a new interpretation. To argue that Jesus never spoke before about his blood, about substitution and atonement, is not to the point. It assumes that the existence of individuals and of nations is carried on outside history. But the new interpretation Jesus gives in this very moment when the people of God is at the point of squandering its election for the sake of the world does not happen just anywhere and at any time. It happens at the Passover meal, at one of the holiest hours of the Jewish year. Jesus interprets his death as a final and definitive saving decree of God. Israel’s guilt, concentrated in Jesus’ death, is thus answered by God: he does not withdraw election from his people but instead truly allows that people to live, even though it has forfeited its life. That is precisely what the Bible means by “atonement.”11
In this interpretation Jesus makes use of Scripture in masterful fashion. He is familiar, of course, with the texts about the Sinai covenant, sealed with atoning blood;12 he knows the texts about the new (= renewed) covenant that sets aside Israel’s sins after it has broken the Sinai covenant;13 he knows above all the texts about the Suffering Servant who gives his life and takes the guilt of the many on himself.14 The Servant, of course, is Israel,15 but Jesus can see himself as the embodiment of the true Israel.
In interpreting his death in the light of the Torah and the prophets, did Jesus deny his previous message? Precisely the contrary is the case. Jesus had proclaimed the reign of God as a reign of God’s mercy and kindness. When he now, in the crucial hour before his death, sets before the eyes of the participants in the meal in definitive signs that God is holding fast to the covenant with Israel, indeed, that God is renewing the covenant and assuring this people of new life in spite of everything, he reveals the true radicality of God’s mercy. We must truly say that only in the interpretation Jesus gives to his approaching death does his message of the reign of God achieve its ultimate power and shape. And here, with utmost clarity, appears definitively the “being for others” that was implied in his message from the beginning.
If there are again and again exegetes who simply deny that Jesus could have understood his death as an existential representative substitution for the many and an atoning sacrifice for Israel, that is not really based on questions of historical criticism. Their decision has already been made beforehand, long before the historical discussion has begun. Rudolf Bultmann made that clear, with the honesty that was his, when in his famous essay on “New Testament and Mythology” he wrote:
How can my guilt be atoned for by the death of someone guiltless (assuming one may even speak of such)? What primitive concepts of guilt and righteousness lie behind any such notion? And what primitive concepts of God? If what is said about Christ’s atoning death is to be understood in terms of the idea of sacrifice, what kind of primitive mythology is it according to which a divine being who has become man atones with his blood for the sins of humanity?
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Precisely here the course is set for historical demonstrations that present themselves as logical and certain. People living in the wake of the European Enlightenment can no longer reconcile concepts such as representative substitution and atonement with the autonomy they have gained by so much struggle.17 But are they really irreconcilable? What is meant by representative substitution and atonement only becomes an irritant when the experience of the people of God has been forgotten. For life in the people of God, representative substitution and atonement are simply elementary. They detract nothing from the dignity and independence of the human being.
Representative Substitution
Israel’s existence always depended on individuals who believed with their whole existence. That the scarlet thread of salvation history was never broken depended on Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Amos, and Isaiah; on King Josiah, on John the Baptizer, and on many others. Others could enter into their faith and so come to believe in their own right. It is not a language game to say of Abraham that whoever blesses him will be blessed, and that through him all the families of the earth achieve blessing (Gen 12:3). Jesus’ representative substitution for the many is no exotic exception but the culmination and ultimate distillation of a long history of representation in Israel. Only by way of representative substitution can faith be handed on at all.
Nevertheless, representative substitution never means dispensing others from their own faith and repentance; it is meant to make both those things possible. True representation does not infantilize; it desires nothing more strongly than that the other should be free to act. It is done so that one person takes the place of another, not to “replace” that one, but to enable the other person to take possession of her or his own place.18