Show Notes
In this Holy Week episode of Peaceable and Kind, Derek Vreeland concludes the Lenten journey through Fleming Rutledge’s The Crucifixion. This episode reflects on the meaning of the cross through the final biblical motif Rutledge explores: recapitulation. Derek also offers his final thoughts on Rutledge’s book.
Recapitulation is the idea that Jesus “sums up” the human story and lives it again the right way. Where Adam failed, where Israel failed, and where we fail, Jesus succeeds. Drawing on the theology of Irenaeus and the apostle Paul’s description of Christ as the “second Adam,” this image shows how Jesus restores humanity by living a life of perfect covenant faithfulness and undoing the damage introduced by Adam. Through Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, a new humanity is born, one no longer ruled by Sin and Death but brought into the life of the new Adam.
The crucifixion reveals both the depth of humanity’s captivity to Sin and the power of God’s righteousness to set things right. God’s righteousness is God’s power to rectify what has gone wrong in the world. While Christians are called to pursue justice, the ultimate restoration of creation belongs to God alone. Derek closes the series by reflecting on why The Crucifixion remains one of the most important books he has read on the death of Jesus, while also noting the importance of recovering the kingdom implications of the cross, that is, how the crucified and risen Jesus is revealed as the true King of the nations.
Books Mentioned
The Crucifixion — Fleming Rutledge
The Day the Revolution Began — N. T. Wright
N.T. Wright and the Revolutionary Cross — Derek Vreeland
Scriptures Mentioned
Matthew 26:26–28
Genesis 12
Romans 5:14–15
1 Corinthians 15:22
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Transcript
Welcome back.
Peaceable and kind.
I am your host, Derek Vreeland, and we are in the season of Lent and it’s coming to an end.
This week is Holy Week.
Today, in fact, is Monday Thursday.
Day when we remember Jesus with his disciples before his crucifixion and death.
And so this episode is gonna feel a little different.
Because we’re coming to the end of our annual journey with Jesus to the cross.
And so before we get started, let me invite you to leave a rating, a review.
That helps us a lot.
And if you enjoy the kind of content we’re creating here, if you want to share it with others and make sure
You have subscribed.
We are at the end of a mini-series here at Peaceable and Kind where we have been walking through Fleming Rutledge’s book, The Crucifixion
We’ve been taking, I think it’s now seven episodes to allow this book to cause us to focus
on Christ crucified.
And that’s in part what we do during the season of Lent.
And now that season
is coming to its grand conclusion today Monday Thursday, tomorrow Good Friday, Saturday, Holy Saturday, when nothing happens
Saturday is when we remember that Christ was in the tomb, and then comes Sunday morning and the Easter surprise.
And one of the values of following the church calendar is that if you enter into the
holiness and the sorrow of Lent, it’ll really help you experience the joy of resurrection.
And so I’m feeling the Linton vibes today.
When I’m recording this episode, it’s
morning time here in northwest Missouri and it’s cloudy and overcast and I have that sense of foreboding
And it feels like that just with the current weather, but as I orient my day around the sorrows and suffering of Jesus.
It’s just not an ordinary day.
It’s a different kind of day.
It feels different.
And I have told our congregation that, to be honest, I’m not a huge fan of Lent.
I r I really don’t like let.
I don’t like the darkness.
I don’t like focusing on suffering.
I don’t like fasting.
I like feasting.
But our lives need contrast because not every day is celebrating on the mountaintop.
Life is full of valleys.
Life is full of setbacks and failures and indeed pain.
And so the season of Lent reminds us that God is with us on days like today, that God is the God of crucifixion, but not crucifixion only.
Resurrection is coming.
And so we want to wrap up our discussion of Fleming Rutledge’s book, but because it’s Monday Thursday, I want to reflect a little bit on what happened on this day.
If you will remember, Jesus is gathered with his disciples for a final meal.
And there at that table, Jesus strips down to just a towel, and he takes on
the form of a servant doing the lowliest of tasks, and that is washing the def the feet of his disciples
And in doing so, Jesus is showing his disciples how they are to carry on his legacy and his ministry.
It’s not about platforms.
It’s not about the spotlight.
It’s about getting on your knees and washing stinky, dirty feet.
And it’s also during this final meal that Jesus institutes what we now call the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion.
Which is important for our reflection on the meaning of the death of Jesus, because as Tom Wright has said, when Jesus wanted to explain to his disciples
What his forthcoming death was all about.
He didn’t give them a theory.
He gave them a meal.
Jesus never gave what we would call a full-blown lecture or sermon on what his death really meant.
There are places in the Gospels where Jesus would say things about when I am lifted up, I will
draw men to myself, he will judge the world and cast out the ruler of this world.
So there were times he said a few things, but he never gave a systematic account.
Of how his forthcoming death would save us.
And so there’s something very beautiful about Jesus with his disciples
During this final meal, because here’s what happened.
Let me read to you from Matthew 26.
This is verses 26 through 28.
While they were eating, Jesus took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it, he broke it, gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat, this is my body.
Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks, he gave it to them, saying, Drink from it all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant
which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.
This was a revolutionary and revelatory action
Because Jesus in sharing this cup was saying that his death and his blood that would be shed
was to establish the new covenant.
His blood is the blood of the covenant
People often ask why was the cross necessary?
Couldn’t God save the world in some other way?
And of course, God is free to save the world in any way he wants
I think the way God went about it was somewhat strange.
It’s not the way I would save the world, but then again, God’s not asking me my advice.
So why was the cross necessary?
Well, I think what Jesus reveals to us as he is instituting the Lord’s Supper, Holy Communion, this final meal with his disciples.
Is that God’s way of saving the world is covenant?
In other words, while God could save the world in any way God chooses,
God chooses to work with humanity to save humanity.
And this goes all the way back to Genesis chapter 12.
When God establishes a covenant with Abraham, Jesus in fact comes
As the fulfillment of all that began in the Old Testament
And God has chosen to save us by working with us.
And the way God established this relationship, which we call covenant, was through the shedding of blood.
Covenant was secured by the shedding of blood.
So was it necessary?
Well, no, it wasn’t necessary in the sense that God is restricted in what God can do.
It was necessary, however, to show that God is faithful to all of his promises.
And from the beginning, covenant was his promise to redeem and rescue the world through covenant with
God’s people.
And in the Old Testament, a number of the prophets, I’m thinking of Jeremiah, forecast that a new covenant was coming.
For Judah and for Israel.
And Jesus in his Last Supper is explaining that new covenant has come now.
That this cup, the cup that Jesus was holding there in Matthew 26, this was his blood of the covenant.
Establishing a covenant that would be marked by the forgiveness of sins.
Now, I want to turn to Rutledge here in just a moment, but I want to encourage you that
You do not need to understand how the blood of Jesus saves you from your sin in order to experience the power of it
Now, I do want you to grow in your understanding.
I think it causes our our faith to grow as our knowledge grows.
This is how we love the Lord with all of our minds to do this deep exploration of all of the different ways in which Scripture describes the death of Jesus on our behalf.
But if you feel confused or uncertain on how exactly atonement works and how you would articulate that to someone else, i it’s okay if you feel a little confused.
You can still receive the redemptive effects of Jesus’ blood, of his crucifixion and death, even if you do not perfectly understand it.
I will give you this encouragement that the next time you celebrate the Lord’s Supper in your church, and I don’t know how often or how you go about doing that, but the next time you come to the Lord’s table,
Let that be a moment where you experience this new covenant in forgiveness and redemption
As you come to the table, do take a moment for self-reflection.
Confess your sins, your need for Jesus, and then let this experience
Of eating the bread, drinking from the cup, bring to you and bring to your awareness a sense of God’s saving power.
All right, that was an extended introduction.
I do want to get to Fleming Rutledge because today we’re going to conclude.
This is our last look at the crucifixion by Fleming Rutledge.
We’re going to look at the last motif and did her concluding chapter, then I have some final thoughts.
So the last of her eight biblical motifs or biblical images or biblical metaphors is recapitulation.
Now this is probably the most overlooked image in the entire New Testament.
I didn’t even know about recapitulation until I went to seminary.
And I will admit it’s a pastor and a teacher and a preacher.
I don’t often use this metaphor in proclaiming and preaching.
uh the cross of Jesus.
But let’s dive into it.
And and before we see what Rutlich has to say, let me define what we’re talking about.
Recapitulation means to sum things up again by going through the story one more time.
It’s like someone telling a story
And getting all the details wrong, and then someone else steps in and says, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold up.
You’re getting this whole story wrong.
Let me tell the story.
All right, take it from the top.
Let’s start at the beginning.
I’m gonna tell this story the right way.
In Christian theology, recapitulation is the idea that Jesus
entered into our humanity to tell the human story again, but this time he gets it right
So where Adam failed to live out the human story, where Israel failed, where we fail.
.
Jesus succeeds.
He sums up.
He recapitulates.
He becomes the proper storyteller and restores the story.
Recapitulation as a metaphor for the atonement was made popular
by Irenaeus in the second century.
So this is a very, very ancient view of the cross, and it’s built upon Paul’s description of Jesus in the Book of Romans as the second Adam.
Here’s just two verses, Romans 5, 14 and 15, where Paul writes, Yet death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses.
even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who is a type of the one who was to come.
But the free gift is not like the trespass.
For if the many died through one man’s trespass,
Much more surely has the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many.
So, what Paul is describing here is that Adam was the prototypical human being.
But because of Adam’s sin, Adam led humanity into sin and subsequent death.
So Adam in telling humanity’s story gets it all wrong because it quickly turns into a story of sin and death, which is not the story God intended for humanity to tell.
So Jesus came as our human representative to redo and undo what Adam did.
Adam got it wrong.
Jesus comes as the second Adam to get it right.
I find it interesting that Irenaeus also wrote,
That not only is Jesus the second Adam undoing what the first Adam did, but the Blessed Virgin Mary is
the second Eve or the new Eve undoing what the first Eve did.
Irenaeus writes, and I absolutely love this quote
It was the knot of Eve’s disobedience that was loosened by the obedience of Mary.
For what the Virgin Eve had bound fast through unbelief, this did the Virgin Mary set free through faith.
I absolutely love the way Irenaeus extrapolates and builds upon this idea of Jesus.
summing up and retelling the story that Adam got wrong, and Mary, through her faith, did the same thing with the way Eve got the story wrong.
But let’s go back to Paul.
So in Romans, Paul casts Adam in a metaphorical light
We were in Adam, and we died in Adam, 1 Corinthians 15, 22.
But Jesus comes as the new Adam so that we can experience new life
Free from death’s dominion.
So because Jesus is retelling the human story in his recapitulation
Jesus leads us away from sin and death and into righteousness and life.
Rutledge writes, The story of Adam and Christ is a story of incapacity on the part of Adam and potency on the part of God.
I find that helpful to see.
See, Adam was unable to get things right, but God in Jesus was able to make all things right.
So what we could not do in our weakness, God in Jesus did for us.
Jesus did this by living a life of faithfulness, the kind of life that on our own we could not live.
So in this regard, this second Adam idea from Paul in Romans.
and the recapitulation metaphor that’s being created, it also shares a little bit with substitution.
Because in his recapitulation, Jesus is doing for us in our place what we were unable to do.
Rutledge notes that this model, this image of recapitulation, it doesn’t give the full picture
But it is helpful in that it draws the incarnation of Jesus into the story of our salvation.
Something that is emphasized in Eastern Orthodoxy, but in the Western Catholic and Protestant and of course evangelical world,
We have tended to look only at the blood of Jesus, simply the crucifixion, as the moment of
Redemption history when salvation was provided for us.
But the recapitulation model is helpful for us to see that the entirety
Of Jesus’ birth, the incarnation, his life, his death, crucifixion
His resurrection, his ascension, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, that the entirety of the life and ministry of Jesus
Is a part of our salvation.
It was necessary.
Every part of it, from the incarnation to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
All of this works together for our salvation.
So while recapitulation
tends to miss the horrific nature of the crucifixion, it’s still important.
And Rutledge notes that.
She does, however, emphasize once again that a historical look at the death of Jesus is helpful
Because, as I’ve said many times, the cross of Jesus rescues and reveals
Well, one of the things that Rutledge points out that the cross reveals is that it reveals the ugliness of sin.
She says the hideousness of the cross corresponds to the hideousness of sin.
And Rutledge says a lot of people miss this, but this is the central idea of her book.
She writes, The trajectory of the story taken together with the horror of crucifixion
leads us to the conclusion that the hideous God-forsakenness of Christ’s public execution corresponds
to the soul-destroying nature of sin and its uttermost reach, even as God renounces sin
and execute final judgment upon it.
So when people ask why is the crucifixion
necessary.
I mean why couldn’t Jesus just offer a sacrificial animal?
And why crucifixion?
Why the the horror and the torture?
and the excruciating pain and all of the bloodletting.
Why?
Why save the world this way?
Well Rutledge would argue that it’s necessary to reveal the hideousness
the horror, the excruciating effects of sin.
I like to think of it as Jesus, God in human form, is perfect love
And when perfect love came among us to show us how to live, to show us the way for eternal life
This is what human sin does to perfect love.
It executes it.
And so if we tie this back into recapitulation, what we see is that
As we receive by faith the redeeming works of Jesus, we by the Holy Spirit become a new humanity.
Living according to the new Adam, which is Jesus.
Jesus as Lord and King is taking over our lives
He is the second Adam who has told the story correctly.
And this second Adam lives the story correctly and for us defeats sin and death.
So Jesus’ recapitulation includes a victory over demons, over the devil, over evil.
and acknowledges the inadequacy of human ability to resist evil and the temptations
of the devil.
Humanity, as projected in the Star Wars films, we are easily drawn to the dark side.
So in a sense, Rutledge uses the the language of a takeover.
So in a sense, Jesus is taking over humanity.
through his death and resurrection, and he does so to demonstrate God’s righteousness, that is, God’s power to set right what has gone wrong in God’s good world.
And again, as we receive it by faith, then we get in on that work of God setting right.
If God is going to set right a world gone wrong, the first thing he does is he sets us right.
We become justified.
Remember, the justice of God is God’s work to set things right
And that word justification has just in it.
And the concepts are connected.
So for there to be justice in the earth, there needs to be justification within us.
Hey friends, I want to pause this episode for just a moment to let you know that Resurrection, eight lessons on how God restores us, the third and final book in the God in the Neighborhood Bible.
Study series is out now.
Go to the show notes for ordering information.
Well, that wraps up her chapter on recapitulation.
Let me talk quickly about her concluding chapter, and then I’ll offer some some final thoughts.
And in the final chapter she writes, she doesn’t necessarily sum up what she has said before, rather, she extends the implications of the crucifixion of Jesus
uh to the redemption of the ungodly.
Religion has the history of dividing people
But, according to Rutledge, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ puts an end to all these religious categories that separate people from one another.
She describes the work of Jesus as bringing us together.
She says that the human predicament is deep enough.
That we all find ourselves in need of help.
And we need more than forgiveness, we also need mending.
We need to be pardoned of our sins, but we also need to be rebuilt according to the pattern of Jesus.
Because sin has had such devastating effects on our own humanity.
So we need we need to be restored
She writes, The best definition of the righteousness of God is the simplest one.
It is the power of God to make right what has been wrong
And what has been wrong since Adam is the captivity of the entire human race to sin, death, and the judging and condemning voice of the law
So she describes the work of God.
I’ve often called it the justice of God as the righteousness of God.
Righteousness and justice in English can be interchangeable.
So God’s work, God’s justice, God’s righteousness, again, is to set right that which has gone wrong, and sin and death.
These are primarily what has gone wrong.
And beyond our own spiritual formation, there are evil and true horrors in our world.
that need to be addressed and made right.
And we can work to make things right
As we advocate for justice in our world, but ultimately setting things right is God’s job
Then at the end of her book, she does have a well-written paragraph.
This is on page 611.
And this paragraph, I think, beautifully sums up her work.
So let me end with this final quote.
She writes
The precious blood of the Son of God is the perfect sacrifice for sin.
The ransom is paid to deliver the captives.
The gates of hell are stormed, the Red Sea is crossed, and the enemy drowned.
God’s judgment has been executed upon sin.
The disobedience of Adam is recapitulated in the obedience of Christ.
A new creation is coming into being.
Those who put their trust in Christ are incorporated into his life.
The kingdoms of the present evil age are passing away
And the promised kingdom of God is manifest not in triumphalistic crusades, but in the cruciform witness of the church
From within Adams, our human flesh, the incarnate Son fought with
and was victorious over Satan on our behalf and in our place.
That, my friends, is a beautiful picture, a thick and dense picture of what Jesus has done for us
And I appreciate that she says judgment was executed upon sin, because it wasn’t Jesus that was condemned at the cross
It was sin.
If anything was being punished by God, sin was being punished.
Again, the problem
For which the cross is the solution is not God’s need to punish someone.
That’s not the problem.
The problem is sin and death, both of which were defeated.
In Jesus, by Jesus, through his incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension.
All right, so here’s a couple of final thoughts about Fleming Rutledge’s wonderful, wonderful book.
Again, I have to say it is hands down the best and the most important book I have read on the death of Jesus.
I will continue to reference it and turn to it and
be inspired by it.
Uh I think particularly for preachers, it’s good because Fleming Rutledge is
a theologian and a preacher.
I think those of us that preach the foolishness of the cross would do well to spend time in this book.
In the quote that I just read towards the end of the book, she does mention um how the promised kingdom of God comes through the cross.
And I really wish she would have extrapolated that out, drawn out some of the implications of that.
I thought that was a little bit missing because as the cross is revealing things, the cross is revealing Christ as King and how the kingdom comes.
And I think some of that was missing.
I wish she had one more chapter entitled The Kingdom of God.
I thought that would have been good.
But if you want to see the more kingdom implications of the death of Jesus, check out Tom Wright’s The Day the Revolution Began.
Um, or you can read my little reader’s guide in T.
Wright and the Revolutionary Cross, uh, where I talk a little bit about that.
I think we have overlooked the kingdom implications of the death of Jesus.
And so one thing you can do is if you go to John, I think it’s chapter 18 and 19, and you you walk through John’s gospel, you can see
How often kingdom of God or king is mentioned?
So if you take Jesus arrest
his trial before Pilate and his crucifixion in John’s Gospel.
Because interestingly enough, John doesn’t use the phrase Kingdom of God
as much as the synoptics do.
Matthew, of course, uses the phrase kingdom of heaven.
But in John’s Gospel, where you most clearly see the kingdom of God being revealed is through Jesus’ suffering and death.
So that would be a fun Bible study if you want to go through those chapters, John 18 and 19, just circle every time you see the word kingdom or king.
I think you might be surprised how often that theme is being communicated in John’s Gospel.
And it’s shocking to me that we have missed the kingdom implications of the cross because above Jesus’ head was a sign that said King of the Jews.
And so while that was not as predominant in Rutledge’s book, I thoroughly appreciate
Her desire to stay close to the scriptures.
And before we get to atonement theories,
Let’s see what the Bible is actually saying about the death of Jesus.
I think that’s important.
Christians, particularly conservative, evangelical type Christians, they really want to argue about atonement theories, what Rutledge would call these
Motifs or metaphors or images.
And I’m not interested so much in the theories that are created.
I just want to know what the scriptures say.
And I think Rutledge is a wonderful guide.
Uh she for for me definitely, she’s caused me to when I was reading crucifixion the very first time, I had my Bible next to me.
I was constantly looking things up.
And I realized there’s a lot in the scripture that I have missed.
And so I appreciate Fleming Rutledge for causing me to uh go back to the scriptures
Encouraging me to stay devoted to the scriptures as she certainly has given me new love and appreciation for Jesus in his sacrificial death.
Well, that’s it for my review of Rutledge’s book, and that’s it for this episode
I do look forward to connecting with you during the season of Easter when we celebrate Jesus’ resurrection.
But that’s all that I have for you in this episode.
Go in peace.
And be kind.
This transcript was generated with AI and may contain errors.