Show Notes
Lent is underway, and in this episode of Peaceable and Kind, Derek continues the Lenten journey through Fleming Rutledge’s monumental book, The Crucifixion. This episode takes a deep dive into chapters 2 and 3, confronting the ugliness of the cross and rethinking the meaning of the wrath of God.
Before the cross became a polished religious symbol, it was an instrument of terror, shame, and public humiliation. Rutledge insists that if we want to understand what the death of Jesus means, we must first face what it was: irreligious, degrading, and horrifying. Only by grounding the crucifixion in its historical reality can we begin to grasp how God’s justice and mercy meet at the cross.
This episode also explores Rutledge’s reframing of divine justice—not as punishment for punishment’s sake, but as God’s work of rectifying what is broken. God’s wrath, she argues, is not an emotional outburst, but God’s active opposition to sin and evil for the sake of setting the world right.
Key Takeaways
The cross was not a religious symbol but an instrument of public shame and terror.
The manner of Jesus’ death matters as much as the fact of his death.
Roman crucifixion was designed to humiliate, dehumanize, and warn entire populations.
God’s justice in Scripture is about rectification, not mere punishment.
Forgiveness restores relationships; justice seeks to make things right.
The wrath of God is not emotional rage but God’s active opposition to evil.
God’s justice is restorative, aimed at healing what sin has corrupted.
Books Mentioned
The Crucifixion — Fleming Rutledge
The Day the Revolution Began — N. T. Wright
The Cross and the Lynching Tree — James Cone
Scriptures Mentioned
John 1:29
Isaiah 1:16–17
Matthew 12:18
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Transcript
Welcome back to another episode of Peaceable and Kind.
We are in a series walking through The Crucifixion by Fleming Rutledge, which has been a massively important book.
Describing the death of Jesus.
And on this episode, we’re gonna take a deep dive into chapters two and three.
But before we jump in,
Let me invite you to leave a rating and a review.
You know, do all the things, subscribe, all the things.
And also, before we get into the episode, I want to say thank you to everyone who has celebrated the release of my new book.
the second in the God in the neighborhood Bible study series.
The title of the second book is Crucifixion
not to be confused with Rutledge’s The Crucifixion.
Mine is a one hundred page Bible study and and hers is a six hundred page theological beast.
I do quote her, by the way, in lesson two of my Bible study.
So if you’re listening to the podcast and you’re also working through my Bible study, you’ll see me quote her in the second chapter there in the second lesson.
And my Bible study, as I’m thinking about it, is about the crucifixion, but it’s less about theology, and it’s more about exploring.
Biblical language, how the Bible is describing the death of Jesus.
And in all of the books in the God in the Neighborhood Bible study series, I’m using
Eugene Peterson’s The Message translation.
A very contemporary, very imaginative translation.
And I’ve chosen eight passages in the crucifixion Bible study to work through, and I find Eugene Peterson’s language helpful.
I don’t always agree with this translation.
Uh you’ve heard me talk about Bible translations in the past.
I don’t believe there is one perfect Bible translation.
There’s lots of
different translations and in fact I think it’s valuable if you’re studying the Bible to use different translations.
My friend Tim Wildsmith says that you need a team of Bibles when you’re doing Bible study.
And I agree.
I think that that is super helpful.
So if you haven’t spent much time
In the message translation, here’s your opportunity.
So go check out Crucifixion, eight lessons on how God saves us if you’re interested.
Okay, let’s get back to Fleming Rutledge’s big book, The Crucifixion.
This is a perfect book to work through, and my Bible study is also good.
For this time because we are now in the season of Lent.
Lent began yesterday on Ash Wednesday.
My Bible study was released on Tuesday.
And now we’re in this season where we are journeying with Jesus to the cross.
And if you didn’t grow up with the liturgical seasons and the Christian calendar.
I want to say just a little bit about Lent because you might be asking, where in the Bible does it talk about Lent?
Well, you can search the scriptures and you won’t find the word there
Lent is not a part of Scripture, but it’s a part of Christian tradition.
And it is a way for us to draw near to Jesus in his sorrow and suffering
And it helps us to create a little contrast between where we are and where we’re going.
Because what we’re headed towards is Easter.
There are two great celebrations on the liturgical Christian calendar, and you know those two big celebrations.
They’re Christmas and Easter.
And they’re so important that you need four weeks to get ready for Christmas.
That’s Advent.
But you need six and a half weeks, you need 40 days to prepare for Easter.
And we call that Lent.
So Lent is not a biblical requirement.
Lent is a tradition.
And I have found such value in doing something special during the season of Lent, whether it’s fasting or giving something up.
Or I’ve often done a study, a Bible study, or read a big theological book during the season of Lent.
And in 2023, I chose Fleming Rutledge’s The Crucifixion to read during the season of Lent.
In fact, I posted it on social media with the hashtag readingRutledge and invited people.
If you want to read along with me, had over a hundred people
Read along with me and that was fun.
So because I did that a couple years ago, I thought during the season of Lent in 2026
I’ll take podcast episodes to walk through this book.
So let’s jump in to chapter two of the crucifixion entitled The Godlessness of the Cross.
I think this chapter is important because it will give us a framework in which to understand what she’s doing in the rest of the book.
Because in later chapters, she’s going to spend a lot of time in the scriptures.
And before we get to the scriptures, I think this chapter, the godliness of the cross, is helpful.
And let me warn you that this episode is going to be difficult.
It’s going to be difficult for me to get through.
And it might be a challenge just to listen to.
Because we’re going to talk about crucifixion from a historical point of view.
We’re going to look at the very ugliness of crucifixion
So the subject matter is hard to stomach, but I think it’s necessary and good.
Because remember, in the season of Lent, we want to know nothing among ourselves other than Christ crucified.
We want to draw near to Jesus in his sorrow and suffering.
Easter is coming, the celebration is coming, but Lent is a season that’s somewhat dark, and we have to deal with
dark subjects like crucifixion and evil and sin.
And so Rutledge it recognizes
in her work as a pastor and a preacher, that the cross has become sanitized.
It’s become
Scrubbed clean and elevated as this very sophisticated symbol of the Christian faith
Right?
So people wear a cross as a pendant, as jewelry around their neck.
I wear a beaded bracelet that has a wooden cross on it.
And Rutledge said, because of that, because we have this very elevated, very religious
imagery in our minds when we think of the cross, we need to recognize that the crucifixion of Jesus was anything but religious.
According to Rutledge, the crucifixion was hideous, inglorious, it was irreligious, degrading
embarrassing, shameful, humiliating, dehumanizing, and wretched
She calls the cross the most irreligious object ever to find its way into the heart of faith
So what she’s doing here is grounding the crucifixion in history.
Tom Wright, N.
T.
Wright, takes a similar approach in the day the revolution began.
And I think this is so important for our study of the Bible.
When we go to the Bible, we want to understand first what it meant
in its historical context before we work towards what it means for us today
This is absolutely essential.
You will never understand the scripture if you only read it from a modern vantage point.
We want to first understand what the Bible meant in its historical context, and then we will work towards what it means.
So what it meant is historical.
What it means is theological and devotional.
So before we rush to understanding and meaning and theology and devotions and
What does this mean for us?
How does Jesus save me by his blood?
Before we get to that, and we want to get there, but before we do that, we have to first look at Jesus’ death.
In its historical setting.
And what we’re going to discover is that crucifixion was downright ugly
Rutledge encourages us to set aside what we think we know about the cross, what we’ve learned about the cross and its meaning, and simply look at it.
historically with fresh eyes.
According to Rutledge, during the first three centuries the cross was not the sign in which the emperor conquered
It did not adorn medals and honors.
It was not bejeweled, enameled, or worked in precious metal.
It was a sign of contradiction and scandal
Which quite often meant exile or death for those who adhered to the way of the crucified one.
The crucifixion of Jesus was scandalous because a crucified Messiah is a failed Messiah.
Let everyone who hangs upon a tree be accursed.
This is why the preaching of the cross in Jewish circles was a stumbling block.
It was scandalous.
Right?
If God is going to return in and through the king, in and through the Messiah, God is going to be victorious over God’s enemies.
And the crucifixion.
In its historical sense, it is not victory, it’s actually defeat.
And the significance of the crucifixion
Was not only that Jesus died for our sins.
We all believe that.
That’s a foundational Christian understanding of the cross, that Jesus died for our sins
But Rutledge reminds us that it’s not just that Jesus died, but it was the manner in which he died
The crucifixion was shameful, right?
That’s one of the words she uses to describe the cross.
Crucifixion was shameful.
It was shameful in that Jesus suffered.
the very shame and degradation that we heap on each other.
Now I don’t want to rush into theology, but remember
When John the Baptist says in John 1 29, Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.
Jesus takes away the shame and degradation that we want to dump on other people.
Jesus takes that on himself in order to take it away
But we’re jumping a little bit too far into theology.
So let’s just back up and again with historical eyes take a look at first century
Roman crucifixion.
And this is a challenge because it really is hard to grasp
or even imagine how hideous crucifixion was.
It was public.
Very often those who were crucified were stripped naked.
It was ugly and hideous, and we don’t have anything in our modern world that really compares with it.
Now, some people will say that
Roman crucifixion is like modern lethal injection, a state execution, but honestly, crucifixion was far worse than that.
Other people will say, well, crucifixion in the ancient world was like the modern electric chair, which we’ve now outlawed.
But honestly, crucifixion is worse than that.
I would say the closest thing we have in modern history to ancient Roman crucifixion is the lynching of black people in the American South in the early mid twentieth century.
Let me see if I can draw out the comparisons.
And it’s not a perfect comparison because I will still argue with Rutledge that crucifixion is worse than lynching.
But there are similarities.
The cross was not just Rome’s way of executing criminals.
It wasn’t just
simply a way to kill people.
It was a public display meant to shame
terrorize and crush anyone who dared to challenge Roman power and authority.
And in the same ugly, hideous way, lynching in the American South was not hidden violence, but it was very public.
And it was meant to humiliate.
It was meant to instill fear, to warn black communities about
the cost of stepping out of line, particularly in the era of segregation and Jim Crow laws
It was repugnant and pure evil, yet it was a public spectacle
White people would bring their children.
There would be vendors who sold food, and people would take photographs standing next to a mutilated hanging black body.
Some of those photographs were even turned into postcards.
It was vile and disgusting and
For me, completely unthinkable, but it’s true.
This is a part of American history
And it’s hard to revisit that, but I think that that lynching of black people in the American South is.
is the closest comparison that we have to Roman crucifixion.
Because in both cases the violence was never just about the victim
It was about sending a message through a mutilated, exposed, and broken body.
That you dare not mess with the power brokers, or this will happen to you
If you’re interested in exploring the connections between these two forms of execution, Roman crucifixion and American lynching, check out James Cohn’s book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree.
And as I said, this is a difficult episode.
And even to talk about lynching, it makes my stomach turn.
But again, I think this is what Rutledge is trying to do in chapter two.
She wants us to not think of the cross in terms of a piece of jewelry.
But to think about the ugliness and as she says in the chapter title, the godliness of crucifixion.
I have to pause this episode for just a moment to tell you that the next two Bible studies in the God in the Neighborhood Bible study series are available for pre-order.
Crucifixion
Eight lessons on how God saves us and resurrection.
Eight lessons on how God restores us.
Both release on February 17th, just in time for Lent and Easter.
Pre-ordered.
Now links are in the show notes.
All right, let’s move on to chapter three: the question of justice.
From the irreligious and ugly nature of the cross in chapter two, Rutlich now lays out her vision of the justice of God in chapter three.
She devotes an entire chapter to justice because Rutledge says there is such a connection between punishment and the righteousness of God, in how New Testament writers will talk about
The death of Jesus, she wants to take a deep dive into the biblical topic of justice
Now, I often don’t talk about Greek words or Hebrew words, but this is going to require a little bit of work in that regard.
So I just want to talk about one Greek word that appears throughout the New Testament.
It also appears in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, and that’s the Greek word dikyosune.
It is the word that is most often translated righteousness in the New Testament, and it is the Greek word for justice.
In English, we have two words, righteousness and justice.
And they have two words in Hebrew, but in Greek they only have one word, dikiosune.
I heard N.
T.
Wright say one time that this Greek word is like a freighter ship in the ocean carrying lots of cargo.
So what we understand as righteousness, rightness, and justice, or
justness, both of those English words and concepts are found in this word dikayosune.
And as Rutledge goes on to say in this chapter, when D.
Kaiosune justice
Is referred to God, so the justice of God, it means God’s work to rectify or to set things right
And she doesn’t go into a deep dive, but I think it’s important to make a distinction between how biblical writers use the word
Dikaiosune, and how Greek writers use that word.
So Paul, for example, in the New Testament
He is writing his letters in the Greek language, but he himself has a Hebrew mind.
He is using the Old Testament.
He’s using the Hebrew scriptures and Hebrew definitions of words, even though the words he’s using are Greek.
And they’re different at times than how that word is used in a Hellenistic culture in the Greek world.
And Dekaiosune is one of those words.
And again, Rutledge doesn’t get into this, but I think it’s helpful to see that for Greek writers
whether it’s the philosophers or the other Greek great Greek authors, when they use the word decosune
They mean justice in terms of giving a person what they are due
So, in a Greek understanding, justice is about giving people what they deserve.
And so if a person is of nobility,
If they’re a good person, then what they deserve is honor.
And if they’re a bad person and they’ve done wrong or evil, what they deserve, what is justice, is punishment.
And for Hebrew Jewish-minded writers like the Apostle Paul
He is not using the Greek word dikyosune that way.
Paul and the other New Testament writers.
.
Use that Greek word and the very concept of justice, not to refer to giving people what they deserve.
.
but they’re using it in the sense of setting things right.
And throughout this chapter, Rutledge continues to use the word rectify, which I think is important.
Now she does trace justice through some key passages in the Old Testament, particularly Isaiah.
And let me give you just one example
So that you can see how in a Hebrew mindset how justice is understood.
Because I would say that many modern American Christians,
They think of justice from a Greek perspective and not a Old Testament Hebrew-Jewish perspective.
And what Rutledge is doing this chapter, and what I want you to do, is I want you to think biblically
Which means thinking in terms of biblical language in the Old Testament, which means to think from a Jewish or a Hebrew perspective.
So here’s just one example that Rutledge uses.
It’s Isaiah 1, 16 and 17.
And I’ll just jump right into it.
And God here is speaking through the prophet Isaiah.
Wash yourselves.
Make yourselves clean.
Remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes.
Cease to do evil.
Learn to do good.
Seek justice, correct oppression, defend the fatherless, plead for the widow
So do you see how justice is used in these verses?
God is calling on Israel to seek justice and
Because we’ve been grafted into the vine, into the family of Abraham as followers of Jesus, we too are to seek justice.
So how do we do that?
We seek justice by
Correcting oppression and defending the weak and vulnerable.
Now, I would say that that can include
punishing oppressors, but that is not what Isaiah actually says.
Again, good Bible study is first observing what the biblical writers are saying.
See, justice from a Jewish perspective is about setting things right.
So in Isaiah 1, when God calls us to seek justice, he’s talking about setting things right like correcting oppression.
Right?
And defending the fatherless and widows and those who are in need.
And so when Jesus comes, he comes as a fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy.
And in Matthew 12, 18, it’s clear that Jesus comes to proclaim justice to the Gentiles
So it is justice not just for Israel, but the entirety of the world.
All the nations of the world are to participate in justice.
In terms of not just trying to punish bad people, but in rectifying and setting things right
So if you hear the word justice and you recoil a little bit, if you hear the word justice and for you
you associate it with a political platform or a political ideology, let me encourage you to do a Bible study
Do a word study in the Old Testament and New Testament, studying the word justice and righteousness.
In the Old Testament, justice and righteousness are often talked about together.
In the New Testament, sometimes you only see the word righteous or righteousness, but it’s referring to justice.
So, for example, in the Beatitudes, when Jesus says, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
What Jesus really means there is, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for wrongs to be made right.
So, from her discussion of justice and the biblical word, she talks a little bit about forgiveness, that while forgiveness is central to Christian practice,
Uh forgiveness also requires justice.
Forgiveness restores a relationship, which is good, but then justice rectifies things.
Remember, justice is setting things right.
It’s a little bit like in the 12 steps, if you know the 12 steps from celebrate recovery, CR, or A-A-N-A.
It’s step nine is to make amends, right?
That is that is justice.
That’s rectifying.
That’s setting things right.
And so we need forgiveness, right?
Forgiveness is an important way that we proclaim the kingdom of God.
Because God in Jesus is forgiving us of our sins, so we want to forgive the sins of others
But more than just a pardon, God’s ultimate purpose for forgiveness is for it to lead to rectifying, making things right, making amends.
So Rutledge, I think, makes a pretty compelling case that rectify would be a better word than justice.
She also connects rectification, the setting things right.
uh as a better term than justification.
Uh justification by faith is one of the the key doctrines of the Protestant Reformation.
And I wonder
how the Protestant Reformation would have gone if their banner was rectification by faith.
Let’s set things right by faith instead of justification.
But that would be an exploration for a different podcast episode.
Then from the discussion on forgiveness
She begins to talk about the language of the wrath of God.
The wrath of God or the anger of God is a biblical image that you see in the Old Testament and the New Testament.
And Rutledge makes the same claim that Brad Jerzak and I and many others have made for years, and that is that the wrath of God is not literal.
But it is metaphorical language.
Here’s what Rutledge says about the wrath of God.
She writes
The wrath of God is not an emotion that flares up from time to time as though God had temper tantrums
It is a way of describing his absolute enmity against all wrong and his coming to set matters right.
She continues a couple pages later.
Where is the outrage?
It is God’s own.
It is the wrath of God against all that stands against his redemptive purpose.
It is not an emotion.
It is God’s righteous activity in setting right what is wrong.
It is God’s intervention on behalf of those who cannot help themselves.
So I know that a lot of people have really struggled with these images of God getting mad, right?
The anger of God, the anger of the Lord, the wrath of God.
And so Rutledge is clear, and it’s what I’ve said for years, that whenever you see the wrath of God, don’t in your mind get images of the anger of emotion.
That would be a human projection on God.
Human beings, we get angry.
And by the way, getting angry is not wrong.
It’s a human emotion.
Right?
It’s it’s normal for human beings to get angry.
And so there’s no reason for Christians to ignore their anger, but unchecked, persistent anger
Can become a corrupting force, which is why Paul says to put away from yourself.
This is in Ephesians 4, put away from yourself
anger and malice and rage.
So you can’t live in anger, but to to to get angry, particularly at wrongdoing,
Like I, you know, in and recounting American lynching, uh that makes me angry
I mean, it makes me sick, but it makes me mad.
The way black and brown people have been treated in the history of the United States makes me angry.
So to feel that anger, that emotion of anger, isn’t wrong, but the question is what do I do with that anger?
Right?
If I if I turn that anger into rage, I’m not following in the Jesus way
So when you read of the wrath of God in Scripture, don’t associate that with the human emotion of anger.
Because God does not literally have anger.
Anger is not an attribute of God
Because you’ll hear this sometimes.
People will say, well, God is loving, but God is also just.
And see, they want to associate the anger of God with justice
Because they have a poor Greek non-biblical understanding of justice.
Justice is not about getting mad and punishing people.
Justice is about setting things right.
So people will say that, well, God is loving, but he’s also just.
Whenever someone says God is loving, but just know that they’re about ready to make a mistake in what they say.
God is love, period, full stop.
And what we see as the wrath of God in the scriptures
Is God’s desire, because God is love, to reject all things that are unloving?
The wrath of God is God’s work to set all things right?
Rutlich doesn’t say it this way, but I think if you substitute judgment for wrath, you get a better understanding of what biblical writers mean by the wrath of God.
In other words, the wrath of God is a metaphor that points us to something very true about God, and that is the judgment of God.
Not the human emotion of anger, but the anger of God, the wrath of God in Scripture, is God’s desire to in the end set things right in final judgment.
So if you forgive someone who has done something evil and awful to you
And if that person receives your forgiveness or not, but they go on and live a cruel, mean, evil life.
You forgiving them is putting them in the hands of God, knowing that God in the end will judge them.
So if you substitute the word wrath with the word judgment, it will make much more sense.
And that is such a helpful understanding.
To know that God is not literally angry with you.
Anger of God, wrath of God is a metaphor.
Just like when the scriptures talk about the eyes of God.
God doesn’t literally have eyes, but God sees all.
God doesn’t literally have anger, but God will judge all.
And God isn’t mad at you.
God’s not mad at sinners.
When we look at Jesus in the gospel, he approaches sinners, and I mean sinners by run-of-the-mill sinners, prostitutes.
Tax collectors, he runs towards them with redemptive love.
But religious leaders
Religious elites like the Pharisees, Jesus is also direct with them about their sin, but it doesn’t come from a place of anger.
It comes from a place of love
Now, we’ll have much more to say about the wrath of God because Rutledge is going to talk about it more, particularly how it relates to how we understand the cross and Jesus dying.
But we’ll save Wrath of God Talk or more Wrath of God Talk for a later episode.
I think this has been enough.
Enough content, enough heavy topics for one episode.
So thank you for joining me for this episode.
That’s all I got for today.
Go in peace and be kind.
This transcript was generated with AI and may contain errors.