I want to take up a question I asked earlier: “Is the cross a condemnation of human violence, an act of divine violence, or both (or neither)?”

For starters, let me postulate that God hates sin.

I’ll define sin as a breakdown of humans’ ability to love and relate to God and one another; alienation (to be mended later by reconciliation) is a good word for it. This alienation defies God’s purpose for creation, with the result that God (often violently) punishes whoever is responsible. He may avenge sin in this way because it is in nature to do so, or he may do so out of an insistence that humanity know how much he hates sin. The flood suggests the former, the cross the latter.

Genesis 1–7 begins with God’s intimacy with creation and shows how humanity breaks and increasingly defies that intimacy. I believe the flood is a key to the story of Scripture, because it shows God’s response to sin: God ultimately removes it or punishes it, whatever the cost.

It is difficult to over-emphasize the importance of the flood (whether one thinks it literally happened or is a myth intended to make a theological point), in that God was willing to destroy almost all of creation, out of both wrath and a loving desire to make creation good again. God starts again with Noah, who does love God and his family, but of course he and his descendants fall again into sin and alienation.

These early stories describing the pervasive sin both before and after the flood suggest a key point about humans: while the occasional individual (like Enoch or Noah) whole-heartedly seeks a realtionship with God on his/her own, humanity on the whole will inevitably descend into sin and alienation from God if left to ourselves.

So God makes it easier for humans by setting certain terms to define the relationship. He begins with Abraham and eventually establishes the covenant with Israel, in an effort to win back their love and to use them to win back the love of the world. But, of course, the people break this relationship early and often and continue to fall into sin. God responds to their sin, as he did during the flood, by destroying Israel’s world, via the exile, to make the nation good again.

In the incarnation, God conclusively defies divine/human alienation; though already present with Israel in many ways over the centuries, God now becomes a human to achieve the full intimacy of relationship.

The cross, I’m convinced, is beyond human comprehension. Scripture describes Christ’s work in various ways, many of them centering on animal sacrifice, and yet we never quite understand why sacrifice (animal or divine) should mend the broken relationship between us and God. I suspect that animal sacrifice was intended to demonstrate the weight of our iniquity, but of course it could not really settle the matter conclusively.

Here I would suggest that the crucifixion must be understood in light of the flood. I shouldn’t over-press the point, since the NT itself doesn’t draw this connection, but I do think it can help us make sense of divine violence in general and the cross in particular.

Both the watery destruction of the entire world and the death of the incarnate God underline the weight of sin in God’s eyes, but in powerfully different ways. In Genesis, God executes his wrath upon humanity and creation; in the crucifixion, God takes it upon himself. In one sense, this means that Christ suffers the punishment we deserve, but in another sense it is a proclamation to us that God will not allow human weakness to prevent relationship between God and his creation.

God was unwilling to leave sin ultimately unpunished, lest we think it unimportant. The cross, then, is not a condemnation of human violence, but a condemnation of human sin. If divine violence was inevitable, God chose the most gracious act of violence possible, in that God in the flesh was the willing victim.

The hope, it seems, was that all people in the world would look at the cross and recognize both (1) that we are sinners who need to repent and (2) that God loves us passionately and will forgive our sin so that we can be reconciled to the creator who loves us.

The beauty of the cross is this: only the crucifixion has proclaimed to humanity both the boundlessness of God’s love and the full weight of our sin without destroying us to teach us the lesson.