Who killed Jesus? How not to shift the blame

after by Camil Tulcana

 

In answering the question: “Why did Christ die?”, John Stott broadens the scope much further than simply blaming the Jewish authorities at the time:

“This blaming of the Jewish people for the crucifixion of Jesus is extremely unfashionable today. Indeed, if it is used as a justification for slandering and persecuting the Jews (as it has been in the past), or for anti-Semitism, it is absolutely indefensible. The way to avoid anti-Semitic prejudice, however, is not to pretend that the Jews were innocent, but, having admitted their guilt, to add that others shared in it. This was how the apostles saw it. Herod and Pilate, Gentiles and Jews, they said, had together ‘conspired’ against Jesus (Acts 4:27).

More important still, we ourselves are also guilty. If we were in their place, we would have done what they did. Indeed, we  have  done it. For whenever we turn away from Christ, we ‘are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace’ (Heb. 6:6). We too sacrifice Jesus to our greed like Judas, to our envy like the priests, to our ambition like Pilate…

Before we can begin to see the cross as something done  for  us (leading us to faith and worship), we have to see it as something done  by  us (leading us to repentance). Indeed, ‘only the man who is prepared to own his share in the guilt of the cross’, wrote Canon Peter Green, ‘may claim his share in its grace’.”

– John Stott, The Cross of Christ: 20th Anniversary Edition (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1989), 71-72.

 

More of my favourite quotes from  The Cross of Christ:

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