Reading Scripture in the Light of the Cross

What is the most significant biblical discovery of the last century? For Bart Ehrman, it isn’t the Dead Sea Scrolls. It isn’t the textual variations that reveal scribal errors or theological amendments. It isn’t even the lack of archaeological evidence for the Exodus. The most important ‘discovery’ about the Bible might seem obvious, even banal, but it has radical ramifications. It is simply this: that the Bible is not one book.

What would happen if I took the collected works of William Shakespeare and insisted on reading them as a single, seamless narrative? If I harmonised Hamlet with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, smoothing out their tonal dissonance, or forced King Lear and The Tempest into one coherent philosophical system, I would not be honouring Shakespeare; I would be silencing him. The brooding fatalism of Macbeth does not resolve into the pastoral reconciliation of As You Like It. The political ambiguity of Julius Caesar does not neatly align with the redemptive arc of The Winter’s Tale. Each play has its own voice, its own emotional weather, its own questions and tensions. To collapse them into a single “Shakespearean message” would be to flatten the drama, to erase the very contradictions and developments that make the canon luminous. Faithfulness to Shakespeare requires that we allow the tragedies to remain tragic, the comedies to remain comic, and the histories to wrestle with power in their own distinctive ways. In the same way, treating the Bible as though it were one uniform book risks muting the chorus of voices that give it depth, tension, and, ultimately, its power.

If Shakespeare must be read play by play, voice by voice, how much more so the Scriptures? And yet the church has often treated the Bible not as a library of witnesses but as a single, seamless oracle — “the Word of God” in a flat and undifferentiated sense. And in doing so, in this attempt to harmonise all of the voices, we distort or even silence all of them. We fail to permit any of the authors to say what they intended to say. In short, we are unfaithful to the Biblical texts when we try to make them speak with one voice. More, we risk making our distorted version authoritative.

The fourth gospel does something theologically daring. It does not deny eschatology; it internalises it. In the fourth gospel, judgement is not primarily deferred to the end of history but disclosed within it. As Jesus approaches crucifixion, he announces, “Now is the judgement of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out” (12:31). The adverb matters. The judgment is not postponed. It is present.

For the writer of the fourth gospel (whom I will – for convenience – refer to as John, although it is extremely unlikely that an uneducated fisherman could have composed so nuanced and literary a text as this account is), the cross is not merely the precondition for a later reckoning; it is the reckoning. The world judges Jesus — condemns, mocks, executes — and in that act its own logic is unveiled. Light shines into darkness (3:19), and the response to that light, the exposure itself, constitutes judgement.

This is why the crucifixion in John reads as exaltation. Jesus is “lifted up.” He declares, “It is finished.” The gospel that begins with Genesis language — “In the beginning” — culminates in a garden, on the sixth day, with a cry of completion. Creation reaches its fulfilment not in coercive triumph but in self-giving love. The cross is framed as the climax of creation, and judgement is woven into that climax as an unveiling: the violent imagination of the world is exposed; the non-violent character of God is revealed.

None of this need be read as antithetical to the Synoptic horizon of future reckoning (Mark 13; Matthew 25). But if we too quickly harmonise John into a scheme in which the decisive judgement still awaits humanity as a punitive event, we risk muting his theological claim that the judgment of the world is already manifest in the crucified Christ. The danger of collapsing his vision into a purely future tribunal is not merely exegetical; it is theological. It leaves space for a conception of God whose final word is retribution rather than revelation, whose justice stands apart from the self-giving love disclosed on Golgotha.

The difference is not trivial. If creation is complete and judgement still awaits, the cross becomes preparatory — a mechanism securing acquittal before a later court. But if the cross is itself the completion of creation and the judgement of the world, then redemption is not rescue from a future divine retaliation; it is participation in a new order of being unveiled in self-giving love. The Final Judgment is not God’s violence against the world but the world’s violence exposed by God’s forgiveness.

If this is even close to John’s theological instinct — that judgement is unveiled at the cross, that creation reaches its telos in crucified love — then the question becomes hermeneutical. Which voice orders the others? Which revelation governs our reading of divine justice, wrath, and hope?

The Transfiguration (Luke 9: 28 – 36) offers a quiet but decisive answer. On the mountain, Moses and Elijah stand beside Jesus — the Law and the Prophets in luminous continuity. Peter – instinctively religious, like all of us, I suspect – proposes three shelters, placing them side by side. It is an understandable impulse: preserve the voices, stabilise the revelation, honour the tradition. But the voice from the cloud interrupts: “This is my Son, whom I love… Listen to him.”

Not to them. The writer of the fourth gospel makes it very clear where interpretive and revelatory authority lies. When the cloud lifts, “they saw no one except Jesus.” The Law and the Prophets are not discarded; they are re-situated. They bear witness, but they do not interpret Jesus. He interprets them.

And if John is right that the judgment of the world is disclosed in the crucified Christ, then “Listen to him” cannot mean less than this: all our readings of judgement — whether prophetic, apocalyptic, or eschatological — must be brought under the light of the cross. The exposure of violence through forgiveness becomes the criterion. The revelation of God in self-giving love becomes the hermeneutical centre. To treat the Bible as a flat, uniform Word is, ironically, to resist the very movement enacted on the mountain. It is to build three shelters.

The impulse to build three shelters is understandable. We need our gods to order our worlds – we domesticate and subdue them even as we worship them. But Jesus resists that. The Father he claims to reveal cannot be tamed by our theologies, swayed by our rituals, or contained within our sacred texts. Friends, I will testify that I only began to see the extent of the love of God and the power of the gospel when I stopped trying to harmonise the texts and make them speak with one voice. When I allowed each writer to speak for themselves, without trying to impose modern Protestant hermeneutical frameworks onto them, when I listened to the to the often contradictory but passionately felt truths of each writer and juxtaposed them with the Jesus that some of them interpreted and described, I saw a fuller picture, a lovelier picture, a more transformative picture of the Father than I ever had before. I urge you, let the Biblical texts speak with their own voices, Dare to silence your own. Let the light shine in the darkness.  Be renewed.