The following essay has been excerpted, with some abbreviation and slight modification, from chap. 1 of Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel, 2nd edition (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2002). The woodcut pictured above is Albrecht Dürer’s “Doubting Thomas” (c. 1511).

§1

The opening chapters of the Acts of the Apostles offer us a sharply-defined picture of the earliest preaching of the resurrection of Jesus. Although allowance has always to be made for the incorrigibly tidy mind of Luke, it is hard to deny that his reconstruction must bear some relation to the realities of that first preaching, if only because the resurrection was indeed first proclaimed in Israel; that is, it was first proclaimed to a specific audience with a particular history and memory, both of remote and of recent events and transactions. For that preaching must have presupposed (as Luke insists) the memory of the crucified: ‘this Jesus’, the identifiable figure whose death was a public event, and whose sentence, however odd or irregular, belonged to particular and observable bit of political process.

But Luke goes further: this is not only an audience which knows about Jesus. It is not a neutral audience, and it is not an innocent audience. In this event of the preaching of Jesus risen, there are no ‘uninvolved bystanders’. For Luke, the apostles speak to an audience of participants, an audience with blood on its hands. The proclaiming of Jesus crucified and risen is not a matter of giving information; the rhetoric of this preaching assumes that the hearers already belong in the story, that they are agents, that ‘the things concerning Jesus’ have concerned and will concern them. Luke makes it clear that he is defining his audience, his ‘Jerusalem’, as the judges and condemners of Jesus: their guilt is historical, concrete and specific.

And this emerges most clearly, of course, when Luke presents us with the disciples preaching the resurrection to those who are most precisely the judges of Jesus. The apostles stand in the name of Jesus before the court that condemned Jesus: to this court they must in turn pronounce the sentence of God, the sentence implied in the fact that the crucified and condemned is raised by God and vindicated. He returns as the judge of his judges.

So, at the simplest level, we have to do with a straightforward reversal of roles: the condemned and the court change places, the victim becomes the judge. And this as it stands would have been a readily intelligible theological move. The idea that those who are now poor and despised will at the last day be endowed with the authority to judge those who judged them is familiar enough from Jewish apocalyptic literature, from Daniel to Qumran and later. But the gospel of the resurrection goes on to a more profound and startling reversal. The exaltation of the condemned Jesus is presented by the disciples not as threat but as promise and hope. The condemning court, the murderous ‘city’, is indeed judged as resisting the saving will of God; but that does not mean that the will of God ceases to be saving. The rulers and the people are in rebellion; yet they act ‘in ignorance’ (Acts 3:17; cf. Luke 23:34), and God still waits to be graciously present in ‘times of refreshing’ (Acts 3:19). And grace is to be released when the judges turn to their victim and recognize him as their hope and saviour.

It has been said by one of the greatest of British New Testament scholars and expositors that ‘the kind of preaching represented by the Acts threw all its stress upon vindication rather than redemption’; and, in the sense that Luke has a very undeveloped theology of atonement or justification, this is unquestionably true. Yet redemption in the simplest sense of an offer of decisive and transforming hope is very much a part of this preaching. The promise of liberation is pervasively present in terms of ‘the rescue, by the vindicated one, of his own opponents’. By his vindication, by God’s judgement presented against human judgement, the crucified becomes himself a vindicator, a source of justification. And the sharp exclusivism of Acts 4:12 must be read strictly in this light: grace is released only in confrontation with the victim.

§2

If we turn from the preaching and witness of the disciples in these early chapters of Acts to the dramatic account of Saul’s conversion in ch. 9, we find the same insight taken a stage further still. Saul is stopped on his journey by a vision of power and judgement: blinding light, an accusing voice. He responds — as might be expected — by addressing his accuser as ‘Lord’ (9:5), recognizing the hand of God in the event by which he is challenged and judged. And the reply identifies this ‘Lord’ as ‘Jesus, whom you are persecuting’. The Lord names himself not only as Jesus, but as Jesus embodied in the particular present victims of Paul’s violence: he is those whom Paul has oppressed, hurt or killed.

And yet the annihilating force of this judgement by the victim on the oppressor is in due course lifted by the same victim: Ananias comes to Saul, saying ‘The Lord Jesus who appeared to you on the road by which you came, has sent me that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit (9:17). The Lord who judges is the Lord who saves; the Lord who vindicates his oppressed witnesses also comes, in their words and hands, to save their oppressors — who are his as well.

Luke has begun firmly in Jerusalem: the risen Jesus appears only in Jerusalem and its environs, and the disciples are enjoined to ‘stay in the city’ until the gift of the Spirit comes. But ‘beginning from Jerusalem’, the witness gradually spreads. Wherever Jesus is to be found among his disciples and wherever he is oppressed and persecuted in his disciples becomes a ‘Jerusalem’, the city of rejection, the court of judgement. The stress on geographical continuity in the first chapters of Acts points up to the fact that the resurrection is first preached to the guilty; once it is further established that the persecuted Church ‘embodies’ Jesus as victim, the definition of the oppressor, the identity of the condemning court, becomes ever wider. If Saul is persecuting believers in Damascus, there too is a ‘Jerusalem’, awaiting the good news of the resurrection. And Acts 9 represents the decisive turning-point in the universalizing of mission — it spreads not only to Samaria but to the Gentile world (9:15): it is a gospel for all.

§3

What I have said so far suggests a provisional definition of the primary stage in preaching the resurrection as an invitation to recognize one’s victim as one’s hope. The crucified is God’s chosen: it is with the victim, the condemned, that God identifies, and it is in the company of the victim, so to speak, that God is to be found, and nowhere else. And this is not simply to say, in the fashionable phrase, that God makes his own the cause of the poor and despised. We are not talking of ‘the’ poor and despised, ‘the’ victim in the abstract. The preaching of the resurrection, as we have seen, is not addressed to an abstract audience: the victim involved is the victim of the hearers. We are, insistently and relentlessly, in Jerusalem, confronted therefore with a victim who is our victim. When we make victims, when we embark on condemnation, exclusion, violence, the diminution or oppression of anyone, when we set ourselves up as judges, we are exposed to judgement, and we turn away from salvation. To hear the good news of salvation, to be converted, is to turn back to the condemned and rejected, acknowledging that there is hope nowhere else.

To judge is to be exposed to judgement. Conversion is the realization that this equation shows us where we look for our vindication: the relationship we have set up, of judge to victim, is first of all to be reversed and then transcended. When I have seen that judging exposes me to judgement, I see that my oppressive and condemnatory role in fact wounds and diminishes me, makes me liable before the court. I am my own victim, no less than the one I judge, and that is why I need salvation, rescue from the trap of the judge-victim relationship, the gift of a relationship which is not of this kind. But this means that the judge-victim relationship must itself be transformed: I am not saved by forgetting or cancelling my memory of concrete guilt, the oppressive relations in which I am in fact inextricably involved. And so I must look to my partner: to the victim who alone can be the source of renewal and transformation.

The problem is that in ordinary human relationships, boundaries are very fluid indeed. Even in a single relationship, I may be both oppressor and victim, and I can also be involved in all manner of subtle collusions with both my oppressors and my victims. The human world is not one of clearly distinguishable bodies of oppressors and victims, those who inflict damage and those who bear it. Where is a ‘pure’ victim to be found? Is it possible to imagine a person capable of choice, of oppressive violence, who is in fact only victim and never oppressor? If so, such would be the one victim whose judgement might be more than a reversal of roles: such a person could never merely assume the place of the condemner over against myself as the new victim. And so there would be the possibility of a transformed rather than an inverted relationship. The ‘pure victim’ alone can be the merciful, the vindicating judge.

What Christian preaching asserts is that conversion, return to the victim in hope, is possible because Jesus embodies the condition of a pure victim. Judgement here is also mercy and hope because of the quality of this particular victim. The New Testament writers often show a great interest in Jesus’ attitude at his trial: there is no sense in which Jesus uses counter-violence of a verbal or any other variety. ‘When he suffered, he did not threaten’ (1 Pet. 2:23). And the tradition made it clear that Jesus offered no ‘violence’ to any who turned to him in hope: he accepts, he does not condemn, resist or exclude. His life is defined as embodying an unconditional and universal acceptance, untrammelled by social, ritual or racial exclusiveness. Jesus is judge because he is victim; and that very fact means that he is a judge who will not condemn. ‘God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him’ (John 3:17).

The exaltation of Jesus to be judged, to share the ultimate authority of God, is thus God’s proclamation to all earthly judges, to the condemning court and the hostile city, that it is the pure victim alone who can ‘carry’ the divine love, the divine opposition to violence, oppression and exclusion. And so far from being passive, it is the pure victim alone who is capable of creative action, the transformation of the human world, the release from the pendulum swing of attack and revenge. The victim as ‘pure victim’ is more than victim: when God receives and approves the condemned Jesus and returns him to his judges through the preaching of the Church, he transcends the world of oppressor-oppressed relations to create a new humanity, capable of other kinds of relation — between human beings, and between humanity and the Father. There is more to human interrelation than the opposition of the one who possesses coercive force or authority to condemn and the one who suffers it.

§4

Yet this does also imply something about God’s attitude to any and every victim. If God’s love is shown in the pure victim, it is shown (as we have seen) in opposition to violence: so it impossible to conceive of the Christian God identified with the oppressor in any relationship of violence. The powerless sufferer, whether ‘innocent’ or ‘guilty’, is the one who belongs with God, simply in virtue of being a victim; so that the saving presence of God is always to be sought and found with the victim. Conversion is always turning to my victim — even in circumstances where it is important to me to believe in the rightness of my cause. For we are not here dealing with law and morality. What is at issue is simply the transaction that leads to exclusion, to the severance of any relation of reciprocity. It may be unconscious, it may be deliberate and wilfully damaging, it may appear unavoidable; but as soon as such a transaction has occurred, God is with the powerless, the excluded. And our hope is that he is to be found as we return to our victims seeking reconciliation, seeking to find in renewed encounter with them the merciful and transforming judgement of Jesus, the ‘absolute’ victim.

Part of the point in stressing this is to guard against an easy sentimentalizing of the victim. Some people need to believe that penitence towards the victim is an admission of the innate moral superiority of the excluded or dispossessed. This (curiously) reduces my violence to a kind of mistake: had I but recognized the virtue of my victim, I should have seen that I had no ‘right’ to act as I did. I ‘atone’ for my primal sin of oppression by according a superior instead of an inferior place to my victims, placing a moral scourge in their hands to beat me as once I beat them; and this is a travesty of the process of human reconciliation and restoration: my imagination is still trapped in the illusion that the basic and ultimate form of human relation is that between the powerful and the powerless. Even if this is translated into terms of moral superiority and inferiority, the structure remains the same, a ‘master-slave’ relationship in which one partner is defined by the other.

God is not ‘with’ the victim in order to make us victims; so the preaching of the resurrection affirms. Yet we go on seeking some firm ground for a ‘justice’ that will invert the existing order to create new victims out of old oppressors. God judges our justice: not condemning it or inverting it, but transcending. It is the secret that Paul learned, of a divine justice, righteousness, which acts only to restore — what Luther so strangely called the ‘passive righteousness’ of God, the justice that will not act against us, that is incapable of aggression or condemnation: the righteousness that makes righteous.

§5

To recognize my victim as my hope involves the prior recognition of the fact that I victimize, and of the identity of my victim. The formulation, ‘Repent and believe’, stresses that God’s forgiveness cannot be abstract and general: the authentic word of forgiveness, newness and resurrection is audible when we acknowledge ourselves as oppressors and ‘return’ to our victims in the sense of learning who and where they are. It is the process in which memory becomes my memory, the memory of a self with a story of responsibility.

And to remember in this way is to have restored to me a part of the self that I have diminished. It is possible to be your own victim, too, and the violence you do to yourself is no less real than that which others do. So the camp commandant who has diminished and isolated himself by his violence, and compounded the injury to himself by refusing to own the memory of it, has still unwittingly left his past in the hands of God. If forgiveness is ever to be realized for him, it is not only the face of his victim which must be ‘returned’ to him, but his own forgotten face: the face of himself as his own victim, scarred and ruined by what he has done. He must see Christ, the saving victim, the merciful judge, not only in the victim whose blood is on his hands but in the self he could and would not be, the self he has decided against.

Ivan Karamazov cries out against the prospect of an ultimate reconciliation between victim and murderer based on a recognition of God’s justice, and he is right. But what if that justice is not the vindication of a divine plan, but the revelation of God’s identity in the insulted and injured, the uncovering of all forgotten wounds, so as to open up again the possibility of fresh relation, growth into healing? God does not shoulder aside the victim to pronounce an empty and formal acquittal to the oppressor (what right has anyone to forgive on behalf of another?): he is not to be found, his grace and mercy are not to be found, anywhere but in the past of human violence. God as gracious ‘occurs’, is manifest, only in the resurrection of the crucified. ‘There is salvation in no one else’. No amount of the rhetoric of ‘self-transcendence’ can substitute for the recovery of the self, the self as the memory of crucifixion and crucifying: there are no dead selves discarded or buried to be the foundation-stones of new identities, because God is the God who opens our graves and gives back the past.

‘God’ is that to which all things are present, so theology traditionally affirms: so, through the mediation of God, all things can be made present to us again, present through his presence. The concept of God’s ‘memory’ as holding or keeping open the past overthrows the delusion that our violence is final and irremediable. But what takes us further than this and ensures that the ‘memory’ of God is a saving fact, neither a menacing nor a neutral one, is the conviction that God’s presence presence to the world is neither menacing nor neutral. God identifies with the victims in the world’s history: we learn this in the fact that the bearer of his grace and power in our history is one who can be described as ‘purely’ victim, in no way the perpetrator of diminishing and excluding violence. So that God’s ‘memory’ is the victims’ memory: God receives the victims’ pain into an infinite selfhood and self-presence; and so when he returns to us the memory of what has been done, it is as a memory inseparably bound to a reality which guarantees the hope of healing because its resources and possibilities cannot be exhausted or extinguished by the world’s destructiveness.

§6

Thus the risen one judges not only our judgement but our fear of judgement. His condemnation is pronounced against the whole system of earthly condemnation, and the structures of mutual rejection and fear in which human beings lived are challenged in the most direct way. In the light of the return to us of the crucified, we can learn to interpret our world as it has been in these terms of mutual rejection, to see our human history as one of condemnatory and excluding violence. We are all of us, in some measure, shut off from each other: our own individual options for violence fade into an overall background of endemic violence. We are born into a world where there is already a history of oppression and victimization. In this sense, we are all victims. Yet such a discovery can only be made — as I have tried to show — by beginning from the particular facts of the violence for which I am responsible, not by a bland generalization. By discovering my past of oppression, I can discover my own self-diminution in the process; and in pressing back to the source of this vicious spiral, I discover the primary lack of wholeness, the primary deprivation, which is a part of belonging to the single human story.

But the freedom, the ‘space’, to undertake this process of discovery requires the presence of the ‘pure victim’, the symbolic figure who transcends the order of human violence, a figure first to be identified with my victim, then with myself, in a continuing process of mediation and reinterpretation. And the gospel of the resurrection offers Jesus crucified as such a figure.

So we return to our starting-point. The preaching of Jesus crucified and raised occurs in a specific human context in which Jesus and his death are available in the public memory. This man and his way of living and dying, this man rather than any other, is exalted, approved and vindicated. The preaching of the resurrection takes this out of the realm of mere report by its address to a particular audience, its requirement that they see themselves as guilty of the violence of the cross and turn back to their victim. And this can be done in hope precisely because it is this man and no other who is involved, the pure victim, the carrier of mercy and acceptance. Thus the process begins by which the particularity of Jesus crucified and proclaimed as Saviour in Jerusalem becomes a universal symbol, the focus and pivot of a fresh and transforming interpretation of all human reality.

‘There is therefore now no condemnation’, wrote Paul, ‘for those who are in Christ Jesus’ (Rom. 8:1). Condemnation is condemned in him; those who come to be ‘in’ Jesus, who live in, or under, or by the resource and power of the symbol of the cross, have passed through God’s ultimate judgement. God’s judgement operates in the gospel of the resurrection to bring men and women out of the slavery and deprivation of violence and mutual exclusion into a new creation, whose ‘law’ is Christ. The community of those in Christ can thus be both a penitent and a hopeful community, a community, that is, capable of recovering its individual and corporate history in trust. And it is a community whose concern, in living under Christ’s ‘law’, is to stand against oppression, exclusion and violence, to stand for the kind of human relation — and human-divine relation — which transcends the oppressor-oppressed bond.