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.

The Father, as such, will not judge (5:22): judgement belongs to the Son, because it is the Son who is concretely involved in the processes of violence and condemnation.

attempting to keep the devotional and the critical together in one interpretative process:

a divine justice, righteousness, which acts only to restore

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:14 in the first instance, the non-violent, the non-oppressive self he has rejected, then also in the penitent self he has refused to become in burying or neutralizing h

Christ as criminal, Christ as madman, Christ as alcoholic vagrant: all this and more is implied in the unconditional identification of God with the victim.

memory is the memory of our responsibility for rejection and injury, for diminution of self and others.

it is the ‘city’ thus constituted that condemns and rejects God’s holy child; and it is in and to that city that the crucified is now proclaimed as risen.

What is at issue is simply the transaction that leads to exclusion, to the severance of any relation of reciprocity.