Viewed from the standpoint of Roman politics, Jesus’s crucifixion meant another chance for Rome to remind everybody who was boss. If the spindly-legged one hanging up there is King of the Jews, that’s all to the good. See what Caesar does with would-be kings: he puts them up like billboards. That is what the cross was. An object lesson in power.

But there is another way to see the cross. It is to see the cross as a place where something of extraordinary importance happened. To understand what I mean you have to go back to the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur in the Old Testament.

The people of Israel were bound to God in a covenant relationship. And the covenant relationship was predicated upon the people of Israel keeping the laws of God. To the degree that the laws were broken, so was the relationship broken. And coming out of that problem for Jews — when you violate the divine laws you’re out of relationship with God — emerged the sacrificial system. Sacrifice was the way that a relationship was restored with God.

Yom Kippur was the annual great day of sacrifice. It was the day when all the burdens of all the people of Israel were lifted. It was the day when all the burdens of all the people possibly related to Israel was lifted. It was the day when all the burdens of the people of Israel and those related to the people of Israel in all possible places in Israel was lifted.

If your heart united itself to the great sacrifices of Yom Kippur, all of your sin was lifted, and not only all of your sin, but all the sin you knew about and all the sin you did not know about. And not only that, but all the sins you committed accidentally, as well as those you did deliberately and in rebellion against God, they were lifted. More than that, all of the transgressions that are not even yet realized, that you have yet to act out, to perpetrate, all of those are lifted. Anything that estranges the people of God from God was lifted in the sacrifice, if their heart bound itself to the sacrifice.

The very dramatic moment of Yom Kippur was the moment when the scapegoat was let out. This was a goat, chosen by lot, to do an awful task. He was a most unfortunate victim, because on Yom Kippur this unlucky winner of the lottery was brought before the high priest. The high priest laid his hands on the head of the scapegoat and confessed into the scapegoat all the sins of the people of Israel. In fact the Talmud even tells us the exact words that the high priest said. With his hands on the goat’s head, he said, “O Lord God, your people, the house of Israel, has sinned. They have committed iniquity, and they have transgressed against you.”

They may sound to you like mere words. But in the Hebraic imagination, words are reality-making, words effect what they express. In the priest’s view and in the view of the people of Israel, the sins of Israel were actually going into the scapegoat, actually going into it. That’s why it was so awful to be the goat. When the sins were put into the goat, a relay of men led the goat little by little out to the desert, to a lonely place, and there the goat would die. There is a legend about that, the legend that the high priest would go and tie a scarlet cord to the tabernacle. And when the goat died, at the hour of the goat’s death, the scarlet cord would turn to white. Many Bible scholars believe this legend is what Isaiah had in mind when he said, “Though your sins be as scarlet as blood, they will be as white as snow.”

So off the goat went into a place alone, but a very public figure; out it went carrying the burden of sin, the sins of all Israel, of all people related to Israel, out it went into a desert to die. Eight centuries before the birth of Jesus, Isaiah prophesied about the Servant of God. Isaiah says that this Servant will bear the sins of many, he will be a human scapegoat, and he will look for a place to do his awful work, carrying the sins of people in a way that the animal sacrifice could not.

And so the cross becomes the desert, the forsaken place. The cross is the lonely place yet so public, so humiliating, so painful, and so terminal. The cross is a place for the holy dreadful work of God, the place to which all of your sins and all of mine, the place to which all of your burdens and all of mine, are taken by the scapegoat, by Jesus, to die in his death.