Reimagining Judgment: What Easter Tells Us About the Cross

One of the most difficult—and yet profoundly beautiful—aspects of following the way of Jesus is that he doesn’t just invite us to change our actions. He calls us to completely reimagine entire categories of how we understand our world and our lives.

What does it mean to love in light of the story of Jesus?

What does fulfillment look like now, through the lens of the resurrection?

Even a concept as weighty as judgment is reinvented in light of the gospel.

The Cross as Judgment

"Now is the time for the judgment of the world, for the prince of this world to be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up, will draw all people to myself."

That is what Jesus says Easter is about. Judgment. But if that’s true—if judgment is what’s happening on the cross—then maybe our shorthand explanations of Easter have missed something crucial.

Because the first thing Jesus tells us is that the cross is the judgment of the world.

Many of us have been taught that judgment comes after we die—standing at the gates, facing divine retribution. But Jesus roots judgment in the here and now. In Holy Week. On the cross.

Rethinking Sin and Retribution

Part of the issue may be our assumption that judgment must mean punishment. That if something wrong has happened, then something bad must follow.

But that’s not what we see in Jesus.

Instead, we’re invited to imagine sin not primarily as rule-breaking but as a kind of corruption. A sickness. Sin is not about breaking the rule. It’s about being unable to see what is good—for you, for your neighbor, for your world.

In this light, judgment is not divine punishment. It’s divine clarity. It’s the moment when God holds our brokenness in front of us and says, "Look. This is what you’re doing to each other. And I will not let you look away."

Cedar and Our Selective Sight

Let me tell you about Cedar. He was a beautiful, brilliant, and blissfully oblivious dog. Wonderful in every way. But now and then, when we were gone a little too long, we’d come home to chaos: shredded artwork, overturned compost, a well-loved stuffed animal gone rogue.

And when confronted with the evidence, Cedar would become a master of avoidance. Pick up any scrap of his mess, and suddenly he couldn’t see you. Eyes averted. Head turned. Denial personified.

Sound familiar?

We do this all the time. We ignore the harm we cause. We accumulate more than we need. We look away when others are sacrificed for our comfort, as long as they remain nameless.

We outsource sin so we can pretend we’re not complicit. And the cross says: No more.

The End of Denial

On the cross, God says:

"This is what your violence looks like. This is the pain your blame and scapegoating creates. And it can no longer remain hidden. You cannot look away."

This is what judgment looks like in the gospel.

Not retribution. Not divine wrath. But divine honesty.

The cross is not about God needing someone to suffer. It’s about God refusing to let us pretend any longer. It’s the place where we stop passing our pain back and forth forever. Where we stop pretending we’re okay. Where we finally see the truth about what we do to each other.

The judgment of God is not violence. It is clarity.

It is the moment we become honest about our own.

"Father, forgive them—they don’t even know what they’re doing."

That is the Easter story. And it is good news for all of us.