St. Paul says that “Christ died for our sins.” St. Peter, referring to Isaiah 53:4, says that “He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross.” While there are numerous theories about why Christ died and what his death accomplished, it is clear that human sin was somehow responsible. In the Gospel accounts, it is clear that human sin was also directly responsible for Christ’s death.

What happened to Jesus on the cross reveals how sin (both in the immediate situation and across time) led to the death of the Messiah. A cursory reading of the Gospels does more than provide prooftexts for a substitutionary theory of atonement; it shows how sin in real time led to the crucifixion.

There are many examples. Perhaps the following will suffice to make my point. Both Mark and Matthew tell us that the sin of envy brought Jesus to the cross: “For [Pilate] knew it was out of envy that [the Sanhedrin] had handed Jesus over to him.” Envy. One of the so-called “seven deadly sins,” which merits mention in many biblical listings of sin. The chief priests and Pharisees were green with it. They felt it on a visceral level, and it moved them to get rid of Jesus.

Greed also played a part in getting Jesus to the cross. Judas sold his friend and master for what amounted to four months wages for a working man. It’s doubtful that greed alone led Judas to betray his Lord, but greed was present in him (see John 12:6), and the greedy chief priests knew how to manipulate it.

Lying, especially lying under oath, is seen as a serious sin in the Bible (e.g., Exodus 19:16-19; 20:16; 1 Tim. 1:9-10), yet the chief priests looked for witnesses who were willing to lie under oath in order to destroy Jesus. After Jesus’s resurrection, the same religious leaders paid Roman soldiers (yet another sin, bribery) to lie about what had happened.

Malice, which is the desire for harm to come to another person, was present when Jesus was crucified. The Jewish leaders held a preliminary trial for Jesus, found him guilty, and then abused him. They spit in his face, slapped him, struck him with their fists, and mocked him. These men wanted to hurt Jesus. There was something in them that wanted to see him suffer. That is malice.

It wasn’t just the Jewish leaders. The Roman soldiers also wanted to hurt Jesus. They too struck him, tortured him, and mocked him. They laughed as they stripped him naked, humiliating him. They took pleasure from striking him and taunting him.

Some of the malice displayed by the Roman soldiers and their governor grew in the soil of racial and ethnic prejudice. It is clear that the Roman governor despised Jewish people. He had treated them abominably, misappropriating their money and then killing them in the streets when they protested. He resisted the Jewish leaders, not at first because he wanted to protect Jesus, but simply because they were Jews. When Jesus was first brought before him, Pilate asked, “Are you the king of the Jews?” Literally, it is “You are the king of the Jews?” (John 18:33-35; Matthew 27:11). By placing the word “You” at the very beginning of the sentence, the evangelists give it emphasis. The Roman Prefect was mocking: “You? You are the king of the Jews? (Just the kind of king Jews would have!)”

Later, when the Jewish leaders coerced Pilate into crucifying Jesus (read the story—it’s fascinating), Pilate used the titulus (the sign stating the reason for Jesus’s execution) to take a swipe at the Jewish leadership. It read (in three different languages), “The King of the Jews.” When the Jewish leaders objected – they didn’t want people thinking that Jesus was their king nor that the despised Romans could possibly execute their king – Pilate dismissed them with a word: “What I’ve written, I’ve written.”

The racial hatred worked both ways. The Jews detested Pilate (not that he hadn’t given them reason) and treated him disrespectfully. They refused to call him by his title. They did not say, “Prefect, thank you for seeing us.” They did not call him, as was expected, “Most excellent Pilate.” Without any niceties, they spat out their complaint: “We found this man misleading our nation and forbidding us to give tribute to Caesar…” Of course, Jesus had not forbidden people from paying the tribute tax; this was yet another lie. When Pilate asked for a summation of their evidence against Jesus, they responded rudely, “If he were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you” (John 18:30).

The crucifixion is a microcosm of sorts, displaying how human sin, from envy to ethnic and racial hatred, results (both immediately, at the time of the crucifixion, and over the millennia of human rebellion) in rejection of, and hatred toward, God. Jesus died for sins, so that they might be forgiven. He also died because people who did not want to be forgiven sinned against him.

The extraordinary thing is that he knew that the sins of others would lead him to this cruel death (Mark 10:45), and he accepted the fact. He accepted it because he genuinely loved envious, greedy, untruthful, malicious, and bigoted people and wanted to rescue them from their sins. Those people included high priests, Roman prefects, soldiers, and Pharisees—and us.