In Mark 10:45, Jesus gives one of his clearest declarations about what he came to do:

For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many.

In this post, I’d like to talk a bit about the metaphor of a ransom and distinguish it from that of a substitute as construed in PSA.

What is a Ransom?

Ransom, and its close cousin redemption, has to do with liberation. Both are about a transfer; a movement from a place of captivity into a place of freedom. When used as a noun, as Jesus does in Mark 10:45, a ransom refers to the cost or price of that freedom. Simply put, when Jesus calls himself a ransom he is indicating the price he will pay in order to bring about our liberation.

When used as verbs, to ransom and to redeem both mean to rescue or deliver. Consider two Old Testament examples:

Psalm 49:15

“But God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol, for he will receive me.”

Jeremiah 31:10-11

10 Hear the word of the Lord, O nations,

    and declare it in the coastlands far away;

say, “He who scattered Israel will gather him

    and will keep him as a shepherd does a flock.”

11 For the Lord has ransomed Jacob

    and has redeemed him from hands too strong for him.

In both cases, God is the one acting. The language is not about appeasing God but about God coming to the rescue. Also, notice that it is a rescuing from. There is a relocation. The psalmist’s soul is ransomed from the power of Sheol and received back to God. God’s people are ransomed from the nations and gathered back into God’s care.

Ransomed From What?

When it comes to Penal Substitutionary Atonement there is a tendency to conflate ransom language with the idea of a payment made to satisfy God’s wrath. But this is to confuse our metaphors. The Bible never talks about us needing to be ransomed or redeemed from God. As if God is the oppressor from whom we need deliverance. When the metaphor of ransom is invoked it is always used to portray God as liberator — the one who acts on our behalf to free us from oppressive powers, from “hands too strong for us.”

This is the immediate context for Mark 10:45.

Just before this verse, Jesus tells his disciples:

You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.

Jesus is concerned that his disciples are envisioning themselves taking up these “lord-it-overing” positions. As if the point of what Jesus came to do was to simply out-Caesar Caesar; to establish a more powerful empire and elevate his disciples to offices where they can rule as tyrants over others. The disciples are captivated, or rather, held captive, by a certain way of seeing the world.

Jesus follows this up with an emphatic: “Not so with you!” In effect Jesus says to them, “Not so with you because I am transferring you into my kingdom which turns this entire way of thinking upside down. In my kingdom whoever wants to become great must become a servant and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.”

How Jesus is a Ransom

Jesus picks up the language of ransom in order to highlight the cost of living this alternative kingdom in a world that mistakes tyrannical rule for greatness. The cross becomes the climactic moment when Jesus gives his life as a ransom for many because it is there that the decisive confrontation between two kingdoms takes place. On the cross, the kingdom of God collides with the kingdoms of this world.

It is only because of who Jesus is that his death has the power to ransom us. If it were anyone else, the cross would be nothing more than one more instance of the strong crushing the weak — one more display of the naked will to power. But if Jesus is the Son of God, as the disciples would soon come to believe, then his death cannot mean defeat; it can only mean the overthrow of the status quo.

This is the crucial hinge on which the entire Christian faith turns. Usually, the cross defines the identity of the one who hangs on it. The crucified are seen as less than, as wretched. They are a sign of what happens if you dare challenge the powers that be. But for Jesus it works the other way around. It is his identity that determines the meaning of the cross.

In his crucifixion, those who imagine themselves wise are exposed as blind, and those who cling to power are revealed as foolish. As God in the flesh — the very embodiment of what true greatness looks like — Jesus shows us that God’s ways are indeed higher than the ways of this world. In Jesus, God takes what the world considers weak to shame what is assumed to be strong; and what is foolish in the eyes of the powerful is shown to be the very wisdom of almighty God.

As ransom then, Jesus does on our behalf what we could never do for ourselves. Without his death, we are left trapped within the same logic of domination, the same cycle of power and retaliation. But in giving his life, he breaks that cycle and opens up a different way. By his death he ransoms us, pays the price, so to speak, in order to bring us out of a kingdom of winner takes all and into another in which the last are first.

A Ransom Is Not a Substitute

Notice, however, what this does not mean. Strictly speaking, a ransom is not a substitute. The idea is not one of a prisoner swap. Jesus is not taking our place behind bars so that we can walk free. That isn’t how a ransom works.

When we buy a product, we do not think of the money spent as substituting for the product being purchased. There is an exchange happening, but it isn’t about one thing being substituted for another. Rather, the money affects a change. That change is the transfer of ownership from the seller to the buyer. This is precisely the logic at work with a ransom. Jesus gives his life as a ransom to effect a transfer of ownership.

Again, we are not bought with a ransom to rescue us from God. Rather it is God who “rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son,” (Col. 1:13). This is what we mean when we say that we were bought with the precious blood of Christ (1 Cor. 6:20, 1 Pe. 1:18-19). It is about a transfer from one kingdom to another, not about a change in God from wrath to forgiveness.

Conclusion

So, it isn’t so much that Jesus dies so we don’t have to. Jesus doesn’t die instead of us, rather, he dies ahead of us. Jesus telling his disciples that he comes to serve and give his life as a ransom is not so the disciples can say, “Phew, good thing we don’t have to do any of that!” The whole point is that Jesus as a ransom opens up the way of the kingdom for them (and us!) to follow in his footsteps.

To sum up, conflating ransom and redemption with substitution can lead us down two confused paths. First, we risk mistaking God as the one Jesus is ransoming us from. Second, we may be lead to believe that as our substitute almost everything Jesus did he did so we wouldn’t have to. But this is precisely the opposite of what Jesus said and taught. The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve — and those who belong to his kingdom, who have been ransomed and redeemed, are called to do the same.