Editor’s Note: The following appears in the October-December 2026 issue of Good Faith Magazine, which is a free publication for all Good Faith Advocates.
Jason Edwards
In 2007, my wife, Christy, and I were serving in northern Thailand with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s Global Service Corps, working alongside the Upland Holistic Development Project (UHDP). One afternoon, I boarded an old repurposed school bus for the three-hour ride from Chiang Mai to Fang. It had been repainted red, and with no air conditioning, the windows were open to catch whatever breeze the mountain roads offered. The air was full of heat, diesel fumes, and dust.
A man I recognized sat near me. We’d met before, though I couldn’t remember his name. My Thai was limited, but we began talking with the words I knew, filling in the spaces with gestures. At some point, he said the word “Boncha.” What did that mean? I listened for clues. Was Boncha a village? A kind of work? Something we’d passed along the road?
In Thai, arai means “what.” So I asked, “Boncha, arai?” What is Boncha? He answered at length. I caught a few words and lost the rest. I tried again. “Boncha, arai?”
This continued back and forth for a long stretch of that ride. He explained. I listened harder. When we finally reached UHDP, we ran into Rick Burnette, the ministry’s founder, whose Thai is fluent. “Rick,” I said, relieved to see him, “what is Boncha? We’ve been talking about it all the way here.”
Rick looked at the man beside me and laughed. “Jason,” he said, “that’s his name.”
For much of that three-hour bus ride, I was trying to understand a word. In his ears, though, it must have sounded as if I were asking him what he was.
Had Boncha turned the question around — “What is Jason?” — I might have sensed the strangeness sooner. If someone who knew me (and spoke both languages) had been nearby, they might have answered: “Jason is a pastor, a husband, an American, and a visitor in Thailand. He’s a man trying to get by on twenty Thai words and an inflated sense of confidence in his ability to eat spicy Thai food because he grew up in Texas.”
All of that would be true. Some of it might even be helpful. None of it would be the same as knowing me.
Years later, while writing about the cross, I remembered Boncha.
Christians have spent centuries asking, “What is the cross?” This beautiful, expansive act of love stands at the center of Christian faith, and the church has never stopped trying to understand what God has done in Christ. That longing has given us some of our richest language. It has also led to centuries of argument over which explanation holds the key to the great mystery.
Boncha helped me hear the expectation tucked inside the question.
When modern people ask what something is, we’re usually shopping for a definition compact enough to carry in our pocket, with a theory clear enough to defend in a debate. But a person cannot be reduced to a formula, and it is a person who stands at the center of Christian faith. Every account of the cross is trying to speak faithfully about what God has done through Jesus the Christ.
In his foreword to my forthcoming book, At Home with God: How the Cross Transforms Us, Brian Zahnd writes: “The cross of Christ is the epicenter of Christian faith and the holy nexus of ever-unfolding divine mysteries. The cross as a theological category is as infinite as God’s own being. We can never be finished with the task of contemplating what is revealed in the crucifixion of the Son of God.”
The New Testament has a word for this kind of revealed depth: mysterion. In Paul’s letters, mysterion names something God has made known in Christ, something we can proclaim, trust, pray, and live without ever reaching the end of its meaning.
The work that became At Home with God grew out of a season when God’s cross-shaped love kept extending beyond the limits of what I thought I knew. I had been taught that Jesus took my place, forgave my sin, and opened the way home. Those words taught me grace. They still do. The cross is not less than the grace I first learned. It’s more.
The witness of Scripture is wide. Paul writes of God in Christ reconciling the world to himself. The Gospels carry us toward Passover and a covenant meal, where liberation and communion share the same bread. Colossians pictures the Powers that deform human life exposed and disarmed. Death will not have the last word.
Ancient theologians joined modern scholars in the growing piles of books around my desk. At one point, I decided to read Fleming Rutledge’s six-hundred-page book The Crucifixion as a daily devotional. Several pastor friends reacted as though I had announced plans to eat a dictionary for breakfast.
Pastoral ministry has a way of pushing our theology into real rooms with actual people. Church members bring me the questions their lives are asking, and often their theories, too. Beneath all of that, there is usually a more honest question, one they may never ask out loud: Is God’s love big enough for this?
I have sat with a man who confessed the same failure so many times he was sure “forgiveness” was an offer only meant for others. I’ve seen former best friends sit in the same sanctuary with an aisle between them no usher could ever close. At a graveside, the promises of faith have to be spoken plainly, without pretending death is small. A family’s raised voices can settle over the years into the way they talk to each other—a wound slowly turns into the old peeling wallpaper everyone learns to ignore.
The gospel doesn’t skip over any of that. A single theory may tell the truth and still prove too small for all the places Christ comes to make whole. I needed an image large enough to hold the many witnesses of Scripture and the lives of the people I served.
The Great House of Atonement
The image came to me as a house.
In 2022, I explored this in a sermon series at Second Baptist Church in Liberty, Missouri. As the weeks unfolded, the rooms in this house began speaking to one another. Over time, the image grew beyond the series and became the Great House of Atonement. The church has been inhabiting this house for centuries. Christians in different times and places have entered through different doors, looked through different windows, and found words for what they encountered at the cross.
At the Front Door, substitution sounds like welcome. Christ enters the place where we’re stranded and opens a way home. Many of us first learned the good news there: love took our place. No one lives their whole life in a doorway. It’s where the house begins.
The Library holds the long human story. Here, Jesus enters our history and lives the human story from the inside with faithfulness and love. The pages we thought were finished can be read again in the light of resurrection.
The smell of warm bread then draws us toward the Dining Room. Here, a people once enslaved gather around a common table, fed by grace and relearning how to belong to one another. Liberation tastes like bread and wine.
Just past the dining table lies the War Room, where Christ confronts sin, death, and the Powers that crush human dignity. But he doesn’t enter wearing armor or swinging a sword; he enters as the Lamb, still bearing the marks of his execution, even after resurrection. His victory subverts the very nature of power, refusing to use the violence it overcomes.
Light from the house’s Stained-Glass Window falls across the work of justice and repair. Harm is named. Mercy refuses to treat anyone as disposable. Forgiveness grows strong enough to face what happened and ask what healing may require.
Further inside waits a Mirror, where we finally see ourselves as we are, and a Hearth, where friends stop needing to perform for one another. Beyond them are a Chapel and an Open Window turned toward the world.
Each room deepens another. Welcome leads toward a table, and the table remembers liberation. Liberation changes how we imagine power. The Lamb’s victory frees justice from revenge, while justice gives reconciliation weight.
The Great House of Atonement gathers the church’s many ways of speaking about Christ’s cross under one roof. It is a portrait to contemplate and a place to enter. Each room speaks in its own voice, and meaning travels through the doorways.
How the Cross Transforms Us
The final word in the book’s subtitle is us. That small word names something the book was reaching for all along.
Before Scripture tells us about rupture, it gives us blessing. Creation’s first word over the world is “very good.” The cross belongs to God’s long faithfulness to what God has made and loves. So us cannot mean private souls alone. It includes the person who needs mercy, the family that needs repair, the stranger welcomed to the table, and the creation Paul describes as groaning for freedom. Christ comes close enough to meet each person, and his love reaches farther than any individual life. The old word atonement carries this longing inside it. Sound it slowly, and you can hear at-one-ment: what has been divided is now drawn toward communion with God.
The cross also forms the people it gathers. The way we imagine God’s saving work eventually enters our habits. Reconciliation opens a path toward truth and repair. The Lamb unsettles our appetite for importance. At Christ’s table, we begin to notice who has been left standing outside.
Most people we meet will never ask which theory of atonement we believe. Instead, they’ll feel it in how we use power, whether we tell the truth, and the ways we respond to brokenness.
Living Atoned
At some point, a house stops being only architecture and becomes a home. You know where to reach for a light in the dark. Its rooms begin shaping the rhythm of your days. So, near the end of the book, after traveling through the rooms, I begin to wonder what it might mean to live atoned.
How do we live in conflict? What happens when we speak to a child after a long day has thinned our patience down to a thread? Can we forgive a sibling without pretending the wound was small? What do we do when the person who hurt us enters the room?
Living atoned usually means something specific. We make the phone call. We return to the conversation and try to listen before defending ourselves. We bring food to a grieving family and stay long enough to hear the story that comes back with the empty dish. Over time, a stranger becomes someone whose name we know.
The Great House opens into the world. A sentence from the Library changes the way we read the news or listen to a friend’s grief. The Dining Room’s table teaches hospitality beyond our own circle. The Chapel gives us enough interior room to listen before answering. What we encountered inside travels with us into kitchens, hospital rooms, school hallways, church meetings, grocery lines, and the ordinary places where people are diminished or restored.
I have felt nervous imagining public conversations about this book. In a culture obsessed with categorization, someone will inevitably ask which theory of atonement I most align with, as if the faithful thing to do is pick a room, bolt the other doors, and pretend the whole house has always been only a studio apartment. I understand the desire for clarity. I share it. Theology needs language, and the church has received a treasury of words. Clarity is a kindness when it helps us see. But we do get into trouble when we ask one faithful account to carry the whole mystery.
Which brings us back to Boncha, sitting beside me on that old red school bus while I searched for the meaning of his name.
Our words about the cross matter. They give the church a grammar for worship and witness. Every account remains accountable to Jesus Christ, whose life, death, and resurrection reveal the heart of God. In him, God enters human suffering, answers violence with mercy, and raises the crucified one into life. The mystery has a face.
“What is the cross?” may be a question we spend our lives learning to ask. Its answers lead us through Scripture and into rooms the church has tended for centuries. They bring relief in some seasons and unsettle us in others. Together, they deepen our vision of what God has done in Christ and what grace is still doing among us. Eventually, the question reaches our own lives. What is the cross making of us?
Years after that bus ride in Thailand, I can still hear Rick laughing. “Jason, that’s his name.”
Some truths arrive the way Boncha did. They take a seat beside us and wait to be known.
At the cross, God comes that close.
At Home With God: How the Cross Transforms Us will be available on November 10. It is available for pre-order at Amazon.
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Senior Pastor of Second Baptist Church in Liberty, Missouri. His forthcoming book, At Home with God: How the Cross Transforms Us, will be available from InterVarsity Press in November 2026. His reflections appear at jasongedwards.substack.com.