The crucifixion of Jesus is the picture of cruelty. It’s also a mirror for the way of our world, and then also reveals the Kin-dom.

Jesus, Crucifixion, and the day we call Good.
Good Friday | Matthew 27:1-61

The Passion is a story of cruelty.

I wish I could say that it is a story of extraordinary cruelty. But little of it is truly extraordinary. Then or now.

The Passion is quite remarkably mundane—for those who have spent any time reflecting on the human capacity for torture. Just ask the prisoners who survived Abu Ghraib or those detained at Guantanamo Bay. They have suffered far more than Jesus.

Neither is it surprising how widespread the cruelty is. It isn’t just the soldiers who delight in torturing Jesus, but in the religious leaders who want him crucified. Who turn the crowd into a mob, calling for his torture and execution. Spend five seconds in an online comment section and you see the same cruelty alive and well.

But let us not see the cruelty in our world as any more normal than the cruelty thrown upon Jesus. Our acts of cruelty are just as grotesque and barbaric as the ones depicted in the Passion.

And let us not seek examples from other parts of the world, so as to make cruelty into something shown by people other than ourselves. Let us not relativize our cruelty as being below the cruelty of Nazis or Fascists, for that is another way we as a people avoid confronting the truth.

We read the Passion on Good Friday to remember, not just how cruel people were to Jesus, but in part, to remind ourselves of how cruel we often choose to be.

Barabbas or Jesus?

I am really struck this time around by a particular moment of cruelty. Pilate has Jesus in custody. And he’s trying to figure out what to do.

This is a strange development, since Rome are the occupiers. He isn’t being forced by the local authorities to do anything. Pilate possesses virtually all the power here.

Nor do we have any evidence that Pilate actually did have a custom of releasing a prisoner of the people’s choice.

And on top of all of that, the primary crucifying crime is rebellion: trying to incite rebellion, in other words, terrorism. So the two men being offered up for pardon by Pilate, Jesus Barabbas and Jesus of Nazareth are terrorist prisoners. It is hard to imagine Pilate letting either one go.

This is a strange moment.

But these facts about the time and the people are not present in the story. Just on its fringes.

Present in the story is the cruelty and the fear.

And this offer of freedom, of choice, which appears so magnanimous and generous, invites its own kind of cruelty. Pilate is letting the crowds play God. Let them choose who lives and who dies.

The narrator even says that he is trying to get out of killing Jesus. So this offer isn’t generosity, but cowardice.

The Murder of Jesus

We have a way of cleverly articulating our fear and avoidance by hiding them in semantics.

The Roman Empire murdered Jesus.

But we never say it so plain as that. Because we don’t want to think of state killings as murder.

Nor do we want to own the culpability ourselves. For we prop up our state-sponsored murder.

This is, of course, how we have always made murder mundane. We bury it under the cruelty of systemic oppression and the complicity of false choices.

Someone has to die today. You pick.

Or we justify the murder of the murderer as a kind of karmic justice.

Even as we worship a God who gave us The Law to limit retaliation and follow a Christ who preached on the Mount

“You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer.”

All our excuses are hollow; our justifications lies.

We make our own cruelty normal.

But the one outlier, in our lives and in the story, is Jesus himself.

The picture of Jesus

Throughout Holy Week, we’ve been reading the gospel of Matthew. And this gospel in particular invites us into challenging teachings throughout Holy Week. Jesus keeps telling parables that are dark and twisted; and which reveal anger and separation.

But in their context, they read like a list of what not to do. They contrast Jesus’s depiction of the Kingdom of Heaven with a world of cruelty.

And having spent my week reading this greater gospel story several times, another vision of the Passion emerges.

It is easy to get trapped in the cruelty. Trapped in the doom and terror of the Passion. It is easy to see this as all together too normal and just how humans are. Ultimately, to justify cruelty by dismissing all of humanity as prone to violence. Like we couldn’t possibly help ourselves.

But Jesus predicts his own death and faces it. He brings his disciples together and says keep doing this after I’m gone. A woman anoints him for burial with costly ointment and he says to his disciples

“Truly I tell you, wherever this good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”

Jesus then goes to Jerusalem, confronts the cowardly cruel leaders who maintain systems of oppression and calls them hypocrites to their faces.

And even as these same people conspire in secret, bribing Judas to rat him out, convincing some of the crowd to turn against Jesus, he faces death. He is the exception to the fear and the cruelty that arises from it. Jesus is the one who never hides behind excuses and justifications. He doesn’t make false choices or pretend like he has to betray God.

Cruelty isn’t the whole story.

Jesus faces the cruelty of empire and corruption. He names exactly why they fail to deliver the Kin-dom. Because the Kin-dom is founded on equality and justice. Hope, grace, and love.

It is the Way of Christ. The one who walks into Jerusalem knowing he will die. Knowing that cruelty will be thrown upon him from every direction. That he will be tortured and his torturers will think themselves justified. Like some kind of retributive balance to the world will be restored by their beating up a pacifist.

Jesus knows all of this and does it anyway.

Because only in facing the cruelty can we see how morally bankrupt it is. Only in facing the evil can we see how ultimately powerless it is. Only in knowing what strength comes through humility, service, and love for total strangers, can we persevere in defeating death and all the forces of wickedness.

That is our picture of strength.

And all the rest looks petty and weak. Cruelty, torture, oppression become the tools of rodents rather than monsters. It is the pathetic excuse of the unwilling and the immoral. The opposite of faith.

Jesus shows us how to overcome all that is before us now. Separation. Loneliness. Frustration. Depression. Loss. Even the death of loved ones and the fear of our own mortality.

He faces it so we can too.