And life in the Kin-dom
Good Friday A | John 18:1-19:42
When someone dies, we really like to lay blame. On someone. It’s one of our favorite hobbies, really.
Who is responsible here? Rome carried out the killing. Jewish leaders wanted him dead. In both philosophical and legal terms, they’re both on the hook here.
Theologians also like to put all of humanity on the hook, too. Humans killed Jesus, so, by extension we all did it.
I don’t know about that one. That seems like a stretch. I mean, I’d like to think if Jesus were alive today we wouldn’t kill him. Then again, he might take the last donut. And if we didn’t have rules, chaos would reign. So, sorry, Jesus. Them’s the rules.
Responsibility
The gap between blaming Rome and the Temple for Jesus’s death and blaming everybody is massive. It also reveals a kind of moral copout.
When we are all responsible, then nobody is actually responsible. No specific actions can be condemned. And ultimately, the blame spreads thin—like a quarter teaspoon of peanut butter on bread. (Add jelly and that’s just a jelly sandwich).
Saying people killed Jesus is useless. As theology and discipleship.
The problem, however, is that, rather than dwell in what it means to have a cruel and oppressive empire lynch a poor rabbi, Christians have preferred a different lesson. Lots of our people have chosen to scapegoat a whole religion and its people.
Of course, this gospel doesn’t help. John’s incessant use of “the Jews” as a reference to Temple or religious leaders in Judea has always been problematic. The fact that it is anachronistic to refer to “the Jews” as followers of Judaism in Jesus’s time doesn’t seem to matter. When a scapegoat is what the people want, a scapegoat is what they’ll find.
The ease of finding moral responsibility in the hands of “the Jews,” especially given it was ROME who killed him, is reprehensible. But also, obvious. Leaders had been conspiring to kill Jesus since the beginning of chapter 7, so…we shouldn’t be surprised.
Brutality
At the same time, we have a story that seems to want to make Rome seem less brutal. As if the moral hazard was mostly borne on the backs of the Temple leaders. Pilate famously tries to send Jesus back. Not that hard, of course. And if anything, the fact that they make him seem afraid of the Hebrew people should be read as high comedy.
And then there’s the matter of police brutality. Like, a lot of it. Before and during the execution.
Oh, and make sure you consider the execution. That junk is grotesque.
Rome hung people on crosses outside the city gates to show the masses what they thought of rebellion. It is gross. And barbaric. And, honestly, evil.
The cruel, militaristic might, the brutal conduct and means of subjugation—yeah, they’re scared the peasants will think they’re mean. Totally.
Tradition
The problem we face in the telling is that we want there to be one answer. Preferably an easy one. And we want it to fit our view of the world. Preferably neatly.
Hence: Jews are the problem. They killed Jesus. And also Jesus had to die to balance God’s checkbook. [Nobody said these answers had to make sense—just that they be easy and neat.]
This reading, while common and, unfortunately, historically encouraged over much of the last thousand years by a lot of people, is obviously bad. Like…really bad.
But then they doubled down and used the scapegoat as a justification for violence. To the point that today, people will gun down children in schools with weapons designed for war. And what do they include in their manifestos? Among other things: hatred of Jews for killing Jesus.
Of course, they also blame blacks and LGBTQ+ persons, so let’s not think this is actually connected to classic atonement theories.
Scapegoating
The fact that people do to other people what the Romans and Temple leaders did to Jesus should give us pause. It should be a time for serious reflection.
They are cheesed about something or afraid of something else and they want to blame someone for it.
In ancient societies, they took this literally and place their blames on the back of a goat and sent it out to die for the community. Leaving the people blameless.
Can you imagine doing this so literally today? OK, kid, you failed that exam, honey, you messed up that account, and I broke the lawnmower. Let’s take it all out on this fly!
Of course, this is also quite honestly what we do. Just, perhaps, not intentionally. Police beat on an unarmed black person and say “but my job’s hard.” Bankers steal from their customers and say “they signed the paperwork!” And some believe Qanon is a real person telling them to kill pedophiles in the government.
We might object to these ideas, but the principle idea of the scapegoat is so ingrained, we don’t even notice it.
Obvious
The wise person wouldn’t wonder why in any of this. Why the cross and why we do this now. Because it is all so obvious.
Some fear. And their fear leads to cruelty. And cruelty leads to spreading fear. It is the same reason that hurt people hurt people. They spread what pains them.
And yet, this is why the gospel writers work so hard to maintain Jesus’s innocence. Because it contrasts so mightily with their fear.
Jesus doesn’t fear his death. He clearly knows it is coming. That he will be their scapegoat.
And I think we might even fairly say that he knows that he will be our scapegoat, too.
That we will place all our burdens on him, like he asked us to. Because he wants to free us of them.
But we will, instead, take the opportunity to foist the blame upon him as well. Saying he had to die to save us. Because we are incapable of following a living Messiah. And I think that is a bridge too far. It matches much of our theological statements, but denies our own agency and ultimately condemns us to eternal slavishness to our own desires.
What Messiahs Do
Instead, Jesus enters into death as the scapegoat precisely because that is true Messianic behavior. A behavior we are called to imitate.
Has it ever occurred to you that we spend so much time being reminded in Lent of our needing to take up our cross and follow Jesus. Then we attend to Jesus’s dying on the cross and mostly go, “welp, glad that’s over!” And then dial it in until Easter, when we stuff our faces full of chocolate again.
We stare at a cross, knowing that this burden is ours, but then, we hear about Jesus hanging there and think “Thanks for doing that for us, big guy!”
Or do we see what he has actually done for us? That he went first. When everybody says nobody can stand up to Rome Jesus stood.
He didn’t throw stones.
Arm himself.
Prep.
He didn’t play military or get elected to higher office or treat money like free speech.
He challenged the Temple. He challenged Rome. And by doing that, he showed us how different the Kin-dom is from all of that.
And when his life was being threatened, he kept at it. Over and over. And when they challenged his authority, he tossed it back at them. Over and over.
Revealed
He showed his followers how ghoulish our world really is. Not because people are bad or powerful people are bad. But because our culture is abusive to the poor, the hungry, the sick, and the immigrant.
And the way we change that is not to become it. It is challenge it in every way. All the way down.
He shared that with his followers and he stepped into the breach.
And out of fear (of change, losing power, protecting culture) some people killed him. Cruelly. After beating him. Cruelly. And falsely convicting him. So much cruelty.
He taught us about it. Then he faced it. And the words he left us with is that we, too, carry crosses. And our time will be later.
And so, for many of us, that time is now. Standing up in the face of cruelty. For the targeted and the marginalized. Committing to eliminate the scourge of racism, anti-semitism, and anti-trans hatred. To be people who stand up in the breach and make peace.
God’s Kin-dom Come.
That’s how Jesus got on that cross. And how we do the same. For the sake of this world truly being God’s blessed Kin-dom here as in heaven.