Who Really Killed Jesus?

A sermon prepared by Rev. Tim Kutzmark
Sunday, March 9, 2008 • Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading

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No one has ever told this story right.
 Even when they get the facts right, the feeling is wrong.
 People can’t stand the truth.
 They want their Jesus seen through their eyes, told through their lies. 
Truth is brutal.  It scalds, it stings.
—Judas, as spoken in the play Corpus Christi, by Terrance McNally

I want to push you over the edge,
push you right over the edge so you stay there and hang out with it,
and get to a higher plane,
 to something through the pain.
—Mel Gibson, filmmaker, The Passion of the Christ

It was a brutal world.  It was a bloody world.  In the year 30 of the Common Era, the Roman Empire ruled the tired, dusty province of Judea with swift cruelty and unflinching force.  Armed Roman guards—rough foreigners in an angry land—patrolled the streets.  Any hint of defiance, any whispering of liberation, any small gathering that could possibly explode into open defiance, was quickly broken up.  Jerusalem, the capitol, was a tinderbox of terror and state sponsored suppression.  This was occupied territory.  Woe to any individual, religious or otherwise, who garnered too much attention.  Charisma was a dangerous commodity on Jerusalem’s crowded streets.  Roman retribution came with a swift arrest, a sharp sword, or, worst of all, an agonizing death by crucifixion: by being tied to a wooden beam and hoisted high outside the walls of the city. Left naked and bound, left in full view of everyone who passed underneath, left to the brutal sun and elements, left to packs of hungry dogs and sharp-beaked birds, left exhausted in body that could not stand upright to take another breath, left to suffocate, a broken example of what happened to anyone who threatened Rome’s mighty rule. 

It was a brutal religion.  It was a bloody religion.  In the year 30 CE, the Jewish faith viewed human sin with swift cruelty and unflinching force.  Not unlike other religions of its time, not unlike the Canaanite pagan religions from which it sprang, the Jewish Temple religion championed blood sacrifice as the way to restore a relationship with God.  If you sinned, as everyone did, only the flowing blood of slaughtered sacrifice could placate Yahweh.  Only the smell of roasting flesh could feed this God’s hunger for justice.  And so, the Jerusalem Temple courtyard was packed with vendors hawking bulls, sheep, goats, small pigeons and songbirds.  These sacrificial animals were taut with terror as they were pulled or carried toward the altar of death.  The chocked screams of animals filled the air as the Temple priests cut open throat after throat after throat.  Washing away the guilt of a nation had become big business.  At the head of it all sat the High Priest of Jerusalem, Caiaphus, the religious leader of the Jewish people for the last twelve years.  Once a religiously bestowed position, the High Priest now served at the appointment and pleasure of Rome.  To remain in power for twelve years meant Caiaphus was an astute player of the political chess game.  It meant Caiaphus knew how to curry the favor of the current Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate.

He was a brutal man.  He was a bloody man.  In the year 30 CE, prefect Pontius Pilate ruled the tired, dusty province of Judea with swift cruelty and unflinching force.  His goals were simple: keep power and keep public order.  But this second-rank Governor was not doing a very good job.  Not unlike the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Roman troops were meeting with stiff resistance.  And, not unlike our present situation, Pontius Pilate didn’t have enough ground troops to secure the countryside.  And so, for the Roman governor, limited expressions of brute force had to suffice.  Pontius Pilate ruled with little regard for the rights or religion of the conquered.  The Jews were still allowed to practice their Temple based faith and sacrificial rituals.  But earlier Roman Governors had respected the Jewish prohibition against parading images of Idols or the Gods of Rome’s religions.  Not so Pontius Pilate.  His troops marched through Jerusalem carrying images of the Emperor, considered by the Romans to be a God.  This defiled the religious purity of the Holy City.  Pilate had those same standard bearers violate the sanctity of the Temple, raiding the treasury to pay for a major construction project in the city.  This was also a time when Jewish messiahs seemed to spring up by the dozens.  When one zealous savior gathered a group of followers in nearby Samaria, Pilate sent out a detachment of infantry.  They wiped out most of the religious revivalists in a bloody battle; the survivors were quickly crucified.  (John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, p. 139) 

Now, it was Passover weekend in 30 CE, and “tens of thousands of peasants from all over the country [were] filling up the inns and courtyards of the city and the surrounding villages.” (Horsely and Silberman, The Messiah and the Kingdom: How Jesus and Paul Ignited a Revolution and Transformed the Ancient World, p 68)  The crowds had come to celebrate Passover, which recalled the liberation of the Israelites from their Egyptian oppressors.  With the crowds and the tensions, “it would be all Pilate’s few hundred men could do to prevent a . . . riot. . . If things got out of hand, Pilate would waste no time in calling out the troops to take care of any troublemakers, “mingling their blood with their sacrifices.” (Horsley and Silberman, p. 68)    Despite how the Gospels portray him, despite how our fictions depict him, Pontius Pilate was not a man who would sit and discuss truth with someone viewed as an insurrectionist.  Pontius Pilate was a man desperate to keep his job, more than ready to strike at anything that smelled of revolt. 

Into this setting, into this city, into this heated Passover weekend, came Yeshua, as he was called in his native Aramaic language.  Yeshua, or Jesus of Nazareth, came into Jerusalem with a band of peasant supporters.  Jesus came into Jerusalem with a reputation for teaching revolutionary religion.  Jesus came into Jerusalem with rumors swirling: “Did he really proclaim the equality of all people?”  Jesus came into Jerusalem surrounded by crowds that were tired of Rome’s oppression and their own religious leaders’ complacency.  Jesus pressed his way through those teeming, angry crowds, and strode into the Temple, the very center of Jewish faith.  He planted himself in the middle of the courtyard and began shouting, shouting about corruption and thievery and injustice.  He began to shout that no religious tradition and no sacrifice and no priest and no earthly power should keep people from God.  He shouted that, from this day forward, God would inaugurate a new kind of Kingdom—a Kingdom of Equality.  Jesus and his band of followers began smashing tables where Roman coins were exchanged for Temple currency.  They broke open the cages of the animals.  They created chaos.

Jesus of Nazareth was born into a time and land of “peasant villages, olive groves, vineyards, vegetable patches, and grain fields.” (p. 24) In their book The Messiah and the Kingdom, historians Richard A. Horsley and Neil Asher Silberman tell us that Jesus was born into an agrarian society where kin and tight-knit village communities had, for centuries, worked together to eek out a living in the harsh, dry, environment.  People could get by, but barely, and only if they worked and shared together, only if they lived, not as individuals, but as a cooperative community where things were shared equally and people truly helped out one another.  But those were the old village ways.  And the times were a changing.  Things had reached a boiling point by the time Jesus was “born in an obscure hill-country town” (p. 11) called Bethlehem.  It was not only Roman rule and taxation that was threatening this tight knit communal way of living. 

For a number of years, the Jewish Kings of Galilee, who ruled with the permission and pleasure of Rome, had embarked on large scale building projects.  Roman authority granted these small-time Jewish Kings the right to tax the people to pay for their new buildings.  But the peasants had little cash; most had only the crops they raised to feed their family.  But crops equaled cash if resold in the city, and King Herod laid claim to their harvests, taking a third of all crops grown in Galilee.  The resale equivalent of these confiscated crops of grain and olives and vegetables equaled nine tons of gold yearly. (p. 26)  These new taxes for King Herod’s coffers came in addition to the yearly Roman tax.  And these came on top of the long-standing annual tax that had to be sent to the Temple in Jerusalem.  It was Holy Law: 10% of all income or crops had to be given to the Temple priests.  To make matters worse, these Temple priests had just added an additional new tax to pay for their new building projects.  And that didn’t take into account the price of the animals that had to be bought and sacrificed each year to wipe away sin.  And so, the peasants of Judea tried to pay all the taxes and also feed themselves and their families, but many could not do so.  The penalties for non-payment were severe.  Unable to pay their debt, some people were taken from their villages and pressed into forced labor for the building projects.  Many peasants were losing their small farms that had been in their families for centuries.  Hard working people who had once been small landowners were now working as indentured servants on the very land they once owned, land that had been confiscated for debt, land turned into aristocratic estates.  (p. 29)  People were starving, families were breaking apart, a centuries old way of living was coming to an end.

Into all of this came Jesus of Nazareth proclaiming a Kingdom of Equals.  Historians Horsley and Silberman write: “In colorful sayings and parables, [Jesus] described a different kind of Kingdom that would harbor no violence, inequality, or injustice—nor tolerate the arrogance of earthly emperors, rich men, and kings . . . The heroes of [his] story [were] . . .  poor people and peasants [who] habored hopes that the brutal rule of the Caesars was just a passing trial and the One True God of Heaven would reward them for their righteousness.”  (11-12)

And so, when Jesus taught people to pray: “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth,” Jesus was preaching revolution.  When Jesus taught people to pray:  “Give us this day our daily bread, forgive us our debts, as we forgive those who are indebted to us,” Jesus was teaching people to challenge the religious and political structures around them.  Jesus was teaching prayers of revolt, prayers that demanded food, prayers that demanded a reduction in Temple taxes, prayers that demanded a reduction in crippling Roman taxation, prayers that demanded freedom from debt that could not be paid, prayers that demanded freedom for the young men of the villages who had been taken into forced labor, prayers that demanded the return of the small farms that had been confiscated for the aristocracy. “Give us this day our daily bread, forgive us our debts, as we forgive those who are indebted to us.”  Jesus was beginning a “grassroots movement of Galilean peasant protests that would, decades later, be transformed into the religion we call Christianity.”  (p. 45)

Further, when Jesus taught people to talk directly and comfortably to God in prayer, as you would talk to a parent (“Our Father”) or friend, he was challenging the intercessory role of the Jerusalem Temple priests.  When he taught people to directly pray to God for forgiveness from their sins, and to ask for such a blessing in the privacy of their own homes, Jesus was challenging the need to travel to Jerusalem and pay the priests to perform animal sacrifices on their behalf.  When Jesus invited people to great outdoor meals and intimate indoor suppers, and broke the bread and poured the wine and shared it equally with people from all levels of society and all levels of religious purity, he was demonstrating to people that there was a way of being in relationship with each other—and caring for each other—that directly challenged the walls that Roman rule and the Jewish Temple religion had built between people. 

After three years of community organizing in the small villages. After three years of growing notoriety and popularity.  After three years of staying on the move so as not to be apprehended.  After three years of escaping back into the hills, the traditional hiding place of zealots and rebels.  After three years of laying a fringe foundation for this new Kingdom of Equals. After three years, Jesus takes his followers and heads to a final showdown in the big city.  There, in Jerusalem, would be Pontius Pilate. There, Jerusalem, would be the Caiaphus, the High Priest of the Temple.  There, in Jerusalem, would be the Temple itself, the symbolic center of religious blood sacrifice.

What actually happened that Passover weekend?  Who really killed Jesus?  I personally believe in a theory posited, in part, by noted Christian scholar John Dominic Crossan.  Crossan suggests this simple unfolding of events: Jesus enters Jerusalem with his band of brothers and sisters.  Jesus enters the Temple and begins his act of defiance.  Immediately, the Jewish Temple guards arrest him, there, on the spot.  There is no way they could allow such an act of open aggression, there was no way they could allow its perpetrator to leave the premises at such a volatile time. 

Immediately, the Jewish Temple guard hand over Jesus to the Roman Centurions standing outside the Temple doors.  Jesus is condemned to death by the Captain of the Guard (this was routine crowd control, no need for a trial before Pilate). Jesus’ death sentence is written into the scrupulous Roman records (where we can still find it today).   Jesus is flogged, as all condemned prisoners are.  A cross beam is tied on his back.  He carries his cross beam out of the same city gates he had entered just hours before.  He is stripped naked, hoisted up, still tied and never nailed, and is left to die slowly along with whoever else had created trouble that day.

I’m sorry, but there probably never was a last supper, a garden of Gethsemane, a hearing before the Sanhedrin, or a dramatic trial before Pilate.  Those were all later creations of religious imagination, created to give meaning and depth and religious truth to this most unceremonious of deaths. 

For you see, Jesus’ followers were left with a dilemma.  How could they explain the swift death of their prophet?  How could his death not diminish his revolutionary message?  In the city and in the countryside different explanations were discussed and believed.  But one explanation seemed to cling most strongly, and even continue on to this day.  This explanation sprung from the very Temple where Jesus was arrested.  As some followers looked around after Jesus’ death, they saw and heard the bloody sacrifice for sin taking place in the Temple.  Could not Jesus’ death be seen in that same light?  Could it not be an extension of those saving rituals?   Like the animals whose throats were slit, could not Jesus have been a great sacrifice to gain God’s forgiveness?  Could not Jesus be the ultimate lamb for God, whose death buys back love?

Although believed by a majority of the Jesus Movement for two thousand years, this is an explanation I find abhorrent.  This is a theology that I find abhorrent. It is abhorrent for what is says about God, what it says about the world, and what it says about humankind.  This explanation makes God a barbarian, a brutal tyrant demanding blood sacrifice in return for forgiveness.  It reduces God’s love to a commodity that can be bought and sold to the highest bidder. It takes the awesome Mystery of Life and reduces it to the least cultivated aspects of human nature.  It takes the Infinite Love in the Universe, and sublimates it to our own projected need for vengeance and retribution. It literally perpetuates a view of life and the universe that is deadly. 

Blood sacrifice was a product of its time.  It is understandable why the earliest followers of Jesus believed such an explanation.  But to cling to it in our modern world is infuriatingly backward.  The Jewish faith left it behind long ago.  To cling to it in our modern world is infuriatingly backward.  And it is immensely destructive. Theological view becomes worldview.  Holding to this understanding of Jesus’ death means that, by extension, we become partners in creating a world where vengeance and retribution continues to be condoned.  By perpetuating this worldview, we continue to create a world where forgiveness can be granted only after blood is spilled.  Is it any wonder we cannot stop war?  Is it any wonder we cannot create peace.  Is it any wonder we resort to invasion after invasion?  Is it any wonder we still practice capital punishment?  Is it any wonder we are the world’s biggest exporter of arms?  Is it any wonder we have an epidemic of police brutality?  Is it any wonder why violence rules the day on so many streets and in so many homes and institutions?  Is it any wonder that our media images and entertainments are dripping with blood?  A theological view has become our worldview, and the reality we perpetuate: blood sacrifice brings salvation.

Our Unitarian Universalist faith stands in a proud tradition that says “no” to salvation through spilled blood.  Our Unitarian Universalist faith stands in a proud tradition that says “yes” to salvation through compassion. We believe in the worth and dignity of humankind.  We believe in Jesus and his Kingdom of Equals.  We believe in a Universal force that demands, not sacrifice, but cooperation and understanding.   We believe that humanity is not something that needs to be saved, but rather, humanity is something that must be tenderly and carefully and deliberately loved into wholeness.

May it be so!  Shalom!  Salaam.  Blessed Be.  Amen.

 

For more information concerning the historical Jesus see:

The Messiah and the Kingdom: How Jesus and Paul Ignited a Revolution and Transformed the Ancient World by Richard A. Horsley and Neil Asher Silberman, Grosset/Punam, 1997

Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography by John Dominic Crossan, Harper Collins, 1994

Who Killed Jesus? by John Dominic Crossan, Harper Collins, 1996

 

©Copyright 2008 Rev. Timothy A. Kutzmark
All rights reserved.