On this Palm Sunday, Let’s Remember what Jesus Really Did that got Him Crucified

For the better part of the last two thousand years, and more recently in Sunday schools and Hollywood movies, Jesus has been universally portrayed as a soft man– a thoughtful-and-doting, mild-mannered, Mother Teresa-figure who was minding his own business, making his itinerant rounds, teaching and healing, befriending the poor, working the occasional Saturday– when somehow he wound up in Jerusalem in the wrong place and at the wrong time. Through no fault of his own, he was sentenced to death– just another misunderstood, innocent victim of circumstance. The problem is, no one was ever crucified for having a kind temperament or for living a life dedicated to the Golden Rule. Jesus must have done something else.

Throughout history, societies have made use of public executions, carried out for the public’s benefit, we might say, as an example of the fate that awaits those who threaten social stability or conventional norms of behavior. In Roman times, similarly, crucifixions were enforced on those who represented some kind of public–read political–threat. The few executions mentioned in the Gospels are notable in that they were explicitly punishments for political crimes. To that point, one might recall the account of the execution of John the Baptist who dared to challenge the moral authority of Herod Antipas. Think also of the 800 Galileans, a people described by Josephus as notoriously seditious, whose blood Pilate “mingled with their sacrifices”, a metaphor for the manner in which Pilate put down their political uprising. And of course, there were the two “criminals” on the crosses on either side of Jesus. One of them was probably a professional revolutionary, judging from his taunt, and that’s probably why he was hanging there. The Gospels also contain the well-known part of our annual Christmas story about the slaughter in c. 4 BC of males under two years of age, on fears that one of them might someday lay claim to political authority. During the same general time period, other extra-biblical sources refer to another crucifixion of 2000 Jews, again for an uproar against the Roman authorities in outrage over their plundering of the Temple and subsequent taxation, the crucifixions being very obviously a political punishment.

In the years leading up to the day that we now call Palm Sunday, public anger against the Roman occupation had been continually re-ignited among Jews by a revolving door of men claiming to be the Messiah and roiling the people of Judea in their own Make Israel Great Again movement. On account of the Passover, Jerusalem’s population was increased nearly seven-fold, resulting in a similar sort of crowded tension that can be observed on Black Friday in modern times at any shopping mall or local WalMart. As Jesus rode into town that day, the crowds were shouting and chanting their own version of “Save the Country”—Hosanna! Hail him!—as though he were the messianic godsend who would do what the deep-state Pharisees and Sadducees had long promised but never accomplished, which was to liberate the Jews from their Roman oppressors, and that Jesus would soon reinstitute the glory days of Israel– the way things were during the rule of King David. And those palm branches that were being laid down for him were not symbols of peace, but were instead symbolic of national independence. In other words, Palm Sunday looked a lot like a Trump rally.

Jesus must have known that entering Jerusalem the way he did would provoke the political establishment–he had to have known it—and maybe he did it on purpose. After all, as soon as he pulled into town, he headed straight downtown to Jerusalem’s political ground zero–its State Capitol, in a sense–straight to the Temple, where he physically pushed people out of the building, threw out the moneychangers who were defrauding pilgrims in exchange for Temple currency, and chased off the brokers of Temple-certified sheep and oxen and doves—according to John’s gospel, using a whip! He mowed down their kiosks and booths and merch tables while publicly criticizing the authorities for having turned the building into a den of thieves. And then to add injury to the insult, he brazenly claimed the Temple premises for his own use and began conducting his daily teaching business from there. The whole episode has the feel of draining the swamp. Mother Teresa never did anything like that.

So the political establishment decided to strike back. As the story goes, they began looking for crimes or scandals of which they could publicly accuse Jesus, in order to influence negatively the loyalty of his followers. They accused Jesus of being a womanizer, since he made no effort to hide the fact that many women traveled among his entourage. They reminded his followers of how Jesus had recently refused to join in the public humiliation of a woman caught in adultery. And everyone already knew the rumors about Jesus and the hooker, Mary Magdalene.

The real coup-de-grace, though, was when they accused Jesus of having claimed to be King of the Jews. Implicit in the accusation was that Jesus was guilty of insurrection against the Romans, and of blasphemy according to the Jews, which today would be like accusing someone of being anti-Constitutional–and it suggested that Jesus’ real intentions were to displace the current political structure and crown himself King.  There was also the fact that he was from Galilee, which signaled to Romans and Jews alike that Jesus was an insurrectionist—sort of like being accused today of having sympathy for MAGA. The Galileans were a constant thorn in the Romans’ side, and the fairly recent slaughter of Jews resulting from an uprising instigated by Judas the Galilean–we might think of January 6th–was quite useful to the political establishment in stoking suspicions of Jesus. Even Pilate himself was clearly confused about how, and to what extent, Jesus was associated with those Galileans. And there were witnesses found who could testify that Jesus had claimed to be King of the Jews, and still others reminded Pilate that some people had understood Jesus to have advocated for non-payment of taxes. See? A clear case of insurrection.

The threat that Jesus posed to the deep state was perceived to be so great that a private gathering of Jesus and his friends was raided in the middle of the night. He was arrested and brought up on fabricated charges to stand trial in one juris diction after another. His public statements were taken out of context, and other words were put into his mouth, and then both were used against him by politically powerful people who could not have cared less what he meant in the first place, all in the effort to get something—anything—to stick. He was brought before the Speaker of the Assembly, then the whole Jerusalem City Assembly, then to Governor Pilate, then to the Sheriff Herod Antipas–the same Herod Antipas who had killed John the Baptist–and then taken back to the Governor.

It all sounds like a highlight reel of recent evening news, eerily similar to having one’s home raided by the FBI, or being bounced around from the New York State Attorney General to the City of New York District Attorney, then to the United States Attorney General, with annual audits from the IRS thrown in for good measure, or being charged with inciting an insurrection and then hurriedly impeached by the United States Congress.

The conclusion must be that Jesus could not have been the man we’ve seen in pictures. After all, not just anyone can terrify the politically powerful the way he did. Instead, he must have been the kind of man with a commanding physical presence–more like a Charlton Heston, as opposed to a Max von Sydow. He must have been the kind of man who connected the religious with the political more like a Rush Limbaugh, and less like a John Piper. He must have posed a real and immanent threat to the politically powerful, more like Donald Trump than Mother Teresa.

Because you don’t need to crucify Mother Teresa.