“But they shouted all the more, ‘Let him be crucified.’”
Who killed Jesus? One of the great sins of Christian people in history has been the facile assertion that Jesus was killed by the Jews. This made Christians in the Middle Ages, and not a few modern Catholics, feel good about themselves because they were not the “Christ-killers.” But of course the assertion doesn’t really make sense. Jesus was, after all, a Jew—a fact that I know can come as a shock to so many of those people I still meet from time to time who think they must know everything about the faith because they “went to Catholic school.” And the people actually putting him to death, in all four of the Gospels, are the Roman authorities, led by Pontius Pilate.
And so now, after the Holocaust, many anxious Christians, trying to be more sensitive, answer the question with a different facile assertion: that the Romans killed Jesus. But of course that assertion doesn’t really make sense, either. It’s not as though the Jewish people of Jerusalem stood by powerless while the Romans did their business. They were there.
So were we all.
Not literally, of course. But this week isn’t just about the literal; it’s about truth. And I think on this question our hymns and our poetry and our art so often get it right when our histories miss the point: We killed Jesus. You and me. Not the Romans. Not the Jews. Not any other group that we can think of that keeps us at a safe distance. We did it.
I think that is, front and center, the challenge and the gift of Holy Week. We have to confront what we’ve done and who we are. This isn’t an exercise is self-pity or moralism, as if every time you tell a little lie, you’re killing Jesus, or every time you disobey your mother, you’re killing Jesus. That’s not the point. The point is that we are part of that crowd of people who don’t really know what they’re doing, who find themselves doing something together that no one would have really thought to do on their own, who find themselves full of contradictions and emotions they don’t understand, who move almost without thought from singing praise to shouting hate, from worship to murder.
That, friends, is us, whether we acknowledge it or not. I’ve seen it in myself, over and over again, in the ways that my temper will flare up at something stupid and I find myself cursing under my breath at people I love more than anything in the world. I see it in my children, who can go from sweet, playful innocence in one moment to cruelty in the next. Lord knows that it appears in the confessional, where otherwise good people find themselves falling into sin. This is who we are.
Going through the work of Holy Week—and, let’s be honest, it is work—is like looking in a mirror, a brutally honest mirror that will show us everything that we never wanted to see about ourselves. It’s not meant to be fun. But it is meant to be good. Because although the Church shows us everything that we never wanted to see, it also shows us everything that we never dared to hope: how all of the worst things about ourselves, like our capacity to kill God, can become the very best things—how God in his grace and mercy and love can make us beautiful.