"It was the Jews who killed Jesus."
I read it again and again as a sentence in comment sections, where people flock to air their hatred of Jews.
I have something to say about that.
Because it took me a long time to understand the Story, and it took me even longer to understand how one can read it, even superficially, and end up there - at the exact opposite conclusion of what is written.
Today I saw it written by a man with a cross in his profile picture. So one we must assume is a Christian. "The Jews killed Jesus," he wrote. And he wrote it quite calmly, almost as information, like when you say the Battle of Copenhagen took place in 1801. Or that 7-Eleven is open 24 hours. Below him are twelve likes.
The first thing one can do, of course, is to correct him. Crucifixion was a Roman punishment method, a pagan form of execution reserved for slaves and rebels, and there were Roman soldiers at the cross casting lots for the cloak.
In addition, Pilate had the power to let the man go, and he himself said he found no fault in him... and then he washed his hands, which is the most precise gesture in all of World History for a man who knows better and does what is easiest anyway.
Much used in our time. Incidentally.
And the man on the cross was a Jew. His mother was a Jew. Peter was a Jew, John was a Jew, Paul was a Jew and wrote it with pride, and the first thousands who believed in him were Jews in Jerusalem. This means that if the Jews killed Jesus, then the Jews also became the first Christians, and then the sentence is not just malicious - it is empty.
But I stop myself there, because if you only correct in that way, you only move things around. Then you divide out the guilt in smaller portions, a bit to Rome, a bit to the high priests, a bit to a crowd of people in a square, and then you go home with the sense that the account has now been settled more fairly.
But the Accusation against the Jews - it still stands there. It just has a slightly broader foundation.
And this is where you should prick up your ears, because it is the Accusation itself this post is about.
For what actually happened that morning?
A man was designated. Not proven guilty. Designated.
An institution needed calm, an occupying power needed order, a crowd of people needed someone to shout at, and all three found what they sought in the same body.
One should notice how convinced each of them was that they were doing "the right thing."
Caiaphas says it aloud, that it is better that one man die for the people than that the whole people perish, and he does not say it like a villain, he says it like a responsible man who looks at the numbers. This is how the mechanism always speaks. It speaks in the language of responsibility, and it is certain of its case, and it can point to good reasons, and that is why it works.
Again. Much used in our time. Incidentally.
Humanity has done it since the beginning. When the tension becomes too great, when the unrest cannot be borne, we find one that everyone can agree on - and when he is gone, peace spreads, and everyone goes home and feels that it has become easier to breathe, and they call that justice.
It is the oldest invention we have, older than the Bible, older than the cities. We just have never been able to see it while we were doing it, because the mechanism can only function if it is invisible to those executing it.
But then something happens on Golgotha.
Something that had never happened before.
The story is told from the wrong side.
We do not get it told from the crowd's side, where it was always told, where the victim was guilty, and where the city was cleansed, but from the victim's side, where he is innocent, and where the crowd is wrong.
This is why the Gospels are a bomb under everything Man has built of temples and courts and public opinion. For the Gospels do not reveal a single injustice. They reveal the Machine itself. And how it functions.
The word Satan means the accuser. And that is not a poetic turn of phrase, that is what the word means in Hebrew, ha-satan, the one who stands in court and points. So when a Christian man fifty generations later sits at his keyboard, looks at the Cross and finds a people to point at, he has not misunderstood a detail in the Easter story. He has taken the role that was available.
He stands in the crowd with those who shouted, and thinks he stands at the foot of the cross. He does exactly the same thing to the Jews as they did to Jesus. He designates a guilty party. And he does it in the name of the man who was himself designated.
It is the most complete inversion that exists, and it is so complete because it feels pious.
Notice that the dying man - Jesus - himself refuses to do it. "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." He uses his last strength to drop the accusation against those killing him, WHILE they do it - and then people use his name afterwards through nineteen hundred years to raise the accusation again...
There are not many scenes in history where the distance between a man and his followers is so great.
And then there is one more thing. All those down there in the square were a gathered crowd, they were not a people.
Five days earlier they had laid their cloaks on the road before him and shouted Hosanna, which in Hebrew means "save us" - and it was the same people, the same faces, the same voices standing there. The same mouth that asked for salvation that shouted crucify him.
That says something about how little a crowd of people has to do with ancestry.
A crowd of people is a condition. It can arise in Jerusalem and in Nuremberg and in a comment section, and it has no ethnicity, it has only a direction. Therefore to confuse the crowd with a people is not a historical inaccuracy, it is the very mistake that makes the Machine run.
He knew in addition what awaited him. He said it himself, long before anyone raised a hand against him - "No one takes my life from me, I lay it down of my own accord." That sentence is worth stopping at, because it turns the whole scene around.
A man who is assaulted is a victim of others' will. But. A man who sees death coming and goes to meet it of his own free will, he is no longer the one being acted upon. He is the one who acts.
No one took anything from Jesus that Friday. He gave it.
And right here lurks an even deeper trap. For if it was all foreseen, if it all had to happen, one could be tempted to think that then no one did anything wrong. Then Judas was just a tool, Pilate just a pawn, and guilt therefore evaporates in the great plan. But that is not how it connects, and it is worth getting written clean and straight.
That God could use human evil does not make the evil good. Judas chose himself. Caiaphas chose himself. Pilate chose himself, and he even knew better. That God had a plan with what happened - providence - is not an acquittal.
This means it was never a people who were in the dock.
It was Man.
And that is where it becomes unbearable for the one who reads the Story and looks for someone guilty.
For ask the Church itself who killed him, and see what it answers. It has answered the same for two thousand years, in every single liturgy, every single Good Friday. Bach has the choir ask who must atone, and then the individual voice answers, ich bin's - "it is I, I should atone"... meaning you and me. All of us.
It is not humility as decoration. It is THE ONLY RELIGION IN THE WHOLE WORLD whose foundational story places the believer among the executioners and says - "remain standing there, that is where you can see something."
And then we come to what I actually could have just written from the start, but then you would not have gotten the whole explanation.
The one who says the Jews killed Jesus has not just gotten the history wrong. He has misunderstood the Story itself. It is about how Man always finds another to give the blame - and he responds by finding another to give the blame.
He does precisely what the Cross was raised to put an end to.
One cannot stand at the foot of the Cross and point.
There is only room to kneel.
❤️🔥🪽
Incidentally the only place worth kneeling for, if you ask me. And I know you did not.
But now you know what I think.
