Friday of Holy Week

The Lenses through which we see

Friday of Holy Week—The Lenses through which we see

Under cover of night they came for Jesus. After a week in Jerusalem, the Temple authorities finally had a plan to get rid of him - a traitor. Judas led them to the Garden where Jesus was with his other disciples. The authorities came with swords and clubs to make the arrest, something they couldn’t do in the daytime because of the crowd devoted to Jesus in the Temple. He was taken to the high priest Caiaphas’ house, where the chief priests, the elders, and the scribes were gathered. They produce evidence against Jesus to put him to death and they accused him of many things, but, we are told, the testimony is either false or contradictory. The trial is a sham.

Although the Gospels all tell a slightly different version of the proceedings, they agree on at least two facts. The first is, that the main charge against Jesus is whether or not he is the Messiah (which means both Christ and Anointed One). They want to know whether Jesus thinks he is the royal messiah because that would be grounds for blasphemy and death—the quickest way to rid themselves of this disruptive presence. If Jesus says he is ‘king,’ then he can be killed for insurrection.

The second area of agreement is that Jesus’ critique of the economic, social and political structure of Jerusalem is never mentioned. Jesus has been in the Temple all week teaching and admonishing the authorities across a wide spectrum of injustices and abuses. He has condemned economic injustice, he has railed against hypocrisy, he has accused them of oppressing the poor, in addition to forgetting the prophets and turning their backs on the weightier matters of justice and mercy. Jesus’ accusation of the injustice of the Temple is never mentioned once. Certainly that has been the topic of conversation behind closed doors, but we never hear a whisper of it in the Gospel narratives. Perhaps, in the multiple charges brought against Jesus, his condemnation of the Temple authorities is mentioned, but they are not why he is ultimately condemned. Nobody wants to talk about why Jesus is really on trial: not the chief priests, no the scribes or elders, not Herod, not Pilate, no one. Even today, Good Friday, there are many of us who want to celebrate the Passion and Jesus’ sacrifice, without recognizing what gets Jesus killed was his passion for justice.

Many were excited by Jesus’ royal procession into Jerusalem, but when the threat of crucifixion became real, they scattered. In the Gospel of Mark, only one person truly recognizes Jesus for who he is while he hangs on the cross—a Roman centurion. He declares, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’ (Mark 15:39). How does he see what others cannot? So many had looked upon Jesus, yet failed to truly see him—especially in his suffering. The lens through which one looks determines what one perceives. Most had been conditioned by fear, trained to see the world through Caesar’s values: power, extraction, consumption, and productivity. Those were the metrics of worth. Your lens changes everything.

A fitting illustration of this comes from The Wizard of Oz. In the Emerald City, one might assume everything is green because the city itself is emerald-colored. Victor Fleming’s 1939 film certainly reinforced that idea, with its towering, sparkly green skyline. But in L. Frank Baum’s original book, the city isn’t inherently green at all. Instead, everyone is required to wear emerald-tinted glasses—making everything appear green, regardless of its true color. The lens one look through changes everything, shaping reality. The chief priests and scribes, complicit with the economic demands of Rome, saw scripture and the function of the Temple only as they pertained to their profit, their security, and their piety. Through those lenses, they could only see Jesus as a threat. Thankfully for them, by the end of the day that threat will be dead and gone…