The Last Week of Jesus's LifeParaugs

Wednesday, April 1, 33 AD

While Annas’s ultimate case is flimsy at best, Rome doesn’t require a particularly high burden of proof. The case will rest on two major points: Jesus’s seemingly political message, and his known and presumed political associations.

Jesus’s first public words were, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15). People have misunderstood this message from day one. Even three to five years in, the disciples still aren’t sure they know what it means. How would Roman ears receive or understand this announcement? The time has come . . . a new empire is here . . . return to the king . . . belief in his royal proclamation.

Jesus is already guilty of treason.

As for political associations, let’s set aside the fact that Jesus has at least two former followers of John the Baptizer, plus the potential reality that Judas Iscariot is a throat-slitting Sicarii-type and Simon is a tad overzealous.

Because we live in such over-politicized times, these tenuous political associations lead excitable authors to the likely incorrect conclusion that Jesus is little more than a revolutionary politician—a power-seeking demagogue bent on the Roman overthrow and the establishment of a new party, kingdom, or even empire. Some even believe Jesus was a leading member of the Zealots, his mind fixated on expelling the Romans from Palestine and restoring the Mosaic Law over Israel.

I do not believe for one second that Jesus’s purpose for preaching was to overthrow the Roman Empire. If that were the case, he would have spent far less time healing, feeding, and preaching about love. Instead, he would have focused on military exercises, combat training, and weapons making. No, Jesus could not have been a revolutionary politician for at least eight significant reasons:

1. He does not seek achievable power. Jesus had a large enough following and strong relationships with several leading Jews to have easily won himself a seat on the synedrion, an alliance with Annas to bilk the commoners, and perhaps even a seat in the Herodian court via his friendship with Herod’s household manager’s wife. Yet he eschews such positions of rank and privilege for life among the lowly.

2. If he were truly a Zealot, why would he tell his followers to enrich that very empire by paying taxes and tribute? Why not call for a tax strike and use the money to buy weapons?

3. If Jesus is such a political contrarian, why does he heal a government official’s son (John 4)? Or the centurion’s servant (Matthew 8)? Or recruit one of Rome’s tax collectors as an inner-circle disciple? Or have dinner with a traitorous head tax collector as corrupt as Zacchaeus? Or accept financing from Herod’s household?

4. He is too smart to be so stupid. Most of the revolutionaries of the time were barbarians. Jesus is nuanced, subtle, literate, and extremely smart. He knows the impossibility of overthrowing Roman might. Even if every person he ever preached to showed up to fight for him, he would still be outnumbered ten to one against a vastly better-trained and better-equipped Roman army.

5. This is a big one—he readily surrenders himself. Why the blazes didn’t he head back to the desert from whence his whole story started? Instead of praying in the garden of Gethsemane on the night of his arrest, he could have walked the ten minutes to Lazarus’s house, borrowed a donkey, loaded it up with provisions from Mary and Martha, and made a wide berth around Jerusalem, heading south along the Dead Sea. He is not afraid of a few hundred miles of desert, having previously lived and traveled through it. From there, he could’ve set his course due west to fertile Egypt, settling in Cairo or catching a ship at Alexandria to spend his retirement somewhere in the Grecian islands. Instead, he stays. He believes he must die.

6. When Peter chops off Malchus’s ear (we’ll get to all the gory details soon), Jesus immediately heals him. This is not the behavior of a Zealot; such a man would borrow a sword and finish the job.

7. Violence is incompatible with his message. That’s why he forgives his murderers while dying on the cross. Jesus preaches enemy love, turning the other cheek, and making the heart (in the words of John Mark Comer) “a graveyard for hate.”

8. It is not the Romans Jesus confronts. He does not overturn the tables of the Praetorium or the Herodian Palace. He makes it more personal, more Jewish, and more pointed at the everyday exploitation endured by everyone in Israel. He rages not against Rome, but against the religionists. Politics isn’t his game—righteousness is.