For Christians Who Want to Kill the Uprising

Very early in the morning the leading priests and the elders of the people met again to lay plans for putting Jesus to death. Then they bound him, led him away, and took him to Pilate, the Roman governor. – Matthew 27:1-2, NLT

Mainstream evangelical Christianity’s most common reading of the crucifixion story holds that Jesus had to die because the world’s sin could not be forgiven unless God received the ultimate sacrifice: the blood of God himself on a public altar at Calvary. This perspective ignores the political implications of history’s most famous death. When accepting wholesale that the death of Jesus was primarily staged to serve a cosmic need, we ignore the nefarious human plot that had been laid out against Him. A more balanced reading, however, reveals that Jesus did not simply die because God needed Him to die "for our sins"—but rather, that Jesus was marked for death because religious and political leaders who opposed the uprising of a movement needed the uprising to die.

The scriptures explain that leaders within human systems – priests, elders, politicians – observed an uprising among society’s least favored people: the poor, women, the reviled, the infirm, the religiously impure. This movement threatened to make everyone uncomfortable. Suddenly, those in power might have to concede to those who served them. If the cries of society’s poorest, most disenfranchised people were suddenly addressed, then the rich might be required to give more of their own wealth to ensure the sustenance of the perishing. Without a great deal of warning, religious leaders might have to accommodate demands for a liberating message rather than a restrictive series of rules; an empowered religious underclass might even overthrow the Temple and establish their own new traditions.

I’ve heard my friends lament openly that our religious spaces and government are ignoring the cries of black and brown people, gays and lesbians, the poor and destitute. They ask: How can the church ignore the cries of oppressed people? Why have our elected officials turned a blind eye to the problems of gun violence, police brutality, and rampant poverty? And how is it that so many Christians have joined their faith with the corruption of our government?

However, to ask these questions is to assume that our problems are new when they are not. There has always been a corrupt marriage of convenience between church and state. Our only defense against this very powerful marriage is to decide that we will not participate in our generation’s version of the corrupt plot to kill the uprising. This is how we change the church, how we change our political structures, and how we'll eventually change the world. Long live the revolution.