Sunday’s Gospel spans Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem through to his crucifixion. Jesus has brought goodness to countless people, especially through his healings. When he enters Jerusalem, “many people spread their cloaks on the road,” in appreciation for that goodness. Jerusalem’s “chief priests and the entire Sanhedrin,” are not appreciative. They know Jesus’ goodness, his conscientious morality, challenges their positional morality. Therefore, “guards with swords and clubs who had come from the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders… laid hands on Jesus and arrested him.” “They led Jesus away to the high priest, and all the chief priests and the elders and the scribes.” The rulers “kept trying to obtain testimony against Jesus in order to put him to death but they found none.” Regardless, their plan for Jesus’ death moved ahead. “They bound Jesus, led him away, and handed him over to Pilate,” the Roman ruler. “After he had Jesus scourged, Pilate handed him over to the soldiers who crucified Jesus.”
Jesus is a healer whose goodness touches so many people’s lives. In time, Jesus is welcomed as a healer by whole groups of people, whole towns. By being a healer, Jesus is conscientiously challenging the moral code of the priests he meets, in fact, he is conscientiously challenging the moral code of the entire priestly class. They set themselves up as the godly class, enforcers of Yahweh’s godly moral code. That moral code included the priestly class’ right to kill people, like Jesus, whom they judged to be immoral. 2,000 years later, the inverted perversion of rulers dictating godly morality and judging people, like Jesus, as immoral and still planning and implementing their deaths, persists as the world’s routine code. Godly rulers routinely plan and implement death by denying people basic needs, by state executions, by warfare. How is it possible that this routine continues? In part, it continues because it is routine. Rulers’ deadly immoral routine was well noted by Hannah Arendt in her 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, a reflection on the Nazi Adolph Eichmann’s war crimes trial. “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our… moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together,… (a criminal who) commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.” Eichmann “was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the… banality of evil.” Evil exists as ordinary, normal in a boring sort of way, to the point of being predictable, routine. That routine resulted in Eichmann and other Germans having a withered conscience rarely exercising it under their ruling empire’s routine banality of evil that spawned atrocities across nearly one dozen nations. That routine resulted in we in the U.S. having an equally withered conscience rarely exercising it under this ruling empire’s same banality of evil spawning atrocities across Iraq and nearly a dozen other nations. That routine is resulting in Israelis having an equally withered conscience having rarely exercised it under that ruling empire’s same banality of evil spawning atrocities across one nation, Palestine. On and on it goes. It is the banality of evil spawned by rulers down the history of rulers who routinely crucify people of conscience and call it salvation.
“For all those beaten, for the broken heads… For those who spit out the bloody stumps of their teeth… For those who carry the scars, who walk lame—for those whose nameless graves are made… in the names of the perfect states. For those betrayed by the neighbors they shook hands with… “We are all good citizens here.”… For the man crucified on the crossed machine-guns without name… John Smith, John Doe, John Nobody… This is the fruit of war… And still he hangs, and still he will not die, And still, on the steel city of our years The light fails and the terrible blood streams down. We thought we were done with these things but we were wrong… Our children know and suffer the armed men.” (Litany for Dictators – Stephen Vincent Benet)
Prayer: Beautiful Spirit, we vow to exercise our conscience and no longer suffer the armed men.
Question: When did I first start questioning belief in Jesus’ murder by rulers’ as being anybody’s salvation?
March 24, 2024 Gospel Mark 14:1-15:47 Palm Sunday to Jesus’ Crucifixion