Note: I wrote this for Easter a couple of weeks ago.

Throughout Holy Week this year, I have constantly been thinking about how we think about Jesus. I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church and whenever Palm Sunday and Easter would come around, the sermon would always focus on Jesus’ procession into Jerusalem, Judas’ betrayal, the crucifixion, and culminating with Jesus resurrection on the third day. Ultimately, the central drive would be on salvation from eternal damnation through Jesus’ sacrifice. Yes, this is a key part of Christian faith, and I am not here to deny that. However, what these services failed to point out what that Jesus’ life and work were, in essence, a protest against the wealthy and the powerful.

In Jesus and the Disinherited, Howard Thurman points out that “Jesus was not a Roman citizen,” and as such he did not have the protections of citizenship. Jesus did not have legal recourse with Rome if someone did him wrong. His social position was that of a subject of Rome, not a citizen. Thurman notes that Jesus, pulling from the prophets of Israel, “becomes the word and the work of redemption for all the cast down people in every generation and every age.” Christianity, of course, arose in the aftermath of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and Thurman argues that we need to remember “that Christianity as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed,” but over the decades and centuries it has become a weapon of the powerful who wield it to suppress the populace.

Writing about Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, Diana Butler Bass points out that when the people gathered to see Jesus ride in from the east and screamed “Hossana,” they called upon Jesus to save them. The crowd shouted, “Hossana! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” (Mark 11: 9–10). Bass notes that “Hosanná is a transliteration of the Hebrew term (hôsî-âh-na) meaning ‘Oh, save now!’ or ‘Please save!’” Thus, while we typically think about the crowd praising Jesus, they did not do that; instead, they implored him to save them from the tyranny of Rome and the domination system within the temple in Jerusalem.

Bass continues by referencing John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg’s The Last Week: The Day-by-Day Account of Jesus’s Final Week in Jerusalem. Crossan and Borg point out that Jesus entered Jerusalem just as Pontius Pilate led an imperial procession from the west, since, as a Roman governor, he came to Jerusalem for Passover “like his predecessors and successors.” They came and “displayed not only imperial power, but also Roman imperial theology.” Thus, Jesus’s processions served as a counter to the imperial image of Roman occupation. Crossan and Borg write, “Jesus’s procession deliberately countered what was happening on the other side of the city. Pilate’s procession embodied power, glory, and violence of the empire that ruled the world. Jesus’s procession embodied an alternative vision, the kingdom of God.”

Coupled with Roman rule, Jerusalem also became the center of the “domination system,” which Crossan and Borg point out “is shorthand for the most common form of social system — a way of organizing a society” that carries over into today through three main features: political oppression, economic exploitation, and religious legitimation. Essentially, it is a top-down system with the wealthy at the top exploiting the poor that they oppress. We cannot separate Jesus’s life, work, and ministry from this system, and we cannot separate his use of the prophets, from this system either. We must read Jesus’s final week in Jerusalem through this lens, especially if we think about his first sermon and other moments in his ministry.

When Jesus returns from desert in Luke 4, he went to Nazareth and entered the synagogue. There, he took up the scroll and read from Isaiah 61:1–2 where the prophet says that God anointed him “to preach good news to the poor,” “proclaim release to the captives,” and “to set at liberty those who are oppressed.” In Isaiah, these verses refer to the Jubilee, the time every fifty years where debts get forgiven, prisoners and slaves receive freedom, and God’s mercies become manifest. When Jesus finishes reading, he tells those gathered, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” and “all spoke well of him” (Luke 4: 21–22). However, when he switches and talks about Elijah raising Zarephath’s son and Elisha healing Naaman, the crowd turns wrathful because in each of those cases, the prophets cared for the oppressed. At this, the crowd seeks to throw Jesus off a cliff because he challenges their position of authority.

Jesus returns again and again to preaching liberation for the oppressed within a Jewish context. We must remember that, as Crossan and Borg put it, “Jesus was a part of Judaism, not apart from Judaism.” As such, Jesus follows the Old Testament prophets like Jeremiah, Daniel, Micah, and Isaiah who, when they saw political oppression, economic exploitation, and religious legitimation, called it out. Again, one need only look back to Isaiah for an example when we read

Woe to those who decree iniquitous decrees,
and the writers who keep writing oppression,
to turn aside the needy from justice
and to rob the poor of my people of their right,
that widows may be their spoil,
and that they may make the fatherless their prey!
What will you do on the day of punishment,
in the storm which will come from afar?
To whom will you flee for help,
and where will you leave your wealth? (Isaiah 10:1–3)

Or, when we think about the ways that the “domination system” uses religion and outwards appearances of worship to coerce individuals to succumb to their exploitation and oppression, we can look to Jesus’s cleansing of the temple when he quotes both Isaiah 56:7 and Jeremiah 7:11, calling those exploiting others in the temple a “den or robbers” and asking, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations?” We can look earlier in Jeremiah 7 when we see a correlation to Isaiah 10 as God tells Jeremiah about the temple and worship. God says, “For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly execute justice one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the fatherless or the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I will let you dwell in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your fathers for ever” (Jeremiah 7:5–7).

Again and again, Jesus calls out religious leaders who exploit others. I could list numerous examples and break down the different religious groups, but I do not have the space. For this discussion, read Crossan and Borg’s The Last Week because they detail all of this. However, I do want to end with a passage from Luke’s depiction of the beatitudes. When we think about the beatitudes, we think about them from Matthew and the Sermon on the Mount, but Luke presents them, along with woes, in chapter six of his gospel. After the beatitudes, Jesus tells us to love our enemies and to help others, and he then warns us we must do so not out of what we hope to gain either monetarily for reputationally. He says,

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. And if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful. (Luke 6:32–36)

During this Holy Week, I have been thinking about these things a lot, especially as we confront a “domination system” that seeks to enrich a few while oppressing the masses. I think about about Jesus not only in a spiritual sense, as God’s son, but also as a revolutionary, as a resistance figure who the Romans and those in Jerusalem who accompanied the Romans would have called a terrorist because he challenged their power and could enact violence against the state. Dick Gregory points out that “Jesus was killed by the state.” We must remember that. He was killed because of what he represented and what he preached, a message of equality and equity, a message of resistance. During Holy Week, I think about this and what it means for us today, in this moment, to remember that Jesus was a revolutionary whom the state deemed a threat.

What are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.