“It is written that the Christ would suffer…”

Easter Sunday 3 14.4.2024

(Luke 24:35-48)

A few months after I was ordained a priest I was teaching “Bible Studies” to a not-very-interested class in a junior high school. The children became attentive when a young girl asked: “Please Father, if Jesus was so good, why did they kill him?” I could have brushed her off with an easy answer, but my stumbling attempts to get to the deeper truth of the matter failed miserably. Like many people, I have wondered about the question ever since.

Towards the end of Luke’s gospel, on that amazing Easter night when he stood among his friends again, Jesus himself explains why he had died. He told them that the things written about him in the Law, Prophets and Psalms had to be fulfilled. There are indeed fragmentary references in those scriptures to the future messiah who suffers and later triumphs, but their meaning is by no means clear. They would not have satisfied my young pupil.

We can learn much more about why Jesus was murdered if we go back to the beginning of his public ministry. There Luke describes him in his hometown at Nazareth, in an idyllic scene of a local boy now mature enough to be allowed to preach in the synagogue. The congregation admires Jesus for his eloquence and wisdom, but before he finishes, they angrily hustle him out of town and try to throw him off a cliff.

We have read this a thousand times in our churches, without understanding why Jesus’ listeners tried to murder him! How could a simple quote from the prophet Isaiah cause all that fuss? Partly because he claimed that he was the one anointed by God to fulfil that prophecy, starting now. But look what he was proposing to do! Freeing prisoners and oppressed people comes at a cost. When he said he was called to bring “good news to the poor”, Jesus was not just telling the poor that God loved them. God’s jubilee year was about to begin. As described in Leviticus 25, in every 49^th year all fields would remain unplowed and unsown, to let the environment recover. To help the poor, all debts would be cancelled, and everyone enslaved because of unpaid debts must be set free. Most radical of all, property must be redistributed so that the poor and marginalised could have a share.

Even though the Leviticus jubilee was probably never put into practice, and even though the villagers were hardly wealthy, this was intolerable, socialistic stuff! They began objecting, denigrating his family, but he further inflamed them by giving two examples when God helped foreigners in preference to Israelites! They had to stop him.

He made it easy for them. After three years of healing people because they were “more important than the Law”, during the holy passover festival he made a scandalous public protest against the temple itself. No wonder that the religious leaders stirred up a crowd to call for his execution!

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Further reading: André Trocmé: Jesus and the Non-Violent Revolution (1961)