The State Executed an Innocent Man: Good Friday and the Violence of Empire

Let us not spiritualize what happened on Good Friday to the point of erasing what actually happened. What actually happened is this: an innocent man was arrested by religious authorities collaborating with an occupying military power. He was given a sham trial. He was tortured. And he was executed by the state's preferred method of public terror. Isaiah saw it: "He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter." The language is deliberate: oppressed. The word in Hebrew is nagas — it is the same word used for the taskmaster's oppression of the enslaved in Egypt. Jesus was not just killed. He was oppressed. He was subjected to the machinery of systemic violence. The cross was not a religious symbol in the first century. It was a political weapon. Rome crucified people along major highways as a message: this is what happens to those who challenge the empire. The cross was state terrorism. And God chose to die on one. This changes how we read the cross. It is not only a transaction between God and humanity. It is a confrontation between God and the powers. When God enters the world as a poor, colonized, brown-skinned man and is executed by the empire, God is making a statement about which side He is on. He is on the side of the crucified.

"He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities." The progressive and liberation traditions read this not only as substitutionary but as solidary. God did not merely pay a debt. God entered the condition of the oppressed. God became a victim of the very systems that crush the poor. Jon Sobrino writes: "The cross is not primarily something that Jesus does for us. It is something that happens to Jesus because of us — because of the world's sin, the world's violence, the world's refusal to practice justice." The cross is the logical consequence of what happens when a prophet of justice confronts an empire built on injustice. Jesus was not crucified for being too spiritual. He was crucified for being too disruptive. He overturned the tables of the money changers. He declared good news to the poor. He healed on the Sabbath in defiance of religious gatekeeping. He announced a Kingdom in which the last are first and the first are last. That kind of message gets you killed — in the first century and in every century since. Good Friday reveals that the God of the Bible is not neutral. The cross is God's identification with the victims of violence, injustice, and systemic oppression. "The punishment that brought us peace was on him" — and in bearing that punishment, God declared solidarity with every person who has ever been punished unjustly.

"It is finished." These words have been the last words of countless prophets, activists, and martyrs who confronted unjust systems and paid the price. Oscar Romero, shot while celebrating the Eucharist. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, hanged for resisting the Third Reich. Martin Luther King Jr., assassinated for demanding justice. Dorothy Stang, murdered for defending the Amazon. In each case, the pattern of Good Friday repeated: the prophet speaks truth, the empire strikes back, the body is broken. But here is what the empire never understands: the cross does not end the movement. It amplifies it. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Good Friday is the day the empire thought it won. Easter is the day it discovered it lost. "By his wounds we are healed." The healing that comes through the cross is not just individual reconciliation with God — it is the healing of the systems that crucify. The cross exposes violence. It unmasks the powers. It reveals the true face of empire. And in that exposure, it begins the process of dismantling. So tonight, we do not merely remember what happened to Jesus. We remember what is happening to the crucified peoples of today. We stand in solidarity with every person being crushed by the systems of this world. And we trust that the God who was crucified by empire is the same God who rises to judge it. The cross is not the end. It is the cost of confronting evil. And the God who paid that cost is alive — and He is still confronting.