Holy Week: When Jesus died.

Today is Palm Sunday, the start of what we Christians call Holy Week. Various Christians also call it Great Week, Greater Week, Holy and Great Week, Passion Week, Easter Week (particularly by those people who consider Easter the end of the week). It remembers the week Jesus died, which took place 9–17 Nisan 3793 in the Hebrew calendar. In the Julian calendar that’d be 29 March to 4 April of the year 33.

DAY	DATE	JESUS’S ACTIVITY
PALM SUNDAY.	9 Nisan 3793 29 March 33	Jesus enters Jerusalem; the crowds say Hosanna. Mk 11.1-11, Mt 21.1-11, Lk 19.28-44, Jn 12.12-19
HOLY MONDAY.	10 Nisan 3793 30 March 33	Jesus cleanses the temple of merchants; curses the fig tree. Mk 11.12-18, Mt 21.12-19, Lk 19.45-46, Jn 2.13-17
HOLY TUESDAY.	11 Nisan 3793 31 March 33	Jesus teaches in temple. Lk 19.47-48, 21.37
HOLY WEDNESDAY.	12 Nisan 3793 1 April 33	Still teaching in temple.
MAUNDY THURSDAY.	13 Nisan 3793 2 April 33	The last supper; Jesus washes his students’ feet. Mk 14.12-26, Mt 26.17-30, Lk 22.7-39, Jn 13.1-14.30
GOOD FRIDAY.	14 Nisan 3793 3 April 33	Jesus is arrested, tried, condemned, executed, and entombed. Mk 14.27-15.47, Mt 26.31-27.61, Lk 22.40-23.56, Jn 15.1-19.42
HOLY SATURDAY.	15 Nisan 3793 4 April 33	Sabbath and Passover while Jesus lays dead. Pilate orders a guard for the tomb. Mt 27.62-66, Lk 23.56

Of course Jesus rose on Sunday the 5th, the day Christians now designate as Easter.

Different Christians observe Holy Week in different ways, depending on church and local custom. The churches I grew up in, usually had a somber service on Good Friday, and a just-as-somber service on Easter Sunday, ’cause they usually held some sort of passion play where most of the service was focused on Jesus getting killed. Lots of weeping. Lots of repentance and conversions. Happy ending, ’cause Jesus is alive, but the focus was more on him dying for our sins. Lots of churches tend to focus on the sad bits, ’cause we humans get depressing like that.

But many churches—properly—spend Holy Week on the sad bits, and Easter Sunday and the weeks thereafter rejoicing. Because Jesus is alive.

What is it with Christians and fascism?

CHRISTOFASCISM 'krɪs.toʊ'fæ.ʃɪz.əm noun. A politically conservative, authoritarian, nationalistic ideology, which claims to be based on Christian principles.

[Christofascist adjective.]

Back in high school history class, we were introduced to the word “fascism,” but as I recall my history teachers had the darnedest time trying to explain what it was. I suspect it’s because they didn’t wanna offend any conservative parents who might lean a little fascist.

Properly, fascism is the movement led by Benito Mussolini in Italy in the 1930s. It’s not based on any particular political ideas, because Mussolini wasn’t an ideas guy; he was a populist. He just wanted to get elected, claimed he’d make Italy great again, and planned to do it by bypassing democracy and the usual checks and balances used to keep dictators from seizing power. The Italians called him il Duce, “the Duke,” because he tried to run the country much like a medieval duke—or one of the early Roman emperors, whom he used as his examples.

The few traits fascists and fascist governments have in common is they’re

• AUTHORITARIAN. The leader tends to act like an absolute monarch, tries to suppress his political foes and hold on to power, and tries to control everything in the country—regardless of existing laws and customs, and even civil rights. (Habeas corpus especially.)
• CONSERVATIVE. Fascist regimes are always anti-Communist, and anti anything they claim to be Communist, like unions and labor laws and government oversight. Always claim to uphold traditional values and standards… and always claim God’s on their side. Often go out of their way to look devout—mainly to help cover up how much they don’t act it.
• NATIONALISTIC. By “nation” they mean the largest ethnic group in the land, so yeah, we’re talking racism. Every other ethnic group is cast as “the problem,” and need to be enslaved, mitigated, deported, or eliminated.

The reason fascism was so widespread in the 1930s, and why it’s returned in such a big way in the 2020s, is because it taps into human nature so very well. People are inherently selfish. We want God to grant us all our selfish desires, Jm 4.3 and if God won’t grant it, maybe this fascist politician will. We want government to grant it, and if a democratic government can’t achieve it through negotiation and compromise, a fascist government can do it through steamrolling all our opponents.

And because fascists recognize that the biggest potential obstacle to their thirst for power is the one to whom we’re meant to grant all power—Christ Jesus—they go out of their way to make Christians believe, “No, really, Jesus is on my side. I’m doing this stuff for him. He approves. Lookit all the sinners I’m going to persecute on his behalf!” Historically they’ve been very successful at this, because obviously Christians don’t know our own Lord well enough to recognize this pursuit and elevation of temporal power, to do our will and claim it’s really Jesus’s, is obviously the spirit of antichrist.

Atonement: God wants to save everybody!

Humanity’s sins have significantly damaged our relationship with God. But not irreperably. God can fix anything. And he did.

As most of us know from the times other people have sinned against us, some of the time we can simply, easily forgive those sins… and sometimes it’s not that simple. Some sins are mighty destructive. When we wrongly destroy something, it oughta be replaced, but that’s not always easy to do. If you destroy something with a lot of sentimental value attached to it, a simple replacement isn’t gonna cut it. If you destroy family photos, sometimes they’re not replaceable. Same deal when you wrongly kill someone: It’s kinda impossible for us to replace them. God could do it, but we certainly can’t.

So when people ask me, “Well can’t God just forgive all our sins, and that’s that?”—it’s not gonna be that easy. Our sins do damage. We don’t always see or care about all the spiritual damage, but it’s there. God can see it, even though we can’t. So God can’t just forgive us; he’s gotta do damage control. He’s gotta fix things.

That’s what atonement is: God’s act of fixing sin-damage.

That’s what it means whenever we try to atone for evil we’ve done: When we try to fix sin-damage… with various degrees of success. We don’t always succeed. Some of our acts of atonement are actually kinda pathetic. Like when a corporation offers people money to make up for harm they’ve done—and it’s always too little money, unless the courts get invovled and make ’em pay something gargantuan.

The Hebrew words for atonement are כֹּפֶר/kofér, כִּפֻּר/kippúr (which you know from the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur, “day of atonement”), and its related verb כָּפַר/kafár. It literally means “plaster.” You know, like when somebody knocked a hole in a wall. You put some plaster or putty or spackle or cement on it, paint over it… and if you applied the filler properly, the wall’s as good as new. Sometimes better than new, ’cause your plaster is stronger than the drywall you’ve patched. And that’s the word the LORD uses in Exodus to describe what the ancient Hebrews’ ritual sacrifices represented to him: Their sins poked holes in their relationship with God, and needed plastering. It’s a really simple metaphor: Sin breaks stuff, and atonement glues it back together.

The word English-speakers used to use to describe kofér, and its Greek translation ἱλασμός/ilasmós, was “propitiation.” It’s still found in the King James Version Ro 3.25, 1Jn 2.2, 4.10 and comes from the Latin verb propitio, “to appease; to regain the good favor of.” It sorta misses the point of kofér—and of grace. Thanks to God’s grace, we already have his good favor; he already considers us right with him. But sin-damage still needs to be dealt with. We still need to make things right in the universe. God’s just fine—a fact which many Christians still don’t wholly grasp (and occasionally send me rebuking emails to complain I’m making God sound too radically gracious, as if that’s possible) ’cause we still struggle to fathom how deep and wide God’s love and grace is.

Anyway, there used to be a Middle English word, “onement,” which means unity. John Wycliffe used it in Ezekiel 37.17. English-speaking preachers started to use the prefix “at-” with it, meaning in, to describe our relationship with God: We’re in unity with him. Supposedly atoning acts bring us back to this state of unity… but remember, God does grace, so we don’t need to do these atoning acts.

Because Christ Jesus already did the atoning act: He sacrificed himself for the sins of the world. Cl 1.22, 1Pe 1.19 He took care of it. We need do nothing more than accept that he took care of it. We can’t add to it; we’re not good enough to sacrifice ourselves for anything more than our own sins.

Since Jesus is God, it makes God himself our plaster. We have him patching the cracks that sin made in our lives—in much the same way the Holy Spirit was sealed to us when we first turned to God. But don’t play with that metaphor too much, lest you get the idea it’s okay to poke holes in your life so God can putty them with more of himself. We’re not meant to keep on sinning so we can get more grace. Ro 6.1-2 Instead look at your life as a wall full of holes, patched over by God. We might imagine it as flawed; we can’t get past the idea of all the holes beneath the paint. But God nonetheless considers it a perfectly good wall. It serves its purpose: It keeps out the wind and rain. It keeps prying eyes from looking through it. It keeps listening ears from hearing better through it. It provides shelter. We can hang pictures on it. And so on, till the metaphor breaks down and we just get silly. But you get the idea.

God wants us, and our relationship with him, repaired, back to the way he originally meant things. He doesn’t want to knock us down and start again from scratch.

Plucking Jesus’s beard. Or not.

Isaiah 50.6.

Because Jesus was foretold in the Old Testament, a lot of Christians throughout history have dug around the OT looking for as many scriptures as possible which might be foretellings of Jesus. They claim to have found hundreds.

And okay, fair, there are hundreds. But there are also a whole lot of passages which actually aren’t about Jesus. They’re about other stuff. Other people, other events, other teachings. Even other messiahs. (“Messiah” is a title of the king of Israel, and Jesus is the current king of Israel, but of course he had predecessors.)

These passages resemble Jesus-stuff, so Christians claim ’em for Jesus. But in fact we’re taking those Old Testament passages out of context. It’s so important to Christians that we amass as big a number of OT “Messianic prophecies” as possible, that often we don’t care we’re misinterpreting and misquoting bible.

Today’s Isaiah passage is one of them. I originally wrote about it for advent, but it has to do with Jesus’s suffering and death, so it’s important to talk about it during the Lenten season too. It’s about how it was foretold that Jesus would get his beard plucked. Supposedly that happened after he was arrested; while he was tortured before he was crucified. Some Jesus movies throw in a scene where inbetween smacking him around and spitting on him, someone grabs a big tuft of Jesus’s beard and rips it out. Yee-ouch!

Years ago I tried to find that beard-ripping moment in the gospels, and found it’s not there at all. Doesn’t come from the gospels. It’s supposedly from Isaiah 50.6.

Isaiah 50.6 KJV

I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting.

Some Christian musta read Isaiah, found this verse about someone getting their face spat upon, thought, “Well Jesus had his face spat upon,” and concluded this was a prophecy about Jesus. And Isaiah apparently also foretold Jesus had his cheeks plucked. So there we are! They pulled out his beard.

Is this passage a foretelling of Jesus? Nah; it’s about Isaiah himself. But tradition says it’s about Jesus… and as we all know, traditions aren’t infallible. This one sure ain’t.

“Fasting” from one thing at a time.

Custom during the Lenten season, because it’s a time to reflect on Jesus’s death and self-sacrifice, is the Lenten fast, between Ash Wednesday and Easter. (And take Sundays off. Not everybody remembers Sundays are feast days, and we’re not meant to fast on feast days.) But it’s not a total 40-day fast; many who practice Lent simply go without meat and alcohol… plus one other thing.

And for many, if not most, they only go without the one other thing. Hence all the discussions before Ash Wednesday of “What’re you giving up for Lent?” Then, during the Lenten season, “How’re you doing?”—a question which typically dies off after the people who usually ask this question, fail in their own fasts.

Lent isn’t the only time Christians “fast” from only one thing. I’ve done it. My church would call for a weeklong fast, or a 14-day fast, or a 21-day fast, and I really didn’t feel like starving myself just because Pastor had a spiritual bug up his heiney. (And as you can tell, my own attitude at the time sucked.) So like many a Christian, I did the laziest bare minimum: I gave up only one thing. Something inconvenient, yet kinda easy. Like coffee. Now, if you know how much coffee I consume, you might think this was an act of heroic self-control on my part… but nah, it’s really not. I’m not addicted to caffeine. (I drink it for the flavor, and switch to decaf after lunch.) Giving up caffeine was just as easy.

As was sugar—which was something I actually stuck with after the fast was over. But giving up bagels was unexpectedly hard; guess I’m more addicted to them than I realized. Meh; enough about me.

I’ve been asked whether giving up only one thing as a “fast” actually counts as a fast. It can. Two thoughts though.

First of all I gotta ask them whether they’re honestly fasting for the right reasons. You do realize God never obligates us to fast. Yes, there are those numbnuts who insist he absolutely did call for a fast in Isaiah 58.6, but obviously they never read the context: The LORD’s using fasting as a metaphor for justice and freedom. Has nothing to do with going hungry for God, nor giving up a particular item.

So we’re not disobeying God when we skip a fast, break a fast, “cheat” on a fast, or diet instead of fasting. True, our churches might want us to fast, and legalistic churches will certainly require it. But unless you swore to God you’d fast along with ’em, you’re not sinning if you don’t fast. (And of course lying about it, or pretending you’re fasting when you’re not, is always wrong.)

Likewise I don’t want people to think the purpose of fasting is to earn karmic points with God. God never “owes us one” for fasting, nor anything we do. Worship and obedience is our duty, Lk 17.10 not a favor we do for him that’s gonna earn us jewels in our heavenly crowns. What, did you not get enough participation trophies in youth soccer?

Fasting is simply a practice which Christians have found helps us focus better on God in prayer, and helps us develop self-control. That’s the only reason we do it. If anyone tells you there are other spiritual abilities, benefits, or rewards for fasting, I advise you to be wary. Too many of ’em are trying to get you to follow them more so than God.

Second I don’t assume Christians are lazy when they want a bare-minimum “fast.” Yeah, sometimes it’s totally that; been there done that myself. But more often it’s because fasting is hardcore. And admittedly, we’re weak. Going without food for a whole day? We’ll crack by 10AM! We’ll walk into the break room, someone will have brought doughnuts, and we’ll hold out maybe an hour. But knowing ourselves, less. A warm Krispy Kreme doughnut is a powerful thing.

I don’t say this to condemn weak Christians. Every last one of us was a weak Christian at one point. (Me, many points.) So if you’re still weak, I’m here to help, not judge or mock. You gotta build self-control. Fasting is the fastest way to do it, but it’s wise to start small and work your way up. Y’don’t just tackle the very hardest practices, and presume you’ll be a natural ’cause now you have Holy Spirit power. Fast small before you fast big.

So, the very least we can fast… is that one single thing.

And this is a very common Christian practice. Some Christians do it every Lent. I’m not saying you need to observe Lent. Start even smaller. Abstain for a week. See how you do. If you fail—and you may—try again.

Pontius Pilate’s attitude towards Jesus.

Matthew 27.19, 24-26, John 19.7-12.

Whenever preachers talk about Pontius Pilate, I find way too many of them describe him as an uncaring government functionary or bureaucrat, who clearly didn’t care enough about Jesus to stop him from dying.

I’m not entirely sure where they got this idea. I suspect it comes from bad Jesus movies. Most of them, trying to foreshadow Jesus’s death or create dramatic tension, try to depict the people who killed Jesus as way more organized than they actually were. It works for today’s audiences, who are mainly thinking of the way their culture works, not Jesus’s. In a democracy, if rulers want to murder someone, government answers to the people, and people have rights; so it takes a lot of conspiring between corrupt officials to try to make it look like a reasonable action. But the Roman Empire was no democracy. It was a fascist dictatorship, which answered to no one. Roman citizens’ rights were recognized, but no one else’s was, and you could kill ’em simply because they were inconvenient. Jesus easily fell into that category.

The bad Jesus movies also typically depict Pilate as an unbelieving skeptic, if not nontheist. The writers must figure if Pilate were religious in any form, he’d’ve fought harder for Jesus. The most they show, is Pilate is curious about Jesus; his accusers claim he’s a revolutionary, but Jesus tells Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world” Jn 18.36 —it’s not a political kingdom; it’s not a political threat to the Roman Empire at all. So Pilate deduces Jesus isn’t a problem, and wants to let him go because he’s not, but the Judean rulers are so insistent, and Pilate doesn’t wanna rile them up, so he throws up his hands and crucifies Jesus as the path of least resistance.

All this junk worms its way into Christian sermons, because people remember movies way better than the text of the scriptures. But I’m going with the gospels, and they depict Pilate as really hesitant to have anything to do with Jesus. He’s particularly wary in John’s gospel. Here’s part of the reason why:

John 19.7-12 KWL

7The Judean leaders replied to Pilate,

“We have a Law, and according to Law,

Jesus is obligated to die,

for he makes himself out to be the son of God.”

8So when Pilate hears this word, he’s even more afraid.

9Pilate again enters the prætorium

and tells Jesus, “Where did you come from?”

Jesus gives him no answer.

10So Pilate tells Jesus, “You don’t speak to me?

Didn’t you know I have power to release you

and power to crucify you?”

11Jesus answers Pilate, “You don’t have power over me.

You have nothing—

unless it was given you from above.

This is why the one who betrayed me to you

has a greater sin.”

12ABecause of this, Pilate is seeking to release Jesus.

And in Matthew we see another part.

Matthew 27.19 KWL

As Pilate was sitting in the rostrum,

his woman sends him a message,

saying, “Have nothing between you and that righteous man.

For I am suffering greatly because of a dream about him.”

Our anger might create big, big trouble.

Matthew 5.21-22.

Here’s the first of the “Ye have heard… but I say unto you” parts of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus gets into them right after he says he has no intention whatsoever of undoing or undermining the Law of Moses, so if you ever get the idea he’s trying to do that with his teachings, no he’s not; he just said he’s not. He’s trying to clarify the intent of the Law: Here’s how we were always meant to follow it. And it’s not the way the scribes and Pharisees claim. Mt 7.28-29

Jesus begins with anger. ’Cause people get angry. Even Jesus got angry. Mk 10.14 And unless we know how to practice self-control, we’re gonna act on that anger, and do something regrettable. Oh, we might justify it by claiming we had “righteous” anger, but don’t fool yourself; Jesus’s brother James stated “human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires.” Jm 1.20 NIV Anger’s a work of the flesh, and we always need to be on our guard against it. Hence Jesus’s teachings.

Matthew 5.21-22 KWL

21“You hear the oldtimers say,

‘You will not murder, Ex 20.13, Dt 5.17

and whoever might murder will be found guilty’?

22I tell you:

Everyone who’s been made angry by their sibling,

{for no good reason,} will be found guilty.

Anyone who might tell their sibling, ‘You waste of space,’

will be guilty under the Judean senate.

Anyone who might say, ‘You moron,’

will be guilty in fiery Gehenna.”

Other bibles tend to translate aorist-tense Greek verbs as past tense. I don’t; aorist verbs are neither past, present, nor future. They happen, but we only know when they happen by the context of other verbs or actions—and since Jesus is largely speaking in present tense, that’s how we’re meant to translate ’em. So when Jesus says “You hear the oldtimers say,” he’s not talking about something his listeners heard a long, long time ago, or read in the bible; he’s talking about what oldtimers say all the time, whether in synagogue, at home, or on the streets.

“You will not murder.” It’s in the Ten Commandments. It needs repeating, because murder still happens a lot. And in ancient times, it happened far, far more often than it does now—because people could get away with it. No cops, no detectives who worked for the state, and no science so you could do actual detection. Nobody had the attitude murder is a crime against God and the state (which it is); in fact the state, in the form of Roman soldiers and governors, murdered people all the time. Even righteous King David murdered a guy to steal his wife, and got away with it. People figured murder was only a crime against the victim’s family—and if nobody would miss the victim, nor mind that they’re dead, what’s the big deal?

Yep, throughout biblical times, including in Jesus’s day, murders and lynchings and fights that turned deadly happened all the time. And what’s the origin of most of these deaths? Anger.

Too often, anger for no good reason—which is why somebody inserted the word εἰκῆ/eikí, “in vain,” into a third-century copy of the text, and it wound up in the Sinaiticus, the Peshitta, the Textus Receptus, and the KJV. But Jesus probably didn’t say it—and didn’t need to. After all, people would try to use it as a loophole: “I didn’t kill him in vain anger, but righteous anger, so it’s a righteous kill.”

Nope; murder is murder. Don’t.