In a few minutes we’ll read the Gospel of the Passion of Jesus Christ – meaning, his trial, crucifixion, and death – according to Saint John. We’ll read about Jesus’ enemies bringing him before the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, to seek the death penalty. Pilate will ask: What charges do you bring against this man? And they will reply: “If this man were not an evildoer, we would not have handed him over to you.” 

If this man were not an evildoer – some translations say, If this man were not a criminal – we would not have handed him over to you. 

Every year, that sentence makes my skin crawl. 

It does so much in a mere sixteen words.

It dehumanizes Jesus by labeling him: an evildoer, a criminal. A malefactor, in the grand old language of the King James Bible. 

By definition – then and now – a kind of person about whom we don’t have to care. A kind of person who deserves whatever terrible things may happen to them. 

And it does this work with horrifying simple and effective circular logic: If he weren’t a criminal, he wouldn’t have been arrested. If he weren’t a bad person, he wouldn’t be in custody right now. If he weren’t an evildoer, we wouldn’t be demanding his execution. 

There’s no offramp in that logic. There’s no falsifiability. 

There’s no room for exploration of guilt, circumstance, responsibility. 

There’s certainly no room for repentance or rehabilitation. 

If this man were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you. 

At times the church’s language makes a big deal about Jesus Christ being an innocent victim. I like to point out that, in fact, Jesus had done at least some of the stuff they say he did. 

For example, in Luke’s Gospel, the charges against him are, “He stirs up the people by teaching throughout all Judea, from Galilee where he began even to this place.”

Yeah. He did that. He taught people. And they got stirred up. 

Jesus’ innocence or guilt is really not the central question here. The question should be the use of state violence. The question should be whether we think teaching should be a capital offense. Whether things we’d name today as free speech and free assembly should be met with crushing, repressive force. 

If this man were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you. This line makes my skin crawl because it’s not just then and there. It’s also here and now. John’s Gospel names something here that remains a dynamic of state violence all over the world – and here, in America. 

Brian Stephenson’s work with the Equal Justice Initiative has begun to show us how many especially black and brown people are wrongly accused and unfairly tried, incarcerated for decades, even executed, because nobody with the power to do something about it cared enough to give their case a second look. 

People who’ve been involved in advocating for criminal justice reform, and for reform of our immigration system, which has also held huge numbers of people – including children – in detention centers, under presidents of both parties, would say that this dehumanizing and circular logic remains alive and well. 

There’s nothing new about this. 

And yet we are facing something new right now. 

This is scary to talk about, but it just hasn’t left me alone. 

I promise this is a sermon about Jesus. Bear with me. 

You’ve probably read some news stories about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the father of three who was illegally deported from the US on March 15 and sent to CECOT, a terrorist detention center in El Salvador notorious among human rights watchdogs. The Trump administration acknowledges that Abrego Garcia was wrongly deported, but is refusing to comply with the Supreme Court’s call to facilitate his return to the United States. 

But Abrego Garcia is only one of many caught up in this brutal situation. Maybe you’ve heard about some of the others, too. Like Merwil Gutiérrez, a 19 year old living with his father in the Bronx. He was seized by ICE agents just outside his apartment. A friend heard one agent say, “He’s not the one,” as if they were looking for someone else. But another agent said, “Take him anyway.” Merwil has no criminal record, and his family says he has no ties to gang activity. 

A cruel irony of this situation is that many of those who have fled to the United States from Venezuela and El Salvador came here to try to escape endemic gang violence in their home countries.

Like Kilmar, Merwil was taken to CECOT in El Salvador. CECOT does not have programs for inmates to learn, serve, or earn freedom by good behavior. There’s no due process, no trial by jury or review of evidence, involved in getting sent there. And there’s no way out once you’re there. CECOT does not have a process for people to be released, to return to their families and communities. It is explicitly intended for lifelong detention. 

The US Holocaust Museum has a definition of a concentration camp: “What distinguishes a concentration camp from a prison… is that it functions outside of a judicial system. The prisoners are not indicted or convicted of any crime by judicial process.” 

My oldest child is 19, the same age as Merwil. I cannot imagine the agony of anxiety and grief of having my child in such a place, with no way to reach them, help them, or free them. 

If this man were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you. 

There’s no offramp in that logic. There’s no falsifiability. There’s no room for exploration of guilt, circumstance, responsibility. There’s certainly no room for repentance or rehabilitation. There’s no escape, and no mercy. 

Sometimes the church makes Jesus too ordinary. A wise and kind teacher who got crosswise to the authorities.

I do believe Jesus was God. I believe something extraordinary is happening in the story we tell each other today. 

But sometimes the church makes Jesus too extraordinary, too. 

As if he were undergoing something uniquely awful. 

In fact, what Jesus endures here is relatively commonplace.

Crucification is a terrible way to die. It was not a particular form of torture devised especially for Jesus. It was just one of the ways the Romans killed people. It was a mode of public execution intended as a deterrent. You execute somebody by crucifixion if you want other people to see it happening and think, “You know, maybe I won’t start that rebellion.” There were mass crucifixions following several revolts against Roman rule in the first and second centuries. Scholars think that by a conservative estimate, the Romans may have executed 300,000 people by crucifixion during their time of empire. 

Dying by crucifixion was not special. 

In the Passion Gospel, Jesus is entering into the commonplace horrors humans have created for millennia. And it starts before he’s nailed to the cross. It starts when he’s drawn into the criminal justice system of his time and place. 

Into the circular and dehumanizing logic of:  If he were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you. 

This is the sense in which Jesus died for our sins: 

He died with and like one of us. 

Christ himself, God themself, entered the jaws of our brutal system of scapegoating, dehumanizing, punishing. 

He allowed himself to be chewed up. Consumed. 

Today we bow before the humbling reality that God submitted Godself to the kind of senseless cruelty that humans regularly visit upon one another. Today we wonder at God’s fierce love shown to us in God’s willingness to walk with us into the dark. 

But. And. The fact that God goes there too doesn’t make it OK. 

If Christ stands with us, so too are we called to stand with Christ. 

With Jesus, the Christ, who told his followers: When you help the hungry, the outsider, the sick, the prisoner, you’re helping me. 

What does our fidelity to this story – to the man at its center, to the God we know through this man – what does striving to keep faith with Jesus look like, today?