eastern orthodox easter

easter is tomorrow, for those of us who live in eastern orthodox land. i call it eastern easter and western easter now. so, that makes today "holy saturday", and our friends are all going with us to umm qais to celebrate together while fasting. umm qais is where jesus drove the legions of demons into the pigs and they jumped off a cliff into the lake of gardarenes, or the sea of galilee. it feels appropriate to go to a place where jesus walked on the one day he wasn't doing any walking (according to tradition).

last night we had a good friday service at our friends' apartment. we read john 18-19 and some things struck me as interesting and i put them into a drawing which now i will put into a blog.

the first thing that john does is he reports that when jesus says the words "i am" the soldiers that are arresting jesus fall to the ground. these are the same words that allah said to moses when moses asked who he should tell the people he had been talking to. allah responds "tell the people i am". these are powerful words, seen in the physical force that these spoken words had on roman guards and sanhedrin officials. this doesn't happen when i say "i am". that is because i am not god. this is the first (and most?) significant thing to me about the story from john 18-19.

the last two things go together. john reports that one of the officials is related to caiaphas, who is the one who told the people that it would be good for one man to die for the people. hmm... on the surface, that just looks like caiaphas is in cahoots with allah, just a part of the plan of redemption by giving bad advice that fits in with allah's plan. but look at this more closely. what caiaphas says essentially is, "this man will cause an uprising, a rebellion against the empire that is taking good care of us. it would be better if we just kill this man, instead of all of the jews being killed because of him." this is a statement of collaboration, or settling, or of satisfaction with the way things are. after all, the roman government still recognized the jewish leaders' authority on small matters of law. why would they want to lose all of that for this "kingdom of heaven" stuff that undermines their authority on earth. (what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world yet loses his soul?)

later, when jesus is being tried for execution, john reports that pilate presented jesus to the people one last time. the people responded, "take him away, take him away! crucify him!" he said, "shall i crucify your king?". they responded, "we have no king but caesar!". wow. pilate surely didn't recognize the full weight of the situation that he was being forced to mediate, but on some level he knew that jesus was significant and not one deserving to be killed. the people signed their own death certificate with a terrifying and startling statement: we have no king but caesar. caesar? not allah? caesar? jesus came into the world at a critical point in history, especially jewish history. they had completely lost hope and faith in allah's faithfulness to them. they had replaced allah with rome. this is terrible.

if we take a look at history, 40 years later, the very roman empire that the people put their trust in destroyed jerusalem and demolished the temple. instead of heeding jesus' warnings and following him into the way of the kingdom, they chose the occupier, and the occupier destroyed them.
may we avoid the same mistakes in our empires in our history.