Jesus Was Revolutionary: Jesus's Final Week Through Political Eyes
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It's Holy Week. And if you grew up Southern Baptist like we did, you probably have a very specific version of this week in your head. Palm Sunday is triumphant. Good Friday is somber. Easter is the big finish. Jesus died for your sins, he rose again, there's a lot of music, maybe a pageant with live animals if your church had the budget. The central message: salvation from eternal damnation through Jesus's sacrifice.
That's a key part of the Christian faith. We're not denying that. But what those services consistently failed to point out, what we were never taught sitting in those pews, was that Jesus's life and work were, in essence, a protest against the wealthy and the powerful. And that changes everything about how you read this week.
What "Hosanna" Actually Means
We've all heard it. Hosanna. Glory to God in the highest. If you asked us a year ago what it meant, we probably would have said it was a shout of joy, a praise word. That's how it's always been framed. It's not.
Hosanna is a transliteration of a Hebrew term meaning "oh, save now" or "please save." Diana Butler Bass points this out. Our own pastor has said it multiple times. When the crowd gathered to see Jesus ride into Jerusalem from the east and shouted Hosanna, they weren't just praising him. They were imploring him to save them, from the tyranny of Rome, from the domination system within the temple, from the religious leaders who were exploiting them.
That reframes the entire scene. These aren't people waving palm fronds at a parade. These are people under occupation, looking at a man who has been healing the sick, raising the dead, and challenging the authorities, and they're begging him: save us.
Two Processions, One City
In The Last Week, Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan point out that Jesus entered Jerusalem from the east on Palm Sunday at the same time that Pontius Pilate led an imperial procession into the city from the west. Pilate came to Jerusalem every Passover, like the Roman governors before him, to maintain order and display imperial power. His procession was a show of force — soldiers, horses, the visual language of empire.
Jesus's procession was the deliberate counter-image. A man on a donkey, surrounded by the poor and the oppressed. The kingdom of God versus the kingdom of Caesar. Two processions entering the same city, representing two fundamentally different visions of how the world should work.
Pilate's procession embodied the power, glory, and violence of the empire that ruled the world. Jesus's procession embodied an alternative vision, the kingdom of God.
And keep in mind: the Gospels weren't written until around 70 CE, right around the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple. The authors were writing with the benefit of hindsight, in a moment when the cry of "God, save us" from Roman oppression had taken on an entirely new urgency.
The Domination System
Borg and Crossan use a term you may not have heard much: the domination system. It's their shorthand for the most common form of social organization throughout history, one that carries over through three main features: political oppression, economic exploitation, and religious legitimation.
That last one is the key that unlocks this whole thing. The system doesn't just oppress people through politics and economics. It uses religion to justify it. It uses worship, outward appearance, and institutional authority to coerce people into accepting their own exploitation.
Sound familiar? It should. We're watching it happen right now. Christian nationalism isn't a new invention. It's the same mechanism the Pharisees and the temple authorities used two thousand years ago, wielding religion as a tool of power rather than a pathway to justice.
Jesus's First Sermon Was a Political Statement
In Luke 4, Jesus comes back from the desert after being tempted by Satan. He returns to Nazareth, enters the synagogue, picks up the scroll, and reads from Isaiah 61: God anointed him "to preach good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, and to set at liberty those who are oppressed."
That's his first sermon. Not a message about getting into heaven. A declaration of liberation for the oppressed. And those verses from Isaiah refer to the Year of Jubilee, the tradition where every fifty years, debts are forgiven, prisoners and slaves are released, and God's mercy becomes manifest.
When Jesus finishes reading, he tells those gathered: "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." And at first, they love it. Everyone speaks well of him.
But then he pivots. He starts talking about Elijah and Elisha, prophets who cared for the oppressed, and specifically for people who were not Jewish. The crowd turns wrathful. They try to throw him off a cliff. Because he just challenged their exclusive access to God and their position of authority.
This pattern repeats throughout his ministry. Jesus returns again and again to preaching liberation for the oppressed, calling out religious leaders who exploit others, and proclaiming a vision of equality that threatened everyone who benefited from the existing system.
Following the Prophets
Jesus wasn't operating in a vacuum. He was following in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets — Jeremiah, Daniel, Micah, Isaiah — who, when they saw political oppression, economic exploitation, or religious legitimation, called it out.
Isaiah 10: "Woe to you who make unjust laws, who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless."
When Jesus cleansed the temple, he quoted both Isaiah and Jeremiah, calling those exploiting others in the temple "robbers" and declaring that God's house should be a house of prayer for all nations. In Jeremiah 7, God tells the prophet: if you truly execute justice with one another, if you do not oppress the alien, the fatherless, or the widow, then I will let you dwell in this place. If you do these things.
The conditional matters. The prophets, and Jesus after them, never separated worship from justice. You can't claim to follow God while exploiting the people God told you to protect.
Love Your Enemies, Expect Nothing in Return
After the Beatitudes in Luke 6, Jesus delivers a passage that should make every prosperity gospel preacher and every performatively charitable politician deeply uncomfortable.
"If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? But love your enemies and do good and lend, expecting nothing in return."
Not for reputation. Not for tax breaks. Not for photo ops. Not so you can post about it on social media and collect praise. Because God wants you to. Out of love. Period.
And then the part that Luke includes that Matthew doesn't: the woes. After the Beatitudes come the warnings. Woe to you who are rich. Woe to you who are full now. Woe to you who laugh now. Woe to you when all people speak well of you. Luke doesn't let you sit comfortably with blessings without confronting what comes next.
He Was Killed by the State
Howard Thurman, in Jesus and the Disinherited, points out that Jesus was not a Roman citizen. He did not have the protections of citizenship. He had no legal recourse with Rome. His social position was that of a subject, not a citizen. Thurman argues that Christianity, as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher, began as a technique of survival for the oppressed. But over the decades and centuries, it became a weapon of the powerful who wielded it to suppress the populace.
Dick Gregory put it more bluntly: Jesus was killed by the state.
That's not something you can argue with if you look at the history honestly. To the Romans and to the Pharisees, Jesus was a terrorist. He was a threat. He may not have been out there enacting political violence, but they feared what he represented, that he could raise people up, that his vision of equality and justice could overturn their system. He was killed because of what he preached: a message of equality and equity, not just salvation.
We think about Jesus not only in a spiritual sense, as God's son, but also as a revolutionary, a resistance figure. The Romans and those in Jerusalem who accompanied them would have called him a terrorist because he challenged their power.
The Contradiction We're Living
Benjamin Cramer put it perfectly: during this Holy Week in America, many will sit through services and get tearful at all the injustices that happened to Jesus, thinking "how could they do that to him?" — all while supporting those same kind of injustices politically towards others and not seeing a single contradiction.
How we treat others is how we would treat Jesus. That's not a liberal interpretation. That's what he said.
What This Week Should Be
Holy Week isn't just about the resurrection on Sunday morning. It's about everything that happens between Palm Sunday and Easter — the confrontation, the cleansing of the temple, the betrayal, the trial, the execution by the state of a man who preached that the poor should be lifted up, debts should be forgiven, the oppressed should be set free, and the powerful should be held accountable.
If that message makes you uncomfortable, it's worth asking yourself why.
We'd really recommend picking up The Last Week by Borg and Crossan. Read it during Holy Week. They walk through each day, what happened, what it meant in its historical context, and why it still matters. Also pick up Howard Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited — it's short, it's powerful, and it will change how you think about what Christianity was supposed to be.
And follow Diana Butler Bass on whatever social media you're on. She's been writing about this for years and doing it well.
This is the week. Pay attention to what's actually in the text. And then look around at the world we're living in and ask yourself whether we're on the side of the procession from the east or the one from the west.