The Politics of the Passion

This year Holy Week falls alongside  Passover and the cycle of readings falls on Luke's Gospel, so on Sunday we had Luke's version of the Passion. Every year at Easter something new strikes me and as it happens I've been teaching about revolutionary journees and the status and nature of the event so this year Luke's historian's understanding of politics drew my attention. Luke does a great job of illustrating how everything gets out of hand very quickly for everyone. From Peter's point of view and that of the other disciples the rush of events is overwhelming. There you are on Thursday night at a seder with your friends and by Friday afternoon your best friend is being crucified. So of course you lie about your relationship to him as events are unfolding. At no point could any reasonable person think that this is going to end with a judicial murder, and this way you get to hang about and see what is going on, until it has gone so far that nothing you do makes any difference. Herod and Pilate do what good politicians do when all the options are bad. They have a huge public order problem so they play for time and when they have no other option they embrace the lesser evil, killing an innocent man, to avoid the greater of a revolt. Luke, it appears, was Greek and so he has less insight into the motivations of Judas or the Temple priests, but it doesn't take that much of an effort of the imagination to see Judas the Sicarii trying to provoke Jesus to act like a true Messiah and restore the Kingdom, or the priests desperate to sustain the Temple worship in a very difficult situation. And the Temple authorities were right that the situation was unstable and potentially catastrophic. The Temple would be destroyed not that long after the Jesus incident. The grace notes, like the women allowed to stand at the foot of the cross, or Joseph of Arimethea being give permission to take the body, ring true to an event whose momentum has pushed to murder, but has now receded, leaving the participants unsure of what they have just done.

Seen through Luke's eyes there are no pantomime villains in the history. It is a true tragedy, where everyone does the best they can, at least by their own lights. However the outcomes, read in any secular way, are all disasterous. Judas's suicide is only the beginning of the appalling political consequences. Worse are the centuries of hostilities between Christians and Jews expressed in the most odious anti-semitism only latterly overcome. The Temple, Judea and the Empire eventually fall.

It seems to me even if you are not a Christian and do not see these events as a narrative of redemption Luke's account carries a telling critique of "Machiavellian" or 'Hobbesian" separation of political ethics from morality. All the acts of "saving evil"backfire. The illusion of a political cunning operating outside our understanding of what is demanded by justice is exactly that, an illusion. The acts of calculation are as disasterous for individuals as they are for the collective. Judas ends up in despair, Peter never recovers from his sense of guilt, Pilate has to give up any idea he had that he represents law. The message here is that willing it so does not make our actions good, that moral good is intrinsic. And it seems to me that a lot of the interesting political questions lie right there, where intuitions of moral imperatives meet the demands of the liberal polity.