Why Do We Kill Jesus?

Questions illuminate. When they are particularly good, they cast light on all around: the asker, the asked, and any witnesses. Even if the question remains unanswered, a response becomes apparent. The most revealing responses are often found in the ways we skirt the vulnerability that certain questions provoke in us.

Jesus knew the power of good questions better than anyone. His most memorable words were often delivered with the expectation of response, drawing forth truth from the mouths of his listeners. Be it with his closest disciples or his most ruthless antagonists, Jesus used questions to establish his identity by revealing our misconceptions.

Speaking in the temple courts during the Festival of Tabernacles, he posits:

“Did not Moses give you the law? Yet none of you keeps the law. Why are you looking for an opportunity to kill me?”
The crowd answered, “You have a demon! Who is trying to kill you?”
(John 7:19–20)

Here Jesus’ ministry has reached the point where grumbling has overtaken wonder as the primary response to his miraculous presence. He has arrived at the festival in secret, knowing that the religious leaders seek his death. The stage has already been set for his eventual trial before Pilate. Yet Jesus’ confrontational tone now extends beyond the authorities to the “the crowd.” He begins questioning their intentions by asking aloud what until this point has only been discussed among the religious authorities in secret: “Why are you trying to kill me?”

In John’s Gospel, “the crowd” serves an important function. Jesus is speaking here to a gathering of festival-goers in Jerusalem’s temple courts, a diverse group, mixed in their reception of him so far. Yet the crowd must be understood as more than just another character in the story; they are a mirror reflecting us – their questions, responses, and presence stand in for humanity’s curiosity and self-protective tendencies. “Why are you trying to kill me?” should not only be read as trial-like dialogue at the tension-filled peak of a religious festival, but also as a piercing accusation revealing our own willful blindness toward our complicity in violence.

As John recounts Jesus’ words, we are drawn into these dramatic scenes as conspirators alongside the crowd – that is, if we dare stand in judgement under the severity of Jesus' question. Our identification with the crowd is necessary for Jesus’ words to disclose the condition of our hearts. Ultimately, the depth of our formation into Christlike beings is determined by the sincerity with which we ask ourselves the same question that Jesus asks the crowd: “Why are you trying to kill me?”

Why is this such a difficult question to approach? In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ questions serve two primary functions. First, they gradually elevate conversation toward a fuller understanding of his identity, moving his disciples from seeing him as just a teacher to recognizing him as the Messiah and the Son of God. Second, they create instances of irony, revealing the contents of his listeners’ hearts in dramatic fashion. Jesus’ question to the crowd at the temple serves both of these purposes – elevating and revealing – propelling his story forward toward the cross by placing the crowds' violent impulses at the center of his message.

Ivan Ilyich Glazunov, Crucify him! Crucify him! Oil on canvas, 1994. Album / Alamy Stock Photo.

This is more clearly seen when we recall Jesus’ ability to know the thoughts of those around him. Already knowing the answer to the question he asks, Jesus does not seek clarity for his own sake. His question gives others an opportunity to see within themselves what they have hidden away, or what they have failed to recognize. Confronted with a question so vulnerable in its asking, so severe in its subject, and yet so remarkably simple in its directness, no room is left for the crowd to escape their inner violence. Jesus stands as the one whose very questions bring forth encounters with reality, which our hearts may not be ready to accept but must inevitably confront.

So how can it be that we – both the crowd and modern readers – want to kill Jesus?

To arrive at a place where we can both receive this question and begin to answer it, we must first consider the crowd’s response to Jesus, a response containing our basest fears and most defensive postures: “You have a demon! Who is trying to kill you?”

Through their invalidation of Jesus, the crowd seeks to dictate the terms by which his truth encroaches upon their lives. This interaction highlights Jesus’ identity as judge. Jesus’ presence confronts our darkness, a darkness that stands in contrast with his “true light, which enlightens everyone” (John 1:9). His light-filled presence is the very means of judgement he brings; not one wielding prisons and executioners but one that makes known the unknown and makes public what is hidden.

Our addiction to violence (a sickness we time and again deny) is laid bare before Jesus’ light, which reveals all things. What Jesus’ question ultimately reveals is the methods we instinctively reach for when what is hidden is revealed by the light: we ostracize and discredit threats through scapegoating, which in this instance means accusing Jesus of demon possession.

Invoking the demonic as a defense against Jesus’ challenging actions is not unique to John’s Gospel (see Matthew 12:24 and Luke 11:15). Nor is it a particularly novel instance of human behavior. Scapegoating of this kind is ingrained within our collective story: be it the persecution of Jewish communities during periods of European crisis, the accusation of witchcraft against “suspicious” women in early America, or countless other occasions. Christian anthropologist Rene Girard has famously illuminated the role scapegoating has played throughout human history, recognizing it as a primary means by which communities have attempted to rid themselves of their collective fear, whether by identifying, blaming, or expelling people deemed responsible for these disturbances, regardless of evidence to the contrary. These blamed individuals are too often those who lack the power of the larger crowd (the poor, immigrants, minorities, etc.), making them convenient receptacles of blame.

And yet in the Gospels, Jesus becomes the scapegoat, the vessel that carries our collective fear. While usually the passive sacrifice, here the scapegoat becomes the agent of morality, exposing our failed attempts to maintain community through violence. In this exposure, Jesus refuses to take vengeance on us for our violence. This, says Girard, is what makes the Christian faith so decidedly weird, so graciously different.

While our urge to discredit accusatory voices is easy enough to recognize (especially in others), seeing ourselves in the crowd that rejected and condemned Jesus is particularly difficult. This difficulty comes in part from approaching this story from the vantage of hindsight, two millennia after its inscription. Knowing how Jesus’ story ends, we are tempted to hover above this text as mere observers of the scene’s dramatics, choosing not to engage in the crowd’s defensive instincts.

But even as we avoid identifying with the crowd, we ultimately are the crowd. Mimicking their motivations while employing modern language, our responses to Jesus’ question may very well be:

“Why would I ever need to kill anyone?”

“Living in relative peace, why would I ever resort to violence to ensure my needs will be met?”

“As a person known for my pleasant personality, how could anyone accuse me of living violently?”

“How dare you try to associate me – a well-off, educated, civilized individual – with those who harm others to get their way!”

Try as we might to distance ourselves from our ancient forebears, our modern responses do not stand in enlightened contrast with the crowd in John 7. Rather, in and through the crowd, we continue the practice of scapegoating in the name of self-preservation. And yet, just like the temple crowd, we are met by Jesus even before we’re fully mindful of our darkest tendencies. The self-aware scapegoat – Jesus Christ – chooses to redeem us from our violence rather than seek vengeance on us for it. Jesus’ death and resurrection render violent self-preservation unnecessary for our own salvation or that of humanity. In light of this peculiar grace, we must repeatedly recognize and reject tactics of scapegoating.

How, though, do we kill Jesus? We are tempted to weaken Jesus’ question as it is turned upon ourselves. We ask, “Surely he does not mean kill, kill? This must be interpreted metaphorically, since how can a present-day person kill a first-century man? How can we as citizens of a peaceable kingdom kill the one who resides at the Father’s right hand?”

As modern recipients of this ancient story, retrieving its applicability can be a genuinely difficult task. Maybe we could re-contextualize Jesus’ question so that “killing” is understood to mean “harm” or “insult”? However, the temptation we must recognize and resist lies in making these texts palatable at the cost of dismissing their more serious implications regarding actual violence. This is the violence we are implicated in even as we remain several degrees removed from the acts themselves. Giving in to this mistake blinds us not only to the killing in our immediate communities, but even more so, to the violence that happens many degrees of longitude from us.

We may believe that as religious people under the tutelage of Jesus, we are essentially nonviolent. But so long as our lifestyles allow for the existence of cruelty, we fail to escape Jesus’ charge. In fact, rather than asking if we are people capable of violence, Jesus’ question presupposes our inherently violent hearts. The responsibility of killing is not limited to those pulling the trigger or injecting the lethal dosage or working impoverished laborers to death. It’s spread across a society that sheepishly allows the severing of human communities through racism, poverty, and militarism (Martin Luther King’s three societal evils) for the sake of comfort, affluence, and protection.

The task before us is not to re-contextualize biblical texts for the sake of modern accessibility. Rather, the challenge is to read these timeless texts freshly and honestly, which here in John 7 means accepting the crowd as the mirror which reveals how and where our apathy has blinded us to the world’s violence and our own.

But is it really Jesus who we kill when we unknowingly (or knowingly) benefit from violence imposed upon others? If we take seriously Jesus’ presence in and not merely his identification with the hungry, thirsty, stranger, unclothed, and imprisoned (Matt. 25:35-36), then the answer is a resounding yes. The groups listed above are the very people so often cast in the role of scapegoat by whatever form “the crowd” takes in our societies.

Knowing Jesus’ denial of earthly power and his companionship among the scapegoated, we can say that the forces that continuously crush the lowly also kill Jesus when they snuff out human lives to justify their world-making campaigns. Any attempt to answer Jesus’ question that distances his person from our human flesh fails not only to recognize the nature of Christ’s presence in the world but also the threat of violence that weaves itself throughout scriptural and human history. Although we’d rather not recognize this reality, our detachment does not alter the fact people who recently inhabited our communities as neighbors are detained in camps and foreign prisons. And by God’s grace, neither is it any less factual that Jesus locates himself in these instances of violence as much as he does at the Father’s right hand, regardless of our indifference.

As disciples responding to Jesus’ question in John 7, it’s on us to resist softening the charge of killing while expanding the scope of who Jesus is in the world. Doing so holds together the realities of our complicity in violence and of Christ’s suffering presence among the scapegoated. As with the crowd, our pleas of ignorance shrivel under the purifying light of Jesus’ judgement.

While the crowd’s reaction demands our attention, we are not doomed to mimic their response. The hindsight that initially hinders us from identifying with them in this story also enables us to realize our new life within Jesus’ death and resurrection. We may now receive judgement as the mercy of Jesus’ incarnate love. And yet our duty extends beyond mere recognition. God’s mercy refuses to breed passive neutrality toward the ways Jesus is continuously killed in neighborhoods across the world.

Enveloped in the illusion of nonviolence, opening our eyes to the world as it is (and not as we have conveniently contrived it to be) may suddenly overwhelm our senses. This is the result of willful blindness over time. Yet our transformation into Christlikeness requires us to open our eyes and receive the terrible, merciful light that Jesus offers. Fredrick Buechner hauntingly notes in his collection Secret in the Dark, “If there is a terror about darkness because we cannot see, there is also a terror about light because we can see. There is a terror about light because much of what we see in the light about ourselves and about our world we would rather not see.”

In and through Jesus, our blindness to schemes of violence is exchanged for the blinding light of his judgement. The latter blindness, however, does not permanently immobilize us. No, it passes, making clear the presence of Christ against the backdrop of our violent world.