The Passion plays of Medieval Europe blamed Jews for the death of Jesus, and
after viewing them, as we know, Christians slaughtered Jews by the thousands.
This is a stain on Christian history and on our hearts.

But if the Jewish authorities were not responsible for Jesus’s death, then
who was? And why? What was it all for? Why the torture, the beating, the
cross?

Why did Jesus die?

Knowing that there are many theories of atonement, as theologians say, I
want to take a look at one in particular: I want to look at Jesus’s life to
shed light on why he died.

Jesus lived in occupied territory. Israel, Jerusalem, the Galilee were
colonized by the great Roman Empire: builder of aqueducts, commander of the
largest and most efficient army in the world, and inventor of that peculiar
form of execution, one they saved for dangerous political terrorists,
persons who were threats to the empire itself, charismatic leaders who
attracted followers–crucifixion, the cross.

Scholars have studied Jesus’s relation to Rome and, for them, neither the
term political activist nor personal savior quite cuts it, but rather
something or someone in between.

This ground is delicate: These days, we often make Jesus into only a
personal savior. I don’t want to swing all the way the other way and make
him into a political revolutionary. That limits him, too. But to remove
Jesus from his political and historic reality is to deny him and us, his
full story.

Trying to understand Jesus without knowing how Roman imperialism determined
the conditions of life in Galilee and Jerusalem would be like trying to
understand Martin Luther King, as historian Richard Horsley has said,
without knowing how slavery, reconstruction and segregation determined the
lives of African Americans in the United States.

Jesus grew up under the heel of an empire. And he saw, all around him, its
cost.

How does this speak to us, today? We know from his life that Jesus chose not
to identify with those with power. There are no gospel stories about Jesus
having drinks at the private clubs of Antipas or Herod.

We are all, every one of us, interested in having power. Some power is good:
the power to speak, the power to live out your vocation, whatever it is. We
speak of empowerment, calling out of others their own strength and
creativity. But we also know, as the old adage says, that power corrupts.
Even in the smallest ways, power can corrupt the work of love.

Many of us have been in the position of either the giving or on the
receiving end of the corruption of power. We see it in the many CEO’s who,
last year and this, have confessed to lying, cheating and stealing. Power
unabated can become demonic: witness Stalin, Hitler, Rwanda. And, I think,
we have all, at one time or another, collaborated in the abuse of power,
small and large.

I, like just about everyone else in America, want to
identify myself with those who have more, not with those who have less. I give to the poor; I taught in a homeless shelter,
but I don’t identify with Them. The people I cozy up to are the
one’s with the power.

Jesus, too, faced choices between power and vulnerability. He was a man who
over the short stretch of his life came into contact with power over and
over again. He made choices. Jesus took a blind man by the hand and
restored his sight. He fed a crowd with loaves and fish. He did not even
exclude persons who were collaborators with the empire: i.e. the
tax-collector, Matthew. He bound himself to those in need.

His parables are as clear as water in regard to power: Don’t be absorbed in
who is sitting at the head of the table. The last shall be first. The meek
will inherit the earth.

Before this Lent, I took these stories as difficult
admonitions, slightly accusatory reminders of how I should always remember
those on the margins. But what I have come to understand is that
Jesus meant to say these things to himself, as much as to me.

He said these
things to himself because he understood that choosing the vulnerable path
was the way to keep his soul alive, and protected, from the harsh realities
of power. He sought out the vulnerable because they helped keep him
vulnerable. And he finally came to identify with them.

I came to understand this because of the work I did in a soup kitchen a few years ago.
I wandered among the homeless and the vulnerable and discovered a kind of crazy freedom with them: none of my pretensions were useful there, but if my heart was available, then we got somewhere.

This vulnerability led him, finally, inexorably, to the cross. To the place where power
and vulnerability intersect or, more accurately, collide. The cross stood
at the end of a long series of choices. Like Rosa Parks who finally sat
down at the front of a bus, like Martin Luther King, Jesus did not suddenly
make a choice between power and vulnerability. He put his foot on a path,
and years later he looked back and saw where that path had led him.

When it comes right down to it, Jesus followed where compassion led him, and
he bore the cost of what he found. Jesus asks us to follow where compassion
leads, and bear the cost of what we find.

He calls us, as Nicholas Cage says in the movie Moonstruck, “to ruin our
lives, to break our hearts, to love the wrong person and to die.” We are
invited to ruin the old life of silence, to break our hearts with compassion
over suffering, to love the wrong person–that would be Jesus–and to die. As
a friend of mine said once, “ to get resurrected ya gotta get dead.” Because
we know, from Jesus’s example, and from our own lives, what lies on the
other side of this death.

The other side of silence and distraction, of the
deadly life of business as usual, is new life, resurrected life, born of
compassion -- awake and broken-hearted, and, yes, dangerous.

Nora Gallagher is the author of two memoirs, "Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith" and "Practicing Resurrection," both published by Knopf and Vintage Books. Her first novel, "Changing Light," was just published by Pantheon Books.