Good Friday: The Empire Always Crucifies
RESIST: A HOLY WEEK SERIES
The Empire Always Crucifies
GOOD FRIDAY
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The cross was not a religious symbol.
Not at first. It was an execution method — specifically designed by Rome to be maximally painful, maximally public, and maximally humiliating. Crucifixion was reserved for the worst criminals, runaway slaves, and political dissidents. People who threatened the order. People who needed to be made into an example.
Jesus was crucified as a political prisoner.
The charge posted above his head — King of the Jews — was Rome's official reason for the execution. It was a mockery, yes. But it was also a statement: this is what happens to people who claim a kingdom that isn't Caesar's. This is what we do with movements that threaten the established order. We make them watch their leader die in public, slowly, in front of everyone who loved him. And then it's over.
Empires crucify. That's what they do. They use state power, legal systems, and public spectacle to eliminate threats to the existing arrangement. They dress it up in law and order. They find religious authorities to co-sign it. They get crowds to cheer.
This is not ancient history. The mechanism is the same. The coalitions are the same. The use of religious legitimacy to bless state violence is the same.
What Resist takes seriously is this: the cross is not just a symbol of personal salvation. It is a record of what happens when the kingdom of God collides with the kingdoms of this world, and the kingdoms of this world fight back. Jesus was not killed because of bad theology. He was killed because of what he was building — and who it threatened.
Good Friday is not the day to look away from that.
It is the day to name it clearly: empire kills. Systems built on domination, exclusion, and the concentration of power will use every tool available — legal, military, religious — to protect themselves from the thing Jesus was doing.
And he kept doing it anyway. All the way to the end.
That's not defeat. That's witness.
Reflection: Where do you see the logic of empire — power protecting itself through force and fear — operating in your own context today?
