Crucify Him!

For nearly two thousand years, Christians blamed the Jews for the crucifiction of Jesus Christ. Here was our Lord and Savior, bruised and broken before the people, an innocent man, and the crowd cried out, "Crucify Him!" It must have been hard for people to believe that people could make such cavalier descisions about a man's life without first wanting to hear the evidence, without first considering the man's innocense, without first asking why the man had to die at all. Therefore, without a trial, we convicted the Jews, blamed them for killing Jesus, and condemned them to hatred and cruelty, torture and indifference, racism and genocide. It was only after the corpses of so many dead finally piled up at our feet that we realized what our blind disregard for fact had wrought. The death of one innocent man had not satiated our thirst, it had only made our desire grow that much more.

There is something to be said about the human desire to destroy. In our own lives, individually, we do things that only tear us down. We lie. We cheat. We steal. We know what is good, and we do evil anyway. We fight against this desire. We struggle against the chaos that threatens to overwhelm us. We search for help. We seek understanding and acceptance for the things we've done. But in the end, the human desire will find others that believe in the notion of safety in numbers - it must not be wrong if so many people are doing it. We find ourselves falling lock step in line with them, with their thinking, with their actions. If They say that this man is guilty, then by God, he must be guilty. And guilty people deserve to be punished. We must, for the good of all, Crucify Him!

I'd like to say that we've learned something in the last 2000 years. I'd like to say that since the evidence has shown and continues to show that this mob mentality is never a good thing, we have abandoned this destructive behavior. But the evidence is overwhelmingly against us as having done any form of evolving. If anything, with the reach of telecommunications and the internet into our lives, we have grown worse. We can now instantly attract a mob the second there is blood in the water and sway opinions far faster than evidence can even be gathered. We have become much more vindictive, much more destructive, much more likely to cry out, "Crucify Him!"

So as we commemorate that day, nearly 2000 years ago, where our Lord and Savior fulfilled His love for us by succumbing to our worst collective behavior, let us think on all those people we crucify in our own lives - that we convict without evidence and take pleasure in their demise - from the guy who cuts us off on the freeway to the man who may, or may not, have faked the evidence to send our country to war. If we circumvent justice, or by our very actions cause the circumventation of justice, then we are guilty. And Lord knows, when our time for Judgment comes, we are all going to want the chance to plead our case before a sympathetic jury.