the anarchy of Jesus' trial
Jesus is a genius for "answering" pilate's question with "you say so"
This is a revised version of an essay I originally wrote for the “abolishing the state in a cool christian way” podcast. Enjoy. :)
photo by Sandra Dempsey on Unsplash
Jesus sparks a peculiar revolution. He organizes the common people into a movement that begins to live according to communal practices that make the state obsolete.
When we arrive at holy week, we come to a moment in which the anarchic principles of Jesus’ movement are fully extended and demonstrated.
Jesus is brought before the judean aristocratic political puppets—the high priest and the sanhedrin, the council of elders. And they bring a religious charge against him. The charge of blasphemy.
But they know that the charge of blasphemy is not going to move Pilate at all. They know he doesn’t care about the insider issues of judean religion.
So when they bring Jesus before Pilate, it’s not on religious charges, it’s on the political charge of treason.
Luke fills in some important dialogue that Mark and Matthew leave out:
Then the sanhedrin rose as a body and brought Jesus before Pilate. They began to accuse him, saying, ‘We found this man perverting our nation, forbidding us to pay taxes to the emperor, and saying that he himself is the Messiah, a king.’
They’re now charging Jesus with sedition and subversion, which to be fair, he was absolutely guilty of:
Jesus absolutely did pervert their nation, if you take the “nation” to be what they took it to be, which was the national accommodation of roman oppression which the judean bourgeoisie participated in and benefitted from.
Jesus absolutely did forbid the people to pay taxes to the emperor. The people understood that when Jesus said “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s,” he was saying that within the indisputably traditional jewish belief that all things belong to God (and that which belongs to Caesar is only the distortion of God’s good gifts into the stuff of coercion and violence).
Jesus absolutely did claim to be not just a messiah but the messiah, which everyone understood to mean the anointed one who sparks the people’s liberation from colonization and oppression.
Pilate listens to these charges against Jesus, and then he turns to Jesus, and he’s like, “this you, bro?”
And Jesus says the most brilliant three words in response to Pilate. He opens his mouth and says three words that are so big brain.
He says to Pilate, “you say so.”
You say so.
I have nothing to say to you. Say whatever you want to say. Call me whatever you want to call me. It makes no difference to me. This movement is unintelligible to your worldview and impenetrable to your opinion. No aspect of who I am—who we are—can fit within your categories. Under these circumstances there can be no actual conversation and no real exchange between us. So I’m just going to bounce your words back to you.
“Are you the king of the Jews?”
Those are the words that just came out of your mouth, yes. Am I going to confirm or deny them for you? No. this isn’t about you at all. Your perception of me, your interpretation of this movement, is irrelevant to us.
See, the thing is, Pilate has no category for a revolution that is not addressed to Rome. He has no framework for a movement whose tactics are organization of the people and obsolescence of the state, rather than attack against the state and attempted seizure of its monopoly on coercion and violence.
So because Pilate has no category to put Jesus in, he concludes that he’s not a threat. He says to the chief priests and the crowds, ‘I find no basis for an accusation against this man.’
This is a key political insight from Jesus’ trial: the state cannot fully acknowledge, comprehend, or respond to an anarchic movement because the principles of anarchism are unintelligible to the state. The state simply cannot conceive of a movement that:
is decentralized
rejects all of the logic of the state, including violence and coercion
truly believes in human goodness and agency, thus believing that the people can truly cooperate to meet each other’s needs on their own, which is what allows it to actually operate as if the state (and its logic and axioms) are obsolete.
The state cannot acknowledge such a movement because to do so is to lay out its own ethical and pragmatic bankruptcy. The state cannot acknowledge the “clothing” of the movement because to do is to reveal its own nakedness. The state cannot spell out anarchism without laying out the code to its own demise.
So, because Pilate, completely beholden to the alphabet and grammar of empire, is entirely incapable of spelling out the anarchism of Jesus, he puts Jesus into the category of “not a threat.”
And when the people cry over and over for him to pronounce Jesus guilty anyway, he tries to offload Jesus to Herod. He’s like “where’s this dude from?” and someone’s like “galilee I think,” and Pilate’s like “oh whoops, not my jurisdiction, not my problem anymore.”
He sends Jesus off to Herod. Herod’s excited to grill Jesus and maybe see a miracle or two. Jesus says nothing in response to his questions because again, he’s about the people, and none of the people are present.
Herod, like Pilate, is unable to perceive Jesus for the threat that he truly is. All he knows is there’s this guy who everyone’s talking about, and this guy is disrespecting him by refusing to cooperate with his investigation. He’s like, “I’m not going to crucify him—that’s reserved for rebels whom we know to be directing their rebellion at Rome, and that’s not what this guy is doing. But because I’m annoyed at his noncooperation, I am going to mock him and then send him back to Pilate.”
So he gets back to Pilate, and Pilate says “once again y’all, I don’t really see this dude the way y’all are presenting him. He’s not striking me as one of y’alls’ typical revolutionaries. Nothing that he’s doing is fitting into the category as we’ve defined it. So how about this? I’m going to whoop his ass and then let him go. Will that get y’all out of my chambers? Whatever little jewish beef y’all have with him is probably not going to be an issue anyway after I reduce him to a bloody pulp.”
And they’re like “no, bro, I promise you, this dude is bad news. Let us make it clear to you the best way we know how: we would rather have Barabbas—a known insurrectionist who has straight up killed some of your cops—than Jesus. And since this is the time of the year when by custom you release a political prisoner to us, why don’t we go ahead and make that switcheroo right now.”
So Pilate, still not understanding Jesus or his movement, but understanding the gist of what the people are saying, grants their wish, and hands him over to be crucified.
Now, if you’re like me, you might be thinking, “ok, I get why the judean bourgeoisie would want Jesus out of there, but why are the common people part of this? Why are they not only participating in, but actively calling for, the most well-known tool of roman terrorism, which has been used endlessly against their very recent ancestors and possibly even friends and family? Why are the subjected, oppressed people themselves yelling out “crucify him?”
It reminds me of poor white people becoming neo-nazis, or marcus garvey praising the KKK. The oppressed always face, and sometimes give into, the temptation of adopting the logic and tools of the oppressor in their efforts to survive.
For these people, as soon as it became clear that Jesus wasn’t going to use violence or domination to liberate them from the crucifiers, they decided that he should be crucified. But did it really make sense to be mad at Jesus for not attempting to use the tools of oppression for the purpose of liberation? Does it really make sense to want to be liberated from crucifiers and yet be willing to call for crucifixion?
I have compassion for this. I know we’ve been trained to use the logic of the state to respond to our problems. I know it’s hard to affirm a different way of life when our emotional resources are depleted by intense experiences of harm.
Maybe there is no other way. Maybe this is all there is.
Crucify him. And give us back the dude who at least fought for us.
The people, in their inability to conceive of a decentralized nonviolent revolution, end up not merely participating in, but in fact ensuring the torture and execution of the person who embodies their only way to actually get the freedom they so desperately want.
With compassion we can understand their actions. And with wonder we can appreciate the times when deeply harmed people refuse to respond to oppression in harmful ways that do not and cannot meet their genuine needs.
It is a wonder when oppressed people respond to the ineptitude of the state by building autonomous systems for meeting each other’s needs. It is a wonder when people find a way to direct their energy and attention towards supporting each other rather than letting their oppressors set their agenda.
Jesus refuses to let his oppressors influence his tactics or ethics. In fact, Jesus not only rejects the logic of the state but he goes so far as to not even legitimize the state by responding to its inquiries, other than by repeating their question in the form of a statement. His noncooperation extends to the point of the complete disrespect expressed through utter nonrecognition.
Why? Because we don’t need to defeat rulers in order to defeat rulership. We can obsolesce rulership through utter solidarity with the people and utter disregard for the state.