The Prayer that Got Jesus Crucified

Similar to the phenomenon of “lynchings” in the modern era, public crucifixions in the Roman empire were intended to strike terror in the hearts of those under Rome’s imperial heel. The Roman historian Quintilian (c.35 -- c.100) observed: “Whenever we crucify the guilty, the most crowded roads are chosen, where the most people can see and be moved by this fear. For penalties relate not so much to retribution as to their exemplary effect.”

Under Roman law crucifixion was typically reserved for insurrectionists and seditionists to deter future uprisings. One of the foremost examples of crucifixion as a tool of public terror is seen in the aftermath of the Spartacus slave uprising in 71 BC. Some 6,000 insurrectionists were crucified along the 120-mile long Appian Way on crosses spaced 100 yards apart, turning it into a dramatic miles-long corridor of terror on which some of the poor crucified souls lived for days in excruciating torture before breathing their last. But crucifixion was not only reserved for major uprisings. It was the punishment for any perceived public acts of defiance to imperial rule.

The Lord’s Prayer is probably the biblical passage most often recited by Christians. Children recite it at bedtime, folks recite it at moments of fear and distress, and it is recited at almost every kind of Christian worship or social gathering. But few realize that what they are intoning arguably encompasses some of the most radical proclamations in the Bible, if not in all of late antiquity. It is usually recited by rote, with little thought to its context or holistic meaning, which is why few folks today have any notion that when Jesus taught the prayer it contained sentiments that Roman law considered seditious, sentiments that constituted a crime punishable by death on a cross.

The scripture tells us that his disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray. But upon reflection it is clear that they weren’t actually asking him how to pray, for prayer had long been an integral part of Jewish life. The thrice-daily prayers enjoined in Daniel 6:10, the midafternoon prayer coinciding with the afternoon Temple sacrifice, table blessings and recitation of the Psalms – without question, the disciples knew how to pray. What they were asking was what they should pray for. What should be the focus of their spiritual ministrations? What should they ask God to help them accomplish?

Jesus’ response began in politically dangerous territory with his instruction to petition the God of Israel to pray that God would “hallow (or sanctify)” God’s own name, when it was a known transgression of Roman civil law to venerate any name above the emperor’s. But there was an additional dangerous dimension of his directive. For Jews the name of God was already sanctified and holy. So why would Jesus tell his disciples to pray for God to become what they believed God already was? What he was telling them was not to ask that God become holy, which would make no sense, but rather that God manifest or demonstrate that holiness. In the Bible, God’s holiness is often coupled with God as judge, vanquisher of injustice and deliverer from oppression, as in Leviticus 22:32-33: “You shall not profane my holy name, that I may be sanctified among the people of Israel: I am the Lord; I sanctify you, I who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God.” In other words, what Jesus instructed them to pray was something like this: “Our father in heaven, demonstrate your holiness by manifesting your justice,” against Roman oppression of their people.

But the prayer’s strongest, most dangerous words came next. They call on God to manifest the divine justice that is characteristic of God’s holy name by replacing the apparatus of the Roman imperial state with the Kingdom of the God of Israel and its dictates: “Let your kingdom come, let your will be done.” The manifestation of God’s holiness, the coming of God’s kingdom and the quest for God’s loving will to be recognized as sovereign ultimately mean the same: that Caesar’s kingdom must go and with it, Caesar’s laws and dictates. By any measure, those sentiments represent the very definition of insurrection.

Most commentators see Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion as a consequence of his actions in Jerusalem during the final week of his life, especially his public disruption of commerce in the Jerusalem Temple (Mark 11), during which he and his band of followers routed the Temple moneychangers and prohibited all movement across the temple grounds with at least the threat of violence, if not by violence outright (the text doesn’t make clear how he managed to keep the moneychangers at bay and control the 33 acres of the temple grounds). Because the High Priest and the Sanhedrin governance body derived their limited civil authority from their Roman overlords, Jesus’ fiery public defiance of the priests’ power simultaneously constituted insurrection against the Roman authorities, who buttressed their control by maintaining military headquarters directly adjacent to the Temple. Thus, in addition to his contesting the power of the priestly aristocracy, Jesus’ Temple disruption offered an insulting public challenge to Rome’s imperial authority that had to be rectified by that dread public spectacle.

So, no, the occasion of Jesus’ prayer instructions to his disciples was not the immediate, direct cause of Jesus’ crucifixion. But the sentiments Jesus espoused were. Anchored as they are in prayerful relationship with God (“Our father in heaven”), the principles expressed in the prayer were the animating factor of Jesus and his mission. They were what moved his disciples to accompany him to what they knew would be a dangerous public confrontation with Jerusalem’s powers that be. They were what brought folks to welcome him with palm fronds and hosannas, and that undoubtedly inspired some to join him in his routing of the Temple. Each and all were encouraged by the principles of that momentous prayer, so momentous that we still intone it two thousand years later. Its conviction that the willingness to defy unjust power and expose its workings was God-sanctioned fired their seditious fervor. Its teaching that pressing social problems like poverty, onerous debt and inadequate food should be treated as divine concerns shaped a moral social witness with which they would eventually challenge unjust powers of every stripe and change the world. They knew that they could pay a heavy price for their actions; the articulator of their moral witness had been tortured to death. Still, they and those who came after persevered. Empires and unjust rulers rose and fell, yet believers’ fealty to the principles laid down by that consequential prayer continued to shape the world. Empires usurped and weaponized their message, yet the righteousness of its proclamation always managed to somehow bring unjust regimes to their knees.

If Jesus was here today the same unjust forces that nailed him to a cross for challenging their legitimacy would do it again. For he would be among the most vigorous and uncompromising figures to preach and remonstrate against the evil machinations of this nation’s ruling regime. The Jesus we know would go right to their precincts of worldly might and denounce them for turning America’s temples of power into the corrupt dens of robbers, corporate thieves, jailers of the innocent and murderers of their fellow citizens. He would angrily denounce their weaponizing of his words to justify their genocide in Gaza and their vicious mistreatment of immigrant strangers at home. And they would jail him, beat him, shoot him down as an enemy of the state. This we know for sure. But we also know that he would rise again, if not in body, certainly in the moral witness and activism of his sincere followers. It is up to us, to we who profess to follow him, it is up to us to struggle against this regime of evil as if the courageous Jesus stands shoulder to shoulder amongst us; it is up to us to battle to transform the remnants of our democracy from the den of robbers it is into the stronghold of justice and love it must become. It is up to us to remember the prayer Jesus taught with its radical defiance against the depredations of oppressive rule. If that prayer means anything today, it means that we must fight with all our might against the blasphemous depredations of this president’s malign quest to rule rather than to serve, to lord over this nation as if it is his imperial right to decide who lives and who dies, who is free and who is not. If the prayer has any significant meaning for us today, it must be as both entreaty and command for us to bring this walking embodiment of the Seven Venal Sins and his entire malevolent cohort to their knees, if not in repentance, then in defeat.