Holy Week Shows the Power of Public Outcry

For all the powerful moments in the story of the Passion, this year I can’t help thinking about the decisive role that the public — the crowd — plays in the story. On Palm Sunday, crowds meet Jesus’ entrance to Jerusalem with cries of Hosanna, meaning “Save us!” as they cried out for deliverance from the occupying regime of the Roman Empire. But by the time Jesus is hauled before Pontius Pilate and charged with blasphemy, the crowd’s cries have changed to “Crucify him! Crucify him!” a dark mirror of its earlier role.

We must take pains here not to fall into the antisemitic trope that assigns blame for Jesus’ death to Jewish religious leaders or the Jewish people as a whole. Noting passages in the gospels (Matthew 27:20, Mark 15:11, Luke 23:5) which insist the crowd had been manipulated by local religious leaders, scholars such as Nathanael Andrade argue that this antisemitic interpretation actually reflects early Christians’ desire to avoid drawing the ire of the Roman occupation and distance themselves from the Jewish people. In reality, it is Pilate — a public official for the occupying regime of the Roman Empire — who bears the primary responsibility for condemning Jesus to death.

Reading these passages today, Jesus’ trial is a striking example of the interplay between the political power brokers who condemn Jesus to death and the crowds who cried out to Jesus days earlier for deliverance. While Pilate is responsible, he uses the crowd’s actions as cover, absolving himself of responsibility for deciding Jesus’ fate. Reading this story amid the deeply concerning judicial drama playing out in real time between the Trump administration and courts, I’m reminded of the role we all can play when we collectively act — or fail to act — in support of justice.

As I write this, the Trump administration has made it clear that it has no intention of returning Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States. Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old father of three who the U.S. admits was deported as the result of an “administrative error,” is being held in a notorious Salvadoran prison for alleged terrorists in a paid arrangement between the Trump administration and the government of El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele, who visited the White House earlier this week.

Though the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that the government should “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return, Trump has so far defied those orders, claiming that the decision of whether Abrego Garcia will be returned rests solely with Mr. Bukele, who used his White House visit to assert, with Trump’s clear approval, that he will do no such thing. This sets an alarming precedent, suggesting that the U.S. government can send someone to a prison in a foreign country without even accusing them of a crime — and the person has no recourse to our justice system for any hope of relief.

Nor, unfortunately, is Abrego Garcia’s case the only instance in which Trump is flirting with outright defiance of the courts. Last month, the administration refused to turn around planes that were taking 200 Venezuelan immigrants alleged to be gang members to the same Salvadoran prison despite a court order blocking the deportations, claiming the court could not enforce an order because the planes were over international waters. In a different case, the administration deported Rasha Alawieh, an assistant professor at Brown University and U.S. visa holder, to Lebanon despite a court order to the contrary. The administration also dragged its feet in February in releasing federal funds that courts ordered unfrozen. And the administration is currently stalling in restoring access for Associated Press reporters to the White House press pool, not giving access to AP journalists on Monday despite a court order that took effect Sunday.

Any of these cases has the potential to escalate into a full-blown constitutional crisis, especially when the executive branch flouts the rulings of the Supreme Court. Some would argue we’re already there with the Abrego Garcia case.

Yet the outcome of such a crisis will ultimately depend on whether enough people in the U.S. are paying attention and express substantial opposition to the Trump administration defiance of the courts. If we stay silent, we’re helping normalize the administration’s habit of crossing previously bright lines.

How could our public outcry, advocacy, and protest help defuse a brewing constitutional showdown and restore some confidence that the checks and balances of our system of government can be strengthened? The crowd’s actions during Holy Week and the governing authorities’ response offer some helpful clues. When Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and the people cried out to him for deliverance, the Roman authorities and the local religious authorities may have viewed that public event as a political protest, a direct challenge to their power. Their subsequent actions, which culminate in the crowd’s dramatic call to “crucify him” may well have been the logical result of political and religious leaders’ determination to remind their subjects of the price of sedition and a public cowed by their fear of a Roman crackdown. In other words, perhaps all the religious authorities had to do to stir up the crowd to call for Jesus’ death was to remind them of the brutality with which Rome frequently repressed political dissent.

This episode offers both hope and caution for our current situation, I believe. First, unlike the tariff chaos that Adam Russell Taylor wrote about last week, Trump’s immigration policies continue to poll relatively well — 49% approval, according to with  a recent poll. The danger related to Trump’s defiance of the courts is the extent to which voters who support him do not make the connection between, for example, Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s civil rights and their own civil rights, and are inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt in any conflict with the courts. This may be exacerbated by the way Trump continues to use fear and blame of a racialized other to drive support for his draconian immigration agenda, an echo of the way that leaders allied with Roman Empire “stirred up the crowd” against Jesus.

We also need to reckon the way the Trump administration is wielding its power to directly instill fear of government repression in those who oppose its agenda, including pro-Palestinian protestors, law firms, universities, and more. If we let the voice of the crowds that this administration hears be the voices like those who waved “Mass Deportation Now” signs at last year’s Republican convention and cheered racist jokes and invective at Madison Square Garden — or if we live our lives too demoralized, fearful, or complacent to take a stand — then collectively, we serve to mask Trump’s use and abuse of power. We allow him to claim that he is doing what “the people” want, much as Pilate did. At worst, we’ll continue seeing his administration point to public support for their agenda to stall, ignore, or even defy court decisions that get in its way.

Of course, the American people can make a different choice. We may not be able to change Trump’s authoritarian actions, but we can unmask them by refusing to offer them the veneer of normalcy and the popular mandate that he seeks. What I believe is ours to do in this time is to work tirelessly to fully awaken the public to the danger the administration’s current behavior poses to the checks and balances of our democracy. In refusing to normalize these actions, in finding small and large ways to refuse to give these actions even implicit consent, we can raise the temperature on Congress to do the same. By working faithfully and diligently to unmask Trump’s power to our friends, our neighbors, our family members, our fellow parishioners, and beyond, we can all help bring us closer to a tipping point of political will. If we don’t work toward that tipping point, if we don’t continue to ask ourselves Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s question, “Who is Jesus Christ for us today?” we risk becoming unwitting or even willing members of a crowd that sees an inhumane and deeply unjust miscarriage of justice, weighs its own fears and interests, and ultimately shouts “Crucify him!”