In part, the Easter story is one of victory over tyrants
National Post, 20 April 2025
The scriptures' chronicling of the resurrection of Jesus Christ gives hope to a world where inflated bullies continue to wreak havoc on those within their grip
At Passover — observed this week — divine liberation from a fearsome tyrant is solemnly remembered. The Pharaoh of ancient Egypt presided over a dominant imperial power. Deliverance for an enslaved people was miraculous.
Christians mark on Easter Sunday the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. He “was crucified under Pontius Pilate” — as the Christian creeds put it — and Pilate was the local governor of the expansive world empire of the day, Rome. The Christian understanding of history emphasizes that the central events of salvation took place in a Jerusalem occupied by imperial Rome.
At that time, at that place, a providential intersection fell. Jerusalem, the royal capital of the Chosen People; from there the elect nation was charged with carrying the name of the Lord God to all peoples. Rome’s worldly power provided the juxtaposition, the might of the world against the light of the nations.
How could the Jewish people, relatively tiny then as now, fulfill the promise made to Abraham? The Christian drama of the crucifixion and resurrection takes place within the Jewish story; at the Last Supper, Jesus eats the Passover with the apostles. The Roman empire provided the highways and byways by which, in time, those same apostles preached the Christian faith, including in Rome itself, where St. Peter and St. Paul were martyred.
As the Lord God used the obstinate despotism of Pharaoh for divine purposes during the Exodus, so, too, did the reach of Rome serve, contrary to expectation, to accomplish the redemption of the whole world — and then to carry that gift of salvation to the ends of the Earth.
For the past several years, Christians the world over have been transfixed by the historical drama, The Chosen, a crowdfunded sensation that chronicles the life of Jesus. Faithful to the scriptures, its creative genius lies in developing the backstories of many of the characters about which the bible is largely silent. Its fifth season, entitled “The Last Supper,” presents Holy Week, from the triumphal Palm Sunday entrance into Jerusalem to the arrest of Jesus on Thursday evening. Filmed last summer, it’s showing in theatres now, and scheduled for streaming in a few months.
The central figure is Jesus, but what He said and did during those sacred days is well known. What fascinates is the development of the other characters, whose names live on in perpetual memory, but of whom holy writ tells us little.
In the telling of The Chosen, Holy Week is also the time of the tyrants. These are not world historical tyrants. They are inflated bullies, small men of mean ambition, who take their part in that first passion play, the drama of life and death and life again in the world’s spiritual capital.
This season opens with the high priest Caiaphas summoned to the palace of Pontius Pilate. The Romans have confiscated the vestments needed by the high priest for Passover, and they keep custody of them so as to humiliate the high priest, forcing him to supplicate for them when needed. The pettiness of Pilate is manifest. His servants have prepared a table groaning with shrimp and oysters, which he offers to Caiaphas, knowing that they are not kosher. When Pilate’s wife is embarrassed by his rudeness, he retorts that he has pork being prepared, too.
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