The Stones Still Cry Out: Holy Week’s Political Reckoning

By Guest Author David Gornoski

The Stones Still Cry Out: Holy Week’s Political Reckoning

By Guest Author David Gornoski

Holy Week is no mere ritual rehearsal for Christians; it’s a political dynamite keg, detonating the myth of human order built on blood. Jesus’ trial, crucifixion, and resurrection expose the scaffolding of power—then and now—as a rickety structure held together by scapegoats and silenced victims. As we navigate our fractured polis in 2025, the Passion narrative demands we confront the same temptations: to cheer for Barabbas, to wash our hands with Pilate, or to abandon the One who reveals the stones crying out for justice.

The Gospels unravel the political with surgical precision. Jesus enters Jerusalem to Hosannas, a king on a donkey, mocking the pomp of empire. Days later, the crowd—fickle as any mob—trades him for Barabbas, a man whose name in the earliest texts is Jesus Barabbas, a violent revolutionary mirroring the establishment’s own brutality. The symmetry is no accident. Barabbas represents the allure of might-makes-right, the seductive promise of force to bind us against a villain. Sound familiar? Our politics thrives on this old magic trick: rally the crowd against a demonized other—be it a marginalized group or a foreign foe in some proxy war. Yet the cross exposes this as a lie. The knowledge of the Lord, as Habakkuk 2 foretold, fills the earth like water, not through conquest but through the slain Lamb who unmasks the guilt we project onto scapegoats.

Habakkuk’s warning haunts Jesus’ words. The prophet condemns cities founded on bloodshed, their walls built with “unjust gain” (Hab. 2:12). In ancient practice, this wasn’t metaphor—immurement, the ritual sacrifice of victims sealed in foundations, was the cornerstone of many societies. Jesus alludes to this when he predicts the stones will cry out if the crowd falls silent (Luke 19:40). And silent they became, abandoning him to the cross. Yet the stones did cry out—not just in the temple’s rubble in 70 AD, but in the resurrection’s seismic ripple. The Passion revealed Israel’s hypocrisy: a nation claiming purity while rejecting prophets, excluding lepers, and mirroring the pagan sacrifices it condemned. Jesus, the cornerstone, becomes both the first victim buried under the city’s weight and the capstone lifted high on the cross, exposing the violence propping up every polis—Jewish, Roman, and ours.

Consider Caiaphas’ chilling logic: “It is better that one man die than the whole nation perish” (John 11:50). This is the scapegoat mechanism laid bare, the crowd’s dispersion of guilt onto a single figure to preserve order. Gentile societies did the same, projecting violence onto mythological gods to obscure their shame. The cross dismantles this. Jesus, numbered among the transgressors, reveals the victim’s innocence, shattering the unanimous fervor that binds societies against a “guilty” other. Pilate and Herod, rivals united in his persecution (Luke 23:12), show how power aligns to excise the misfit who disturbs the status quo. The Sanhedrin fears the crowd; Pilate fears revolt; Herod plays the sycophant. Politicians, then as now, are weak before the mob’s volatility.

The Gospels texts didn’t just expose politics, they transformed it. Jesus’ followers, emboldened by the resurrection, cared for plague-stricken pagans when Rome’s elite fled. Their nonviolent witness won hearts, forcing the empire to adapt. By the fourth century, Rome adorned itself with the cross—a scandal we can scarcely grasp today. Imagine a meek libertarian dissident like Ron Paul becoming the rallying symbol for both our parties; even that falls short of this historical scandal. A tortured, abandoned God, forgiving his killers, was no mere mascot. Yet Rome’s conversion was half-baked. It abandoned gladiatorial games and overt sacrifice but clung to slavery and war. Christianity’s demystification of guilt-projection clashed with sacrificial violence like oil and water, leaving Rome ripe for schism and collapse.

Today, the stones still cry out. Every story of victims—whether nonviolent prisoners like those Steve Bannon met in jail, or casualties of wars we fuel in Israel-Gaza or Ukraine-Russia—haunts our collective conscience. Jesus tied the stones’ cries to Jerusalem’s fall in 70 AD, when Israel’s zeal for violence mirrored Rome’s and left both exposed as complicit in the same sin. America stands at a similar crossroads. Our politics, like Caiaphas’, justifies flesh-and-blood victims for “national security” or “progress.” We cheer Barabbas-types—leaders promising strength through exclusion or war—while ignoring the Lamb who redefines polis not as the victors’ club but as the refuge for the least of these.

The Passion’s political implications are radical. It reveals power as a house of cards, sustained by silencing victims. The resurrection vindicates those victims, proving that no empire, no mob, can bury the truth. Jesus’ movement upended history toward the marginalized, as he predicted. But it also warns us: clinging to sacrificial violence—be it cultural scapegoating or global wars—dooms us to Rome’s fate. The cross haunts every nation, breaking us into rivalry and schism until we repent.

America must choose now. Nonviolence and repentance are not moral platitudes; they are political necessities. The alternative is more rubble, more cries from the stones we’ve buried. Holy Week is not a call to nostalgia and private religion but to revolution—a revolution of the heart that dismantles the altars of might-makes-right. The Lamb has spoken.

Will we listen, or will we keep building on blood?

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