“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
Last week I traced a tradition — from the slave preachers through Bonhoeffer through King — built on a single insight: empire cannot survive exposure. The whitewashed tomb cracks the moment someone names the bones inside.
But how does this relate to the cross?
Not why did Jesus die. Why did he tell his followers to pick the thing up and carry it?
In the spring of 4 BCE, Herod the Great died.
A man named Judas — son of a bandit chief Herod had executed years before — seized the royal arsenal at Sepphoris, armed his followers, and declared himself king. It was not the first time a Jewish rebel had claimed the throne. It would not be the last.
Publius Quinctilius Varus, the Roman governor of Syria, marched two legions into Galilee.
His soldiers burned Sepphoris to the ground. They sold every surviving inhabitant into slavery — thirty thousand people. Then Varus marched south, crushing revolts as he went, until he reached Jerusalem. There, according to Josephus, he crucified two thousand of the captured rebels.
Two thousand crosses.
Along the roadsides of Galilee and Judea. The bodies left to rot, because that was the point. Crucifixion was not execution. It was a message — delivered in the only language Rome believed the occupied could understand. Death by crucifixion was slow — one to three days. The bodies were displayed at roadsides, city gates, prominent hills. The condemned was stripped, exposed, humiliated. Rome did not hide its crosses. It planted them where you could not look away.
Sepphoris was four miles from Nazareth. An hour’s walk. The smoke from the burning city was visible from the village. The stench of two thousand dying men carried on the wind.
Joseph, Mary, and every other inhabitant of Nazareth could not have escaped the sight or the smell.
We do not know whether Jesus was born yet — scholars place his birth between 6 and 4 BCE, and the revolt happened in the spring of 4. He may have been an infant. He may not yet have been born. It does not matter. Every adult in Nazareth carried the memory. Every person who taught the boy his father’s trade, who walked with him to synagogue, who told him the stories of Israel — they had watched neighbors sold into slavery and rebels nailed to crosses along the roads they walked every day.
In Jewish memory, this became known as the War of Varus. It ranked alongside the destruction of the Temple as one of the catastrophes of the age.
According to the stories of the Gospels, that child grew up to say: Take up your cross and follow me.
Stop.
Before that sentence becomes a metaphor — before it softens into “bear your burdens patiently” or decorates a greeting card — hold it in the air it was spoken into.
In first-century Palestine, under military occupation, where crucifixion was the visible daily reality of Roman rule, “take up your cross” was the most terrifying invitation a human being could extend. It did not mean “endure your difficulties.” It meant: follow me into the confrontation with empire, knowing what empire does to people who confront it. Knowing what the road to Sepphoris looked like. Knowing the smell.
But he did not say “take up your sword.”
That refusal is the center of everything.
Three times the sword was offered. Three times he turned it away.
The wilderness. Before the ministry begins, Satan offers all the kingdoms of the world. Read this against the War of Varus and every other failed messianic revolt Josephus catalogs. Every rebel who claimed the throne — Judas at Sepphoris, the bandits in the Galilean hills, the prophets who gathered followers in the desert — took that offer. They raised swords. They gathered armies. And Rome responded with what the boy from Nazareth had grown up seeing: mass crucifixion, village destruction, entire populations enslaved. The sword did not defeat empire. The sword gave empire the pretext to do what it does best.
Jesus said no.
The mountain. After the feeding of the five thousand — the counter-banquet in the wilderness, where five thousand eat outside the extraction economy while Herod feasts with military officers and serves John the Baptist’s head on a plate — the crowd feels what is happening. They want a king. John’s Gospel: “Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself.”
Jesus fled.
They wanted the military messiah — the one who would do what Judas tried to do at Sepphoris, but succeed this time. He ran into the mountains alone. Because he knew what that king produced. He had grown up four miles from the proof.
The garden. Gethsemane. The night of the arrest. A man face down in the dirt, begging God for another way. “If it is possible, let this cup pass from me.” And then the detail that most people read past: “Do you think I cannot call on my Father, who would at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?”
Twelve legions. Seventy-two thousand fighters. He names the option out loud. He holds it in his hand.
A disciple draws a sword and cuts off a servant’s ear. Jesus rebukes him.
“Not my will, but yours.”
He walks forward toward the arrest with his hands open.
Three refusals. The wilderness. The mountain. The garden.
Not because he was passive. Not because he was apolitical. Not because suffering is virtuous. Because he grew up on the road to Sepphoris, and he knew — in his body, in the memory of his community, in the smell that never quite left the air of his childhood — what the sword produces.
But then he picks up the cross.
Not the sword. The cross. The instrument of his own terror. The tool Rome designed to make occupied populations look away, shut up, comply.
Why?
Last week I wrote that Jesus’s crime was exposure. That the arrangement between religious authority and imperial violence depends on hiddenness, and that naming the bones inside the tomb is the one thing that arrangement cannot survive.
The cross is where the theology of exposure reaches its conclusion.
The sword confirms empire. Every armed revolt gave Rome exactly what it needed — an enemy that justified the machinery of occupation. The legions march, the rebels are crushed, the crosses go up, and the population is reminded of the cost of resistance. The sword feeds the beast it claims to fight. This is what the War of Varus taught every person in Galilee: the military path gets your neighbors killed.
The cross exposes empire.
Rome designed crucifixion to say: this is what happens to those who challenge us. Jesus repurposes it to say: look at what empire actually is.
The body on the cross is the collaboration made visible. Pilate washes his hands — he has the soldiers but claims no stake in Jewish religious disputes. Caiaphas delivers the body — he has the religious authority but not the power to execute. The arrangement that depended on hiddenness is performed in public, in daylight, on a hill outside the city walls where everyone can see.
The tomb cracks open — not after the resurrection. At the crucifixion. The whitewashed exterior that Jesus named throughout his ministry — the woes to the Pharisees, the cleansing of the Temple, every confrontation with the collaborating establishment — is finally and completely stripped away. The bones are showing. Everyone can see what the arrangement actually is: the religious establishment handing a prophet to the empire for execution.
And the charge nailed above his head — “King of the Jews” — is not irony. It is a sedition conviction. It is Rome’s official record of what he was executed for: rival sovereignty. The Romans understood what the disciples kept missing. This man was announcing a competing kingdom. That’s next week’s subject — what basileia tou theou actually meant to the people who heard it. But Rome did not need a seminary education to understand the claim. They had a word for people who claimed rival sovereignty. The word was crucified.
The cross does what the sword cannot because it operates on a different level.
The sword challenges Rome’s power. Rome has more swords. Rome always has more swords. On that level, the contest is over before it begins.
The cross challenges Rome’s legitimacy. It strips the violence of its costume — the costume of law and order, of peace and security, of divine sanction and religious blessing. It makes the violence visible as violence. An empire killing a man for feeding the hungry and welcoming the stranger. An empire that needs a collaborating religious establishment to hand over the body because it cannot admit what it is doing without the blessing.
Rome could answer the sword. Rome could not answer the cross. Not because the cross was more powerful. Because it was a different kind of thing. The sword gave Rome an enemy. The cross gave Rome a mirror.
“Take up your cross.”
This is not a call to suffer. It is a call to expose. It is the invitation to carry the instrument of your oppression into the light where everyone can see what it is — and what it reveals about the power that made it.
Last week I traced the tradition forward — from the slave preachers who named the bones in the master’s Christianity, through Bonhoeffer who named them in the German church, through King who named them on the evening news. Each one injected themselves where they did not need to be. Each one paid the price. Each one cracked the tomb.
This week I went backward — to the road outside Sepphoris, to the smell of two thousand crosses, to a child who grew up in that shadow and refused the sword three times and then picked up the one thing Rome designed to keep people silent, and turned it into the instrument of Rome’s exposure.
The tradition runs in both directions. Forward through the slave preachers and the Confessing Church and the children’s crusade in Birmingham. And backward to the strategic logic that made it all necessary: the sword feeds empire. The cross exposes it.
We know what the sword produces. The road to Sepphoris taught us. Minneapolis is teaching us again. The administration called Alex Pretti an assassin. They called Renee Good a domestic terrorist. They lie about what happened because the arrangement depends on the lie. And the cell phones — the six camera angles that contradicted every press conference before it started — are the cross in the hands of the occupied.
Not the sword. The cross. The thing that makes the violence visible as violence.
Next week: The Kingdom of God is not a place you go when you die. It is a competing sovereignty — announced in the political vocabulary of empire, practiced as mutual aid, and present wherever the poor are fed and the stranger welcomed.
The Second Sermon publishes every Sunday morning at theramm.substack.com. The jesus-empire knowledge base that supports this series will be available soon.
Once again: THANK YOU!
Brilliant history and detail that I am absolutely stealing later this week.
I love you call to STOP at the phrase, "take up your cross."
My own take on re-animating this metaphor for our time is here:
https://wheneftalks.substack.com/p/why-i-wear-a-lethal-injection-crucifix?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Fantastic piece, and right on time.
I hope your readership continues to expand.
Thank you.