You may’ve read my recent Palm Sunday article on how the condemnation, torture, and ultimate death of Jesus Christ is compelling evidence that democracy… well, it sucks. Bigly. Mob justice isn’t justice. Check it out if you haven’t.
Donald Trump’s name didn’t appear once in the article, by the way, but I can’t feign surprise that many readers (on both sides of the “Orange Man Bad” divide) saw parrallels between an infamous 2,000 year old story and the drama set to unfold Tuesday in a New York City courtroom. No, Trump isn’t the Son of Man, isn’t very Christ-like if we’re being honest, and it doesn’t even sound like he’s going to be subject to a “perp walk” or a mug shot to the disappointment of some, but if the Left didn’t want to invite borderline blasphemous analogies, then bringing up a controversial public figure on trumped up (pardon the pun) charges on Holy Week is an awfully strange way to go about it.
Also consider this: a recent CNN poll found a majority of Americans including 62% of independents supportive of the Trump indictment (which they HAD NOT EVEN SEEN at the time the poll was taken), but only 37% of all of those polled BELIEVE HE HAD ACTUALLY DONE ANYTHING CRIMINAL. Think about that for a moment.
Forget how you feel about the ex-president hard as I know it is to do. Does it make you comfortable to live in a time when a majority of Americans want someone prosecuted whom they simultaneously believe is innocent, albeit an unsympathetic asshole? Especially in light of a long history of investigations which have dead-ended not for lack of oxygen but raw evidence?
I hope not, but I don’t think millions of Americans can honestly answer “no.” As an attorney, I have tremendous respect for our resilient jury system which continued to buck political pressures through a pandemic and full year of rioting. But how long can it work if this is where we’re headed?
Part of the beauty and majesty of The Passion of Jesus Christ is that it continues to work on multiple levels: theological, cultural, moral, personal, and yes, political. In a single week two millennia ago in a dusty, combustible imperial backwater, we saw the worst and the best of the human experience on display, and the memory of those events continues to inform the counsel of the wise and fair-minded all these many years later. Among those lessons is the dangerous of allowing hatred and fear to overwhelm one’s sense of justice regardless of what the perpetrator “deserves,” a subjective analysis for all but God even under the best of conditions.
I will prayerfully watch today’s events in New York in the weeks to come, but I’m not praying for any particular outcome; I’m praying for justice. Specifically His, not our own warped version of it which I fear is looking positively primative at the moment if that CNN poll is remotely accurate.
