April 6, 2025
What Evil Has He Done?
Luke 22:65 – 23:1-5, 13-25
During Lent, our worship series has been looking at the last week of Jesus’ life, with Luke 22 as our guide. These readings are heavy. To support us as we listen, we’ll sing the chorus, “Shepherd Me, O God” before and after the readings.
Refrain: Shepherd me, O God, beyond my wants, beyond my fears, from death into life….
Luke 22:66-23:25
This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
“Shepherd me, O God, beyond my wants, beyond my fears, from death into life.” We find ourselves standing before a text where Jesus—the Good Shepherd—enters the valley of the shadow of death. And here in Jesus’ trial we see not just individual failings, but something more complex: we see groups of people making what are – in their eyes – wise choices; a system working as it was intended and yet producing profound evil and injustice.
This morning, I reached for my iPhone to silence the alarm, bleary from watching the Final Four games until nearly midnight. The blue light illuminated my face as I checked the time—this small device that connects me to you, to family and friends, to the world. But this small device which brings such connection also stands for something deeper: even this simple object represents our participation in a complex guilty web.
The rare minerals that are dug from the earth in conflict zones, with life-threatening labor; the low wages for assembly workers on the other side of the world; the environmental impact of producing and disposing of old technology; and the apps that we love and that connect us to each other, can cause also great harm, especially to our youth.
It is a complicated and tangled web, and I share this not to make you feel guilty, but because it mirrors in a very small way what we witness in our passage today. We live in systems larger than ourselves and our choices. Systems that entangle us, even when we have the best of intentions.
Jesus steps precisely and deliberately into this tangled world on his way to the cross.
The Tangled Web
Jesus is standing trial before the religious council, before Pilate, and before the crowd. At first glance, it’s a straightforward story of good versus evil: Jesus, the only truly innocent One, confronted by corrupt powers. But a closer look reveals something more unsettling.
The religious leaders weren’t cartoon villains. They genuinely believed they were protecting their faith and their nation. Luke tells us the council asked, “Are you the Son of God, then?” This wasn’t mere curiosity. They were concerned about protecting their community’s understanding of God; concerned about Jesus’ ability to inflame people against them; concerned about the threat that his revolutionary words might bring down the hammer of Rome upon their heads. It had happened before. When Jesus answered, “You say that I am,” they felt their fears confirmed and they moved to protect their people and their faith.
Pilate, too, operated within a system—the Roman apparatus of control and economic exploitation. Three times he declared Jesus innocent: “I find no guilt in this man.” Jesus had done nothing to break the law. Yet despite his belief that Jesus was innocent, the machinery of Roman governance required stability above all else. And Pilate was a man who prized order, not justice. When the crowd began to stir, Pilate calculated the costs of standing by his convictions over against the political trouble of an uprising. The system of Roman peace – which was peace made through force – was working exactly as designed.
Even the crowd, calling for Barabbas instead of Jesus – I don’t think they were simply bloodthirsty. They were perhaps tired of Jesus’ confusing parables, and his insistence on peace. But they were really hoping for a particular kind of liberation—one that might come through the violent rebellion that Barabbas represented rather than the peaceful kingdom Jesus embodied. Their shouts, their resistance to oppression, was working exactly as they hoped.
What makes this trial troubling—and so relevant—isn’t that evil people did evil things to a good man. It’s that ordinary people, working within systems they did not create but they fully participated in, collectively produced an outcome that none would have chosen independently: the condemnation of a truly innocent person.
When Innocence Confronts the System
Three times Pilate declares, “I find no guilt in this man.” What evil has he done? Luke wants us to hear this, to sit with Jesus’ innocence, to understand this was not justice being served, but justice being abandoned.
For Christmas, one of my daughters gave me the book Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey. It’s a collection of stories from Centurion Ministries, a Christian organization that for decades has worked to free innocent people from death row. Jim McCloskey is the founder of Centurion, and like him, John Grisham is passionately concerned about the real-life ways that justice can be denied. So, they teamed up to tell these true stories and raise awareness and support.
The book is very difficult to read because many of the stories are so graphic and haunting, but the story of Mark Jones stands out as one that stayed with me. Mark and two of his friends – all veterans of Desert Storm – were arrested for murder the night before Mark’s wedding, and then spent 26 years falsely imprisoned. Despite flimsy evidence, no motive, and no reasonable ability to have committed the crime, it took decades, multiple appeals, and the support of a national organization to finally win their freedom. By which point the bright promise of their lives had mostly dimmed.
The key witness wrote later that, “I lied because everybody was pushing me to say it was these guys.” One of their defense attorneys said, “I will go to my grave thinking these guys didn’t do this. I brush my teeth and think about them. I’ll never forget them.”
What makes cases like Mark Jones’ so troubling isn’t just that errors occurred, but how multiple systems—police under pressure to solve cases, prosecutors rewarded for convictions rather than justice, witnesses afraid to recant false testimony, courts reluctant to acknowledge errors, the human sins of pride or racism—these become interwoven in a web that no one person created, yet everyone maintains.
In these haunting stories, we see reflections of this Holy Week story. An innocent person. A system of interconnected interests. The difficulty of disentangling truth once institutional momentum begins. And the profound cost paid by those caught in the middle.
But there’s a crucial difference between Jones and Jesus. Jones was accidentally caught in a system not of his making. Jesus deliberately entered ours.
Christ Bears It Away
This close look at Jesus on trial reveals something profound about God’s response to our tangled and broken world. Jesus doesn’t stand at a safe distance condemning the broken system—he enters it fully. He subjects himself to questioning by the council, to examination by Pilate, to mockery by Herod, to rejection by the crowd. At each step, he could have escaped—through divine power, through clever arguments, through compromise. But he does not.
Recall that last week we looked at Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. There, he prayed in anguish, with sweat falling like drops of blood. Now, strengthened by his prayer, and centered by his decision to trust God with his life, he is perfectly calm. He bears the full weight of the system’s failure. He bears the full weight of humanity’s sin. Not just the weight of all the little things we do that we wish we could take back; but the profound weight of all that we cannot fix even when we try our best.
This is what the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany and the anti-apartheid churches in South Africa pointed to as they confronted evil in their midst. German-speaking Christians drafted the Barmen Declaration in 1934; South African churches wrote the Belhar Confession—which now part of our own denomination’s Book of Confessions— in 1982. In these statements of faith that are directed to the world, they weren’t simply condemning external evil. They were acknowledging the church’s own participation in systems of injustice.
And they didn’t just stop at confessing the problem—they pointed to Christ as the one who bears this broken system and offers a new hope. The Belhar Confession puts it well: “We believe… that God has revealed Godself as the One who wishes to bring about justice and true peace on earth.”
This isn’t just wishful thinking; it’s recognition of what happened in the garden, at the trial, at the cross. Christ entered our tangled web not to condemn it or us from the outside, but to take it on from within, to bear it away, and save us from ourselves.
The innocent Jesus confronted not just individual sin but systemic evil—the very patterns of self-protection, self-justification, and self-interest that continue to entangle us today. He confronted them, and in his death and resurrection he defeated them and opened the door to new life.
The New Community
So, what does this mean for us—who still use our iPhones, who participate in these deadly systems, and who recognize our own entanglement?
Jesus Christ, alive in us in the power of his Spirit, has the power to transform how we live in these systems. We don’t need to pretend our hands are clean, neither must we think that nothing can change. We’re invited into a third way—the way opened by Christ, the way of new creation.
It begins with honest recognition. In a baptism or when a person joins the church, we ask, “Do you renounce evil and it’s power in the world?” That question names our participation in broken systems not to rub our noses in guilt but to prepare us to turn toward God. Like the Confessing Church in the Nazi era, or the anti-apartheid churches in South Africa, we acknowledge complicity as the first step toward healing.
This recognition then flows into humble action. Again, the simple question: “Do you acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and seek to be his faithful disciple?” This doesn’t mean grand gestures of moral superiority, but small faithful steps forward through the tangled web. We can be thoughtful about our purchases. We can question institutional assumptions. We can amplify voices that systems silence. We can work, like Jim McCloskey, on behalf of those who are hopelessly entangled. These actions alone will not fix everything, but they bear witness to God’s redeeming work.
It’s so important that this movement of faith, turning away from evil and turning toward God and others, takes place within community. None of us can disentangle ourselves alone. But together—alive in Christ who has defeated our sin, empowered by his Spirit—we participate in a holy way of being human. Together. With honesty, and hopeful courage, and mutual grace.
Coming to the Table
In a few minutes, we’ll gather around the communion table—a place that is intended for an honest family conversation. At this table, we acknowledge the reality of our entanglement in sin, both personal and systemic. We confess that we cannot unentangle ourselves through our own efforts. We cannot save ourselves.
Yet at this table, we also receive again the assurance that Christ has carried our sin, and carried it away. The broken bread, the poured cup—given to the disciples just before his arrest – are tangible reminders that he came not to condemn the world but that the world through him might be saved.
Perhaps most beautifully, this bread and this cup are tangible signs of his sustaining grace. Here God gives us strength to live with fresh hope in a new way. Not alone, but together. Not as perfect people, but as forgiven people. Not as worthy people, but as people who are marked by love and are called to love others.
The innocent Jesus, who stood trial for us, offers us not judgment but invitation. The invitation is to bring our own tangled hearts to the One who can, indeed, shepherd us beyond our wants, beyond our fears, from death into life.
Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D.
First Presbyterian Church
Asheville, North Carolina