Why Was Jesus Killed?

Victoria and I are at Honey Creek from yesterday through Saturday to serve at the High School session of summer camp at Honey Creek. There are 39 high school students from around the diocese here for the week, including four from King of Peace.

Each day we will worship together and do the usual camp stuff (ropes course, pool time, crafts, games and more) and we'll have an hour of program time which is when the religious theme for the week gets played out. All camp sessions this summer will look at the question Who Is Jesus? to have the campers discover more about our Lord. For the high school session, we are going to have them consider not Why did Jesus die? which gets an answer about what God was doing through Jesus' death (answer: Jesus died for our sins). Instead, we will ask, Why did people want Jesus dead? This question gets at the revolutionary nature of Jesus' teaching as well as his life and ministry.

Part of the answer is that people wanted Jesus dead because he broke down the barriers between clean and unclean, between the elite and the outcast. Jesus threatened the way things work and the people who benefited from life as it was already, didn't want that to happen. We created ways the teens can enter more deeply into the question to discover what they find to be revolutionary today in how Jesus lived and how he asked us to live.

peace,
Frank+
The Rev. Frank Logue. Pastor