Sermons

Summary: The seven last words are the seven last phrases recorded across the Gospels that Jesus said before finally dying on the cross. This is the 2 politically charged statement.

Luke 23:43, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

“Thugs in Paradise”

Growing up I understood that I had a little more grit than some of the others. I realized that while some young men were going to stay out of trouble and get home on time and make good grades, I mean even in church I was gonna ask questions and push the limits, the good guy personally wasn’t the lot that had been chosen for me. I had some Thug in Me

The Story is told Jesus of Nazareth was executed today on the orders of the Roman State. Method of execution: Crucifixion. The charge under Roman law was treason, and under Herodian law blasphemy against the church.

The evidence against this anarchist was so strong that authorities of both the Roman State and the Kingdom of Herod concurred with the arrest and execution, and he was subjected to trial by both governments. And in a rare uprising of spontaneous collective justice, the mass of people who were gathered for Passover called for his execution as well. The mob affirmed their loyalty to the state, chanting, "We have no king but Caesar."

Friday's execution ended a career as an anti-government agitator with a long history of lawlessness.

Even as a young child, Jesus was recognized as an enemy of the state and was sentenced to death by the current King's predecessor, Herod the Great.

Subversive foreign agents lied to the king, and with their help, Jesus and his family escaped the lawful orders of the government authority by illegally emigrating to Egypt, where they remained in hiding until the death of the king.

Jesus, who is also treasonously called The Christ by his followers, embarked on a public career roughly three years ago, with the assistance of his cousin, John, who himself was executed by the state for lack of respect for the office of the king.

Jesus's execution was swift and merciless, and his disciples have been scattered. Authorities are confident that his name will quickly be forgotten, while Rome, the eternal city, will last forever. The Enemy of God thought it had Won! Long Live Herod and Polit and Cezar!

Let Me Build this for you, Let Me Share a few Quotes: A few Points and I’m Out!

In common law, a denizen was not a full citizen but had a status similar to that of a “resident alien” or “Illegal Refugee” today; the law followed the ancient Roman idea of granting someone a right to live in a place but not to participate in its political life (not Vote). Later, the word . . . was also used to refer to non-slave blacks in the United States before the abolition of slavery. ?Guy Standing (2011, 93)

Criminals, it turns out, are the one social group in America we have permission to hate. . . . When we say someone was “treated like a criminal,” what we mean to say is that he or she was treated as less than human, like a shameful creature. Hundreds of years ago, our nation put those considered less than human in shackles; less than one hundred years ago, we relegated them to the other side of town; today we put them in a cage. ?Michelle Alexander

Jesus is a denizen: not a citizen of the Roman Empire, but one of its tributary subjects. He is what the rap artist Tupac Shakur defined as a thug, one of that great majority of criminalized denizens without a patrimony. Shakur coins what philosophers of language call a “stipulative definition” of a thug: “not killers and rapists, . . . I mean niggas who don’t have anything.” It is a definition based on neither what one is nor what one does, but on what one has—or rather, what one does not have.

All 4 Gospels agree that Jesus was crucified along with two other men who were known criminals. They tell a story about three convicted criminals as a story about two convicted criminals and Jesus.

The narrative sleight-of-hand sets Jesus apart, obscuring the brute fact that his conviction juridically certifies him as a thug. But today Im Gonna Clean it up for You

Let’s Look at the 4 Gospels Real Quick!

1) As it does with the infamy of Jesus’s Galilean origin, the Gospel of John makes the best of Jesus’s execution as a thug among thugs by acknowledging what the audience must already know. The Gospel of John does so, nevertheless, without calling the criminals, criminals. they crucified him and with him two others, one on either side, with Jesus between them (John 19:16–18).

2) According to the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is not really a thug, and there is nothing at all thuggish about what he or his associates are up to (see 23:13–25, 39–42). In Luke Jesus is executed between two “malefactors” (23:32,33, 39): Jesus is not one himself, but merely a Political Dissident floating atop a mud pond of Anti-Government thuggery.

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