Was Jesus Guilty?

As part of an ongoing effort to read some of the famous authors I brushed aside during my smart-ass school days, I recently picked up a collection of writings by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.

A Christian by passion rather than inheritance, he writes not to defend Christ but to make Him contemporaneous-an unsettling task, for it means Christ stands before us not as a distant figure enshrined in admiration, but as the living demand. And this, Kierkegaard insists, is precisely why the natural human response to Him is not veneration but offense.

He calls Jesus “the Inviter,” but for most men and women this figure becomes a provocation, even an offense. Capable of performing miracles at will and in direct contact with the divine, Jesus seemed-by human logic-to possess the power to grant blessings on command. Instead, He made life harder: acknowledge yourself as a sinner; resist your basest instincts; identify with suffering; love the poorest of the poor as yourself. And after all that inward labor, accept salvation on faith-and wait.

Why, then, single out the Jews of Roman Palestine or a handful of corrupt officials as the killers of Christ? Kierkegaard implies that Jesus had to go down, and would have in any place or time. The offense He presented was universal.

So, was Jesus guilty?