Holy Week is here again: that annual liturgical reminder of the horrors humans are capable of.

We tame it—make it about the provision of a meek and mute divine sacrificial victim to atone for our personal sins. It’s such a familiar story. Our hymnals automatically flip themselves open to “All glory, laud, and honor” and we form a conga line with palm branches for a minute before turning suddenly solemn. We marvel at a “fickle” crowd that celebrates Jesus on Sunday then shouts for his death on Friday. We feel sorry that our own sins caused all this. And then, short-sighted from so much navel-gazing, we miss the fact that we, too, are like those crowds: not so much fickle as carried along by whatever spectacles distract us from our own complicity in networks of power that continue to crucify people and crush communities.

Some spectacles, however, could clue us in. We just have to pay attention.

Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey and we call it a “triumphal entry.” Why?

People in the story do seem to be excited about the event. They shout “Hosanna to the son of David!” and throw their cloaks and palm leaves on the ground in his path.

But that’s…it, really. It’s almost pathetic—especially compared to the $92 million military parade Pilate is riding in on. Now that’s a “triumphal entry”!

Pilate was the Roman governor of Judea, but he didn’t live in Jerusalem. He would, however, arrive, with pomp, in Jerusalem during religious festivals. He wasn’t there to worship the God of Israel, though. His presence in Jerusalem was an assertion of Roman power and authority. He was there, in large part, to prevent just the sort of thing Jesus was getting up to that fateful week in Jerusalem.

A representative of the mighty Roman Empire, Pilate could easily have missed Jesus’ little bit of relatively insignificant political theater. But Jesus went too far when he violently disrupted the market in the Temple court.

Just as today, there were some religious leaders who, whether out of fear or desire for influence among the powerful, were willing to do the governor’s bidding—the Empire’s bidding—and report any hint of insurgency they saw. The New Testament records the logic, which many of us would probably share in a similar situation: It’s better to turn over a single troublemaker to the colonizing power so that their full wrath doesn’t come down on the community should that troublemaker build a strong following. No single charismatic individual was going to overthrow Roman rule. But Jerusalem would see, about 30 years later, what Rome would do to put down a rebellion.

So better to throw this guy under the bus. He did, after all, cause a big disturbance, in a sacred place during a sacred time.

The New Testament—probably wrongly—portrays Pilate as somewhat sympathetic to Jesus. Biblical scholars and historians can help shed light on why early Christian authors might have wanted to shift blame from Rome to the Temple leadership. Unfortunately, it’s part of the beginning of a monstrous history of Christian persecution of Jews throughout the past two millennia (at least, as soon as Christians gained for themselves the very same imperial power that killed Christ—himself a Jew).

More realistically, Pilate represents the kind of power humanity has suffered throughout the ages: the kind that makes a show of its wealth and military strength. The kind of power that is violent, cruel, and insecure. It can’t handle being laughed at. It always punches down. It lashes out at even the slightest threats as much to gratify a desire for revenge as to broadcast a warning to others. It terrorizes people into self-censorship, acquiescence, despair, and idolatry. It motivates people to turn against their neighbors and to betray their friends. It seeks only to aggrandize itself, to hoard whatever wealth it can steal from people in need to benefit itself at the expense of the common good. When a governor or government wields this kind of power, they fundamentally betray their calling.

This kind of power silences. It propagates lies. It uses people, rewarding them profusely as long as their service is useful, then discards them. When enraged, it crucifies masses of people who don’t matter anyway, according to the value system of Empire.

It even kills God.