Easter Sunday, Innocence Series

David Milgaard

Clayton Johnson

Paul Morin

Maria Shepherd

Robert Baltovich

Steven Truscott

Perhaps some of those names sounded familiar to you. They are all Canadians who served prison time for crimes they were eventually exonerated for.

Steven Truscott was 14 years old in 1959 when he was sentenced to hang for the rape and murder of his classmate Lynne Harper. On appeal his sentence was changed in 1960 to life in prison with no chance of parole. In 2007 the Court of Appeal for Ontario ruled, evidence in favour of Truscott's innocence had been ignored in the original trial, and his conviction was overturned. Truscott was almost hung and spent 48 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

Innocence Canada, formerly “The Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted”, is an organization in Canada that was formed in 1993, this mission statements says: “Innocence Canada’s mission is to identify, advocate for and support the exoneration of individuals who have been convicted of a crime they did not commit and to prevent wrongful convictions through legal education, advocacy, and justice reform.”

Since Palm Sunday, we have been looking at how all the events leading up to this point were orchestrated by the religious and political powers of the day, with a predetermined outcome, Jesus had to die.

And for those who collaborated in the plan, and those who watched from afar it seemed fairly straight forward. Jesus was guilty!

That’s right on that Good Friday so many years ago Christ was declared guilty. Just as guilty Steven Truscott and the others that I listed.

He had fought the good fight, but he had lost. In the eyes of the world, in the eyes of His followers and in the eyes of his enemies Jesus Christ the carpenter from Nazareth had been proven to be guilty.

Everything he said about being God, everything he had said about his Kingdom, everything He had said about His power. Every statement He ever uttered, every promise He ever made, everything had been shown to be a lie because Jesus was guilty. Guilty of claiming that he was God, when apparently he wasn’t.

If Jesus had lived it would have been different, but he died and because he died everyone knew he was guilty, as guilty as sin.

The Jewish Leaders Testified to His Guilt. It was Jesus who was marching out of step, not them. He was a liberal, trouble making activist. I mean, think about it, things had been happening the same way in Israel for thousands of years. What right did this young upstart preacher have to come in and try to change things all around?

He wasn’t a Rabbi, he wasn’t a Levite, he wasn’t a scribe or a Pharisee. He was just a carpenter, he was a newcomer to Jerusalem, he was only thirty-three years old and he was wrong.

So why should they change? After all it was the Sadducees who were the lawmakers, not Jesus. He just didn’t understand how things were done. What right did he have to tell them as he did in Matthew 22:29 Jesus replied, “Your mistake is that you don’t know the Scriptures, and you don’t know the power of God.” Well, they had shown him, because they were right and he on the other hand was wrong.

How dare he call them vipers, how dare he call them fools, how dare he call them hypocrites. Who did he think he was anyway? And then he had the utter gall to claim to be the equal to Jehovah God. In their Eyes he was guilty. As guilty as sin.

Pilate Testified to His Guilt And he was right because he was smart. Pilate knew what he was doing, he was every inch a politician. He saw trouble coming and he already had too much trouble in Jerusalem.

The Jews were on the brink of revolt. Perhaps it had happened when he had put the images of Caesar on the flag standards in direct defiance of the Jewish law about graven images. Maybe he was guilty that time, or perhaps it was when he financed the municipal water supply with money he had seized from the temple treasury. He may have been guilty that time too.

I mean Pilate had enough trouble; he didn’t need all the problems that this young Nazarene carpenter represented. Pilate had the authority of the Roman Empire behind him. At the snap of his fingers, he could have levelled Jerusalem.

And this young peasant had the nerve to stand in front of him and say John 19:11 Then Jesus said, “You would have no power over me at all unless it were given to you from above. So the one who handed me over to you has the greater sin.” Oh yeah, right, well Pilate proved him wrong.