It is not hilarious at all. The Lord could indeed have chosen to defeat the Roman Empire. When he is tempted by Satan in the wilderness during his 40 day fast he is offered dominion over all the earth, in return for worshipping Satan. He declines, and later he says that his kingdom is not of this earth.
The Lord is not interested in political power because it is human and transitory (ie subject to time). Even the greatest empires rise and then fall; his empire is not a human one; it is eternal so it will never fall.
And part of his reason for tolerating Rome is that the Pax Romana allowed the very effective spread of the Gospel to all areas of the known world within a very few years of his life and death, and 4 centuries later the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity alllowed an even greater dispersion of the Gospel.
Therefore, destroying the Roman Empire at that point and allowing - who? Persia? Egypt? Assyria? to take over, would not have been sensible. None of them built anything like the superb road systems of the Romans. The Christian faith dispersed largely along Roman roads, thanks to a Roman citizen; St Paul.
Well, here we get into rather deeper Christology.
An immortal god is one who lives forever, but is subject to time. Christ is NOT an immortal god.
Quick overview of Hellenic/Roman paganism. The gods were the children of Kronos, God of time. They were all subject to time, and even though they could not die, they also could not turn the clock backwards or step outside of time. If a mortal died, they could not wind back time to bring him back to life; the best they could do was to turn him into a demi god.
The Judeo Christian God is different; he created time, and is
not subject to it. He is outside time, eternal, and unchanging. What happens to him in relation to his interactions with us is ALSO eternal and unchanging.
Therefore, if an eternal God is crucified, that is an eternal and unchanging crucifixion. Look in any Orthodox or Catholic church; Christ is still shown on the cross, for the simple reason that a God who takes an interest in humanity, and who suffers alongside us, continues to suffer as long as any human on earth suffers.
The Lord himself says; in as much as ye do this unto the least of these my little ones, ye do it unto me.
In other words, he did not suffer for three hours, then died and it was all over. He continues to share our pain and suffering, as intensely as he did then; he took it all upon himself, and continues to do so. In our terms this lasts a long time, in his terms there is no time; there is the endless now of eternity.
Therefore, Christ is eternally crucified, eternally resurrected, eternally wounded for our sins. Not crucified for two thousand or ten thousand or two hundred thousand years, but eternally; outside time in the endless now of his existence.
God's name is I AM; denoting he that was, that is and that is to come.
We have existence that begins, continues and then ends, unless we share in his eternity. He does not.
In the Eucharist, we don't just remember something that happened 2,000 years ago; we partake of the actual Last Supper; the eternal Feast of the Lamb. There is only one, and each time we partake of it. When Christ first meets us he reaches to where we are; to our mortality. From then on when we encounter him it is where he is; in eternity. He is the bridge that enables us to encounter eternity every single day. The same goes for Easter; every Easter we don't just remember the Resurrection of 2,000 years ago, we partake of the one and only Resurrection, and it becomes here and now for us. Christmas; not a memorial of a birth 2,000 years ago; an entering into the very moment of the Incarnation; Christ with us. It doesn't matter about getting the date right; there are no dates in eternity. What matters is the endless presence of the Incarnation to us.
Our faith is not a historical one. It is alive, it is eternal and it is ever present with us.
