The Power of the Cross

In my post a couple of days ago I used this picture of a Celtic cross and received several very appreciative comments.  For the record, I bought it at a Michael's arts and crafts store.  It is cast metal.  And ever day, beneath my shirt, I wear this cross.

But I'm an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister, right?  Do I really buy into all this Christ-died-for-our-sins-on-a-cross stuff?  No.  But for me, at least, that's not the point.  As I noted yesterday, my favorite definition of what it means to be a Christian is the one Marcus Borg devised, "it means taking seriously what Jesus took seriously."

If that's so, then what's the big deal about the cross? 

In Paul's first letter to the church in Corinth -- chapter 1, verses 23 and 24 -- he wrote, "we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God."  Scholars believe that this letter was written around 55 C.E., or roughly 20-25 years after Jesus was crucified.  According to Marcus Borg and other New Testament scholars, this letter is the third oldest piece of Christian writing in the official canon.  (Only the first letter to the Thessalonians and the letter to the Galatians are thought to be older.)  That would make this assertion that "we preach Christ crucified" to be an extremely early expression of Christian theology.

What makes the message of "Christ crucified" so important?  You might think that the answer is, "Christ resurrected," but that's not necessarily true.  The earliest of the Gospels -- Mark -- doesn't mention resurrection at all and, at least according to scholars like John Dominic Crossan, the Greek word that's used later for the idea of "resurrection" is not the same word that would be used to describe, as Crossan puts it, the resuscitation of a corpse.

Besides, if it's the resurrection that's important then that wasn't unique to Jesus.  After all, in Luke's Gospel we're told that Jesus raised his friend Lazarus from the dead, and both Luke and Matthew tell of him bringing back to life a little girl who'd died.  And in Matthew's telling of the crucifixion of Jesus there's this detail -- at the moment of Jesus' death, "the tombs were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; and coming out of the tombs after His resurrection they entered the holy city and appeared to many."  It seems to me, then, that the resurrection really isn't the most important part of the story.

I think it's the crucifixion itself.  Not because his death "redeemed" humankind from our essential nature as sinners.  I'm too much a Universalist to think that God demanded a blood sacrifice to atone for the sins of humanity -- both corporate and individual.  (And, while we're at it, I don't believe that "sin" is our essential nature, but that might need to be it's own topic for another post.)  I think that the real importance of the crucifixion is the cross itself.

Jesus was not the only person who was crucified, of course.  Shortly before Jesus’ birth, the Roman General Varus quelled a peasant uprising in Palestine by attacking the cities of Galilee and Samaria, selling their inhabitants into slavery and publicly crucifying two thousand of the uprising’s leaders. In her book Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, Paula Frederickson said this about crucifixion:

Crucifixion was a Roman form of public service announcement:  Do not engage in sedition as this person has, or your fate will be similar.  The point of the exercise was not the death of the offender as such, but getting the attention of those watching.  Crucifixion first and foremost is addressed to an audience.

That's what makes the cross such a powerful symbol, and why "preaching Christ crucified" would be thought of as a "stumbling block" and sheer "foolishness."  Getting crucified was not a sign of God's favor.  If anything it would be a sign of God's rejection and abandonment.  There was nothing worse that could be done to you than to hang you on a cross.  (And John Dominic Crossan adds the detail that the bodies of the victims of crucifixion were unceremoniously dumped outside the city wall and left there for wild dogs to scavenge.)

Yet the early Christians were saying something utterly astonishing -- that God was with Jesus on that cross.  That God could make even something as horrific as the cross of crucifixion into a symbol of hope.  And as you can imagine, to embrace the cross as a symbol was an act of bold defiance.  It says, "You may want to terrorize us.  You may want to demoralize and dispirit us.  You may want to crush our will, but we will rise again.  Your instrument of torture holds no fear for us.  Do your worst.  We will survive."

Two more thoughts.  First, to paraphrase Jesus, you have heard it said that Jesus' death was preordained and that he had to be crucified for God's plan to manifest, but I say to you that Jesus most likely did not want to die.  He did not go to Jerusalem so that he could get arrested, tried, and executed.  He did not commit, as one person has said to me, "suicide by cop." 

I believe that Jesus didn't want to die, but was willing to.  That's a distinction I made in my recent sermon "I May Not Get There With You."  Martin Luther King made clear that he did not want to die.  In his last speech he said, "Like anybody I would like to live a long life.  Longevity has its place."  Yet he also made equally clear that he was not going to let the threat of death stop him from the work of building the Beloved Community.  I cannot but believe that this was true of young Yeshua ben Miriam, as well.

The last thing I want to say about the cross -- for this post at least -- is that I believe the cross has largely lost what power it once held.  When Constantine looked up before a battle and saw a cross in the air, the cross ceased to be a bold declaration of defiance against "the powers that be" -- it became the sign of the powers that be.  It was no longer heretical and counter-cultural.  We need no proof that this transformation is complete than to see how often the cross, today, is used simply as a fashion accessory. 

Having recently read James Cone's groundbreaking book The Cross and the Lynching Tree I can't help but wonder whether a noose might be a better symbol today.  The cross was originally a shocking symbol of God's presence with the lowest of the low, a promise to the oppressed that there oppressor did not wield ultimate power.  The cross was a tool of the oppressor; it became a rallying sign of the opposition.

Especially in the United States, who has been more marginalized than African Americans?  And what tool was used most often, in the words of Paula Frederickson, as "a form of public service announcement?"  The lynching tree.

Christianity is supposed to be challenging, is supposed to be daring, is supposed to be risky, is supposed to engage in the work of overturning the status quo and ushering in a very different kind of kingdom, a radically new kind of commonwealth, a truly transformed nation state, a new world.  It is supposed to be subversive.  Yet Christianity as it is most commonly found today seems to have forgotten all of this.  (And, I would argue, this seems especially true among liberal Christians.)  The work, though, still needs to be done.

Perhaps it would help if we stopped looking at the image of an innocent, poor, and marginalized Jewish man hanging on a cross (when we know the man is really God in disguise and the cross is a fashion statement).  Perhaps, instead, we should look at the image of an innocent, poor, and marginalized African American man hanging from a tree.  In both cases an innocent man was murdered to maintain a system of oppression that desperately needs to be overturned.  In both cases we are promised that death is not the final word.  In one, though, the death is merely a story and, so, the promise is not something to believe.  In the other, though, the horrific reality of the death may serve to shock us awake to the reality of that promise of life.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

eyes wide(er) open

I recently read two descriptions of African American experience that really caught my attention:

"Their blackness alone was license enough to line them up against walls, to menace them with guns, to search them roughly, beat them, and rob them of every vestige of dignity."

And,

"A black man could be walking down the road, minding his own business, and his life could suddenly change by meeting a white man or a group of white men or boys who on a whim decided to have some fun with a Negro."

Was I reading a blog post written since the events in Ferguson, Missouri once again brought a conversation about race to the national consciousness?  Not exactly.

The first was written by the historian Joel Williamson in his book The Crucible of Race; the second passage is found in Dr. James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree.  Neither author is referring to the realities of 2014.  Instead, they're writing about the realities of the late nineteenth to mid twentieth centuries.  Notice anything about their descriptions?

Much of white America has absolutely no idea how different our experiences and those of people of color in this country have been.  Absolutely no idea!  Oh, yes, we  know that slavery was bad, and that segregation was hard, but look at the strides we've made since then!  There's even a black man in the White House!  And didn't Martin Luther King dream of a day when color wouldn't matter?

No.  He didn't.  He dreamed of a day when people wouldn't be "judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."  That he said.  But he never said that we should all become "colorblind" (as if such a thing were possible).  He never said that at all.

Much of white America has absolutely no idea how different the America we live in is from the America that people of color know.  Why can't "they" just put it all behind them?  Really?  Why can't "they" just move on from the past and stop blaming race for all of "their" problems?  You've heard this, right?  I mean, you've heard people saying this for real.  No jokes.  Hell, you and I may have said it at one time or another, too.  (Or, at least, thought it.)  But anyone who says -- or even thinks -- such a thing has absolutely no idea what we're talking about.  No idea at all.

Let's take lynching -- the subject of the book by Dr. Cone that I've just started reading recently.  No one likes to talk about it much, but most liberal/progressive folk will say, if asked, that it was a terrible thing.  We'd all agree with that, right?  And we'd all agree that such an awful aberration should be left behind in the past.

By one count, at least, from 1882-1968 there were 4,743 lynchings in the United States.  3,446 -- 72.7% -- were of black (mostly) men.  It might surprise some to know that not all lynchings were of black people -- 1,297 white people were also lynched.  It's worth noting, of course, that "Many of the whites lynched were lynched for helping the black or being anti lynching ..." (according to the site Lynching Statistics for 1882-1968.)

So ... it was bad.  right?  But much of white America has absolutely no idea how bad.  Did you know that some of the reasons people were lynched included being homeless, injuring livestock, looking "suspicious," and even for skipping rocks!  (A word of warning, if you follow the preceding link you'll come to a site with "10 Outrageous Reasons Black People Were Lynched in America."  The images are graphic and disturbing.)  Just as today, black Americans knew that for absolutely no reason at all they might not come home at the end of the day.  "Their blackness alone was license enough ..."  Dr. Cone notes that the threat of lynching was almost more intimidating than the lynchings themselves.  

But oh how horrific those lynchings were.  Crowds gathered.  Families gathered.  Mom, dad, and the kids would spread out the picnic blanket and make a day of it.  Photos were snapped with people standing near the corpse like fisherman stand proudly with the marlin they'd just caught.  Portable printing operations were set up so that postcards could be made on the spot.  Sometimes the day, time, and place had been advertised; crowds of up to 15,000 -- that's fifteen thousand -- people came out.  How do you "get over" something like that?

A lot of this I knew.  You may have, too.  In a not-too-graphic way it's touched on in history class.  I'd even heard about the crowds.  But there's so much that I didn't know.  So much that I had no idea about.  I didn't know that many of these lynching victims were also burned, and often burned alive.  I didn't know that people from the crowd were invited to cut off body parts to take home as souvenirs.  And that this torture could go on for hours before the hanging itself.  How does anyone "move on" from experiences like these?

Especially -- especially -- because these experiences have not been left in the past.  In August -- August of this year -- a 17-year old boy was found dead, hanging from a swing set.  His death was pronounced a suicide, but the FBI is now investigating because there are elements to the story that don't quite add up.  The last lynching may not have been in 1968.

African Americans who might be reading this post are probably now thinking to themselves, the last lynching may not have been in 1968?  May not?  Is this guy serious?  And they'd be right.  Because in the final analysis lynching was never so much about a particular technique for murdering someone, but about sending a particular message by doing so.  And that message was not hard to decipher -- black lives don't matter.  Black women and men are not the equals of white women and men.  And they never will be.  Don't even try; don't get any crazy ideas about equality or anything like that.

In Dr. Cone's book he draws the obvious -- though largely unexplored -- parallel between crucifixion and the practice of lynching.  He quotes Paula Frederickson from her book Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews:

Crucifixion was a Roman form of public service announcement:  Do not engage in sedition as this person has, or your fate will be similar.  The point of the exercise was not the death of the offender as such, but getting the attention of those watching.  Crucifixion first and foremost is addressed to an audience.

The same is true of lynching.  And it can be argued that the same is true today of the phenomenon of police violence toward people of color.  Yes.  Of course there are times when lethal force is required, and police are working in an incredibly tense environment.  All of that is true.  Yet it is also unarguably true that when the use of deadly force is 21 times more likely when an African American man is on the receiving end, something else is at work.

Michelle Alexander argues quite persuasively in her book The New Jim Crow:  Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness that America's "war on drugs" is, at heart, a new expression of the same impulse that fueled segregation.  If you haven't read her book -- read it.  And then look for the parallels between then and now.  As William Faulkner famously said, "The past is never dead.  It's not even past."

My eyes continue to be more widely open.  I know -- I am afraid -- that they will need to be even more open still.  There is so much that I don't yet know, but that doesn't mean it's not part of the discussion.

Pax tecum,

RevWik