Tag Archives: Good Friday

Selling Postcards of the Cross

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crucifix1“They’re selling postcards of the hanging
They’re painting the passports brown.”

White boys like me mostly didn’t know what Bob Dylan was singing about when “Desolation Row” first came out on “Highway 61 Revisited.” James Cone’s book The Cross and the Lynching Tree tells us it was about lynching. Lynching was a public spectacle where people took pictures and made postcards out of them.

Cone goes on to argue that the lynching tree was a series of grisly re-enactments of the crucifixion of Jesus. He also demonstrates on how very difficult it has been and still is for Americans to see this truth. Reinhold Niebuhr, arguably the greatest American theologian was, in spite of his social concerns, blind to this reality. Even black people have had trouble seeing this connection, though Cone shows how some black women, especially Ida B. Wells articulated it powerfully. He contrasts Niebuhr and all white liberals with Martin Luther King, Jr. who put his life on the line.

The dynamics of lynching as analyzed by Cone provide powerful confirmation of the theory of collective violence of René Girard. (See my article Violence and the Kingdom of God.) Girard argues that perpetrators instinctively fail to see what they are going. Cone shows us this truth in a powerful manner.

Dylan goes on to sing that “the circus is in town” and then catalogs Western Civilization turned topsy-turvy, suggesting that lynching does this, thanks to the “blind commissioner.”

Cone is right about whites’ blindness to this truth, but Dylan did write “The Ballad of Emmett Tell” in 1963, telling the story in stark terms, though without any Christian reference except to complains that the human race has fallen “down so god-awful low.” Then there is Mark Twain who wrote “The United States of Lyncherdom,” calling lynching for what it was and clearly discussing the human mimesis just as Girard was to do half a century later.

Cone’s book is written calmly, even gently. There is no mincing of words, yet the words are somehow full of forgiveness. The forgiveness in Cone’s words, the forgiveness proclaimed by Jesus, should be enough to undermine our trust in ourselves and our ability to see what we are doing. We must repent not only of lynching, but of our collective hatred of enemies today.

What Humans Willed: the Passion Story

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crucifix1At the abbey where I live, I preach at the Maundy Thursday liturgy and the Easter Vigil. I do not preach on Palm Sunday and Good Friday, the two liturgies where we chant the Passion. The Passion is long enough without added sermons and the Passion speaks for itself. That is, it speaks for itself as long as we don’t add things it does not say that undermine what the Passion does say.

To belabor what should be the obvious, the Passion Story tells us what human beings chose to do. Jesus chose to drive the money changers from the temple and teach the people there. The Jewish authorities chose to plot to have Jesus arrested and handed over to the Roman authorities. Judas chose to betray Jesus, thus facilitating the arrest and handing over. Pilate, to varying degrees in the four Gospels, vacillated but in the end chose to sentence Jesus to crucifixion. Meanwhile, the people who had cheered Jesus upon entering Jerusalem ended up crying for his crucifixion. The Roman centurions nailed Jesus to the cross where he died. The Passion narratives say nothing to suggest that anything that was done to Jesus, from the arrest to harassment and flogging to nailing him to the cross was in any way the will of God.

In all this, God does not do anything. Why do I bother to make a big point of this? The reason is that many Christians have suggested that God positively willed the sacrifice of Jesus for some cosmic purpose, usually because God was upset with wayward humans and was somehow incapable of forgiving humans unless somebody took the punishment for human sin. If Jesus, innocent of sin, should take the punishment, well and good. Well, not well and good. What kind of god demands punishment and doesn’t care who gets punished as long as somebody does? The Passion Story never says anything of the kind.

If God did not will Jesus’ violent death, what did God will? What was God’s plan? Jesus understood the heavenly Father’s plan to be that he Jesus knew that if he defeated Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate with force would only keep the world forever embroiled in retaliatory violence. The only way to avoid that was to gather people peacefully no matter the outcome, even if it meant death.

But Death, much as it was the plan of humans, was not God’s plan as a group of women found out early in the morning on the first day of the week.

See also Two Ways of Gathering