One of my favorite images of discipleship comes from George MacDonald's book The Princess and the Goblin. In it, Curdie holds onto a thread that leads him into trouble where he can be of assistance. Holding onto to the thread of Christ can lead us into trouble as well.
We've spent a lot of time lately with the way that the cross and resurrection of Christ discloses a verdict and also delivers humanity to a new realm of life. The cross and resurrection also exposes sin, evil, and injustice for what it is. We see injustice at the cross. And as we live lives taking up our own cross, we'll keep finding it.
The cross exposes the injustice of both the Jews and the Romans. For the Jews:
"Jesus was an offender, a leper and a pollutant, a transgressor. He was not cleansing the polluted but confusing the categories of pure and impure, and if he was successful Israel's order would collapse into a chaotic mash. When they saw Jesus' flesh flayed and his face disfigured by torture, when they saw him suffocating on the cross, they concluded that they had been right all along: he must be stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. They concluded they had been right to expel the dangerous poison that might have killed the body of Israel." (Delivered, 150)
Of course, as we've said before and will say again, they were the transgressors in reasoning thus.
For the Romans:
"Jesus was a more dangerous irritant than most. He announced the arrival of a basileia (kingdom) within a Roman world that already had a basileus, and that political challenge became a crucial point in Jesus' trial. Pilate in particular was faced with the dilemma of condemning an innocent man to maintain order and remaining on good terms with Caesar, or freeing Jesus and risking his post or his life. Naturally, he acted on fear rather than in the interests of justice. He condemned the man of Spirit in order to cover his butt of flesh." (Delivered, 150)
Jews and Romans alike cloaked their unjust reasons for putting Jesus to death behind a just, orderly facade. We are struck by the pragmatism of putting Jesus to death. We see a picture of the whole world looking to push the inconvenient Jesus to the side.
This is a good place to consider the cruelty of crucifixion. Joel Green has written:
"Executed publicly, situated at a major crossroads or on a well-trafficked artery, devoid of clothing, left to be eaten by birds and beasts, victims of crucifixion were subject to optimal, unmitigated, vicious ridicule." (quoted in Rutledge, 78)
Furthermore, the death of Jesus is of a piece with countless deaths throughout history in which peoples' identities have been all but swallowed, in which it was thought by all concerned that this person was best to be completely forgotten. Rutledge writes:
"We might think of all the slaves in the American colonies who were killed at the whim of an overseer or owner, not to mention those who died on the infamous Middle Passage across the Atlantic. No one remembers their names or individual histories; their stories were thrown away with their bodies. This was the destiny chosen by the Creator and Lord of the universe: the death of a nobody." (76)
Rutledge invokes Susan Sontag to capture a key point in Jesus' death - it wasn't merely that he died, or that he died as a nobody, but that he died a degrading death:
"Susan Sontag, who suffered for years from the cancer that eventually killed her, wrote this: "It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades." Here in a few words is a fundamental insight with which to view the crucifixion. If Jesus' demise is construed merely as a death - even as a painful, tortured death - the crucial point will be lost. Crucifixion was specifically designed to be the ultimate insult to personal dignity, the last word in humiliating and dehumanizing treatment. Degradation was the whole point." (78) Rutledge writes, "In the context of a faith that proclaims "amazing grace," the cross would seem to be the ultimately dis-grace-ful event, utterly lacking in anything appealing, winning, or redemptive." (79)
It is this exposing part which makes us want to look away. It makes us prefer uplifting stories to hearing about the cross. We do this because it exposes something in us as well. It has the power to bring to light all the structures of our society, which seem so reasonable on the surface, and expose the way they subvert truth about God. Because there is nothing 'reasonable' about what Jesus was subjected to.
James Cone has written a book called The Cross and the Lynching Tree, in which he insightfully reflects upon the thematic similarity between the crucifixion of Jesus and the lynchings that took place in the United States after the Civil War. In particular, he captures Emmett Till's role at the fountainhead of the civil rights movement.
Emmett Till was a 14 year old black boy who was lynched on August 26, 1955. He had whistled at a white woman and reportedly said "bye baby" as he left a store two days earlier. Picked up at 2:00am, he was beaten beyond recognition, shot in the head and thrown in the Tallahatchie River, weighed down with a heavy gin fan. (Cone 66) The two men most responsible for this act, J.W. Milan and Roy Bryant, were acquitted by an all-white jury after an hour of deliberation. This lynching (like most lynchings) was meant to do two things: make Emmett Till go away, and put fear into the heart of the black community. Though such tactics might have worked in the past, they did not this time. First, though Emmett Till died, he did not go away. James Cone writes:
"(Mamie Till Bradley, Emmett's mother) refused to allow this heinous act, like so many similar cases, to remain in the shadows or to fade from public memory. When Emmett's body was brought back to Chicago, she insisted that the sealed casket be opened for a three-day viewing, exposing "his battered and bloated corpse" so that "everybody can see what they did to my boy." She exposed white brutality and black faith to the world..." (Cone, 66-67)
Exposing her battered child, she exposed white brutality. He was 14, not from the south, not used to the complicated etiquette of Jim Crow society. He did nothing. His perpetrators were released. It became a trial of the whole Jim Crow system. The not-guilty verdict on Emmett Till's killers became a guilty verdict on the whole sub-structure. It took another victim, but this victim turned out to be more like a sacrificial victim:
"...(Mamie Till Bradley's) spirit of resistance caught fire in black communities throughout the nation, justifying the claim of author Clenora Hudson-Weems that Emmett Till was "the sacrificial lamb of the civil rights movement." Only three months after the Till lynching, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, and a "New Negro" was born. Rather than ride segregated buses in humiliation, blacks decided to walk the streets with pride until the walls of segregation, like the Jericho walls, "come tumblin' down." (Cone, 69)
From here, the non-violent movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr. takes on a redemptive theme: he isn't only trying to set black people free from segregation. He's also trying to set the segregators free from their chains:
"While King never thought he achieved the messianic standard of love found in Jesus' cross, he did believe that his suffering and that of African Americans and their supporters would in some mysterious way redeem America from the sin of white supremacy, and thereby make this nation a just place for all." (Cone 89)
We see here that Emmett Till's death ignites a movement that stays pretty true to what launches it: innocent suffering exposes structures of injustice. Emmett Till's death catches powers of evil in the act. A verdict is disclosed that those who presume to administer justice are themselves not in the right, and this verdict delivers people from slavery to fear to be a "new" people, including perpetrators who have had their 'eyes opened.' That this movement was driven by a special preoccupation with Christ's cross is no accident, as James Cone uncovers again and again. It is precisely Christ's cross which funds movements like these. God exposes the way that flesh has co-opted Torah in Jesus' cross. God discloses the verdict that Jesus was in the right, and that the perpetrators were in the wrong. God delivers Jesus and all humanity into a new reality where Eden is here, and those who crucified him are just as free as anybody to enter in. Think of the centurion, who at the end of the Gospel of Mark, is the first to proclaim Christ as Lord. That Emmett Till isn't as much of a spotless lamb as Jesus is not the point. The point is that God's great wars are won with soldiers like Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, Jr. This is circumcised warfare, like Gideon, like David, like Jesus. They lay their lives down, trusting in resurrection. The point is that you could be like Jesus in this way. I could be like Jesus in this way. All it takes is to read patiently into the Word, see what it really says about the world, and hold to that no matter what.
Hold onto that thread. You may not like where it is taking you, but don't let go.
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